It’s a trend that’s happening in other parts of the country, too: Some wealthy people and young families were leaving big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago even before the pandemic hit. But as with the rise of online shopping and conversations about racial justice, Covid-19 accelerated patterns that already existed. And while some politicians and media outlets have portrayed this as a harbinger of death to big urban centers, there’s a strong case to be made that in a post-vaccine world, cities like New York will emerge more livable than they once were. Jeremiah Moss is not usually the kind of person one turns to for good news. He’s the author of the blog Vanishing New York, which since 2007 has been chronicling the closures of small businesses and beloved mom-and-pop stores all over the city. In 2018, I interviewed him about why popular slogans like “shop local” aren’t enough to save actual small businesses, because no amount of sales will compensate for the skyrocketing rents that powerful real estate developing companies are charging tenants. Yet now, after months of listening to politicians claim that the city is dying, Moss is actually seeing it come alive. The mass exodus of people leaving, he argues, might actually make cities more hospitable to middle- and working-class folks. Here, he explains why.