New Yorkers thought life was better in 2017 — was it?

Let’s remember a time that wasn’t really so long ago, but whose excesses feel like slick fantasies now. It’s summer in New York and “Despacitio” is cranking out of every window. You’re on the way to the still-open Court Street theater to see one of three superhero movies that are dominating the box office; the top-grossing one isn’t even from Marvel, and it stars the universally beloved actor Gal Gadot. You can’t wait to find out what happens on season 7 of Game of Thrones in a few weeks, in between catching The Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Talib Kweli and Fleet Foxes at the Prospect Park Bandshell. 

The rest of your calendar includes hitting up some open-bar shows at the House of Vans and some Mets games to catch Jacob deGrom pitch a scorcher. Someone in the group chat is considering purchasing a romphim. Our mayor is cruising to reelection after fending off his latest scandal: a poorly timed trip to Germany. For a few joyful hours that summer, you stop working and head outside with everyone to don glasses and stare up at the eclipse. Average rent for a one-bedroom was $1,000 less than it is today, and actually went down from the year before. If you were sick, you still went to work anyway; if you had a meeting, it was in person. 

As for the big screeching elephant in the room, the chaotic first term of the Trump presidency? Not to worry, you are convinced that the walls are closing in, this electoral anomaly won’t last long, he’s surely cooked now. You climb to the top of the tallest buildings and scream a warning he will ignore at his own peril: “It. Is. MUELLER. Time!” If you were nervous, there was always a fidget spinner nearby. 

The year was 2017 and, according to some New Yorkers, this is as good as things will ever be in the city. That’s one way to read the results of the latest citywide quality of life survey that dropped this week. The 2025 NYC Resident Survey is produced by nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank the Citizens Budget Commission to take the temperature on quality of life and general vibe in the city. It’s sort of a customer satisfaction survey that city leaders can use to see how well the city is doing at retaining and attracting talent. And the customers haven’t really been happy since J-Lo and A-Rod were together.

“In most areas we are far below where we were in 2017,” Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, said in a Zoom announcing the results. “Which means it is harder for New York to attract and keep businesses and residents.” 

Here’s how that looks by the numbers: in 2017, 51% of New Yorkers surveyed said quality of life was excellent or good; this year, that’s down to 34%. The survey has been conducted only three times in this span, thanks to the pandemic; in 2017, 2023 and this year. 

While attitudes about crime, cleanliness and ease of travel have improved since the last survey in 2023, almost all the data show people feel much worse about the city than they did in 2017 (ease of travel within Manhattan specifically is a notable outlier, as the percentage of people satisfied with it shot up to nearly 50% percent this year, up from 43% percent in 2017. The survey was conducted a few months after congestion pricing went into effect and the city installed busways on 14th Street and 181st Street). 

The results aren’t so surprising for a city that’s still psychically and materially damaged from being the American epicenter of a worldwide pandemic. In the rearview mirror, there’s a certain looseness and rosier color to those pre-pandemic years, not unlike the post-9/11 nostalgia for everything embodied in the years that came immediately before.  

There are still bright spots in the current data: people feel just as good about neighborhood parks and playgrounds as they did in 2017. Satisfaction with the amount of cultural activities of concerts, plays and museums in people’s neighborhoods actually went up from 2017. 

The other bright spot, depending on how you look at it, is that wealth apparently no longer insulates you from feeling miserable. 

People with incomes over $100,000 said their satisfaction shot way down in 2023, putting them at about the same level as everyone else. In 2017, for instance, 69% of people earning more than $200,000 said they were satisfied with the quality of life in the city. This year, that’s down to 35%, the same level as people making less than $35,000 a year; in 2023, that number was still higher, at 45 % satisfaction for higher earners. 

“Income-based differences in satisfaction have diminished,” the report says. 

What’s causing that slide isn’t directly addressed in the study, and maybe it has more to do with perception of crime and quality of life, especially when our mayor likes to drop Fox News-friendly soundbites about the city all the time. But there have been 10,000 more major felonies so far this year compared to 2017, and felony assaults are higher than they've ever been in the 21st century. Or maybe it is a sign that the disgusting chaos of New York is back to being a true equalizer, bringing us together from the tallest supertall building to the lowliest basement apartment, all having to navigate landmines of dog shit on the sidewalk to get anywhere at all every morning. 

It’s hard to say exactly why 2017 ranked so high in relation to the post-pandemic years, but there’s never been any doubt that something vital in the city was snuffed out during lockdown, taking with it some of the 4 a.m. bars and late-night dining spots and a good chunk of many people’s social intuitions. You might not have to wear a face mask any more, but everyone's brains have a kind of mask on them all the time now, making people more cautious and less outgoing than they used to be. (That’s not even to mention the kids, the poor kids who were in school during that time and never learned how to party, and they're so cooked for it). 

But survey respondents — 1,750 of them, contacted in March and April —weren’t asked to compare things to 2017, they’re just giving a snapshot of how they feel now. And the now of it all has a lot more pessimism attached to it than eight years ago. Like I said above, Trump was president back then too, but there was at least a hope that some constraining arms of the system would reach out and prevent him from going too far. Now, not only have those arms not stopped him, they’ve pushed him on, and reached down to help Mayor Eric Adams avoid trial for his crimes too. 

In reality, it’s not like 2017 was some historically great year. On the local side, the good folks of Gothamist and DNAinfo voted to unionize, and their billionaire owner immediately shut both sites down. That created a ripple of disruption in local media that’s only being healed in recent years. It was the famed Summer of Hell for trains. We had a terror attack.

Recently, I was looking through old photos and came across one that truly caused my brain to cramp up. It was a holiday party at Littlefield in Brooklyn, and on the stage were big gold balloons spelling out “FUCK 2017.” I got stuck on it because I could not actually remember what was so bad about 2017, especially compared to the years that would come after. Sure, Trump was president, but we seem like naive babies in retrospect. I remember screaming “fuck 2016” from the moment David Bowie died until New Year’s eve. Was 2017 really that bad too? 

No matter what those balloons said, the data in the NYC Resident Survey are meant to be used as barometers to help influence and inform public policy. 

“We’d welcome the city to do this more regularly,” Rein said. “Customer feedback is one of the most important pieces of info that you can have.” 

CBC officials said they recalled the 2017 study raising a lot of issues about rats that eventually led to action from elected officials. That is one upside of this kind of study, but it can also be easy to let the data trap you in a downward spiral of hopelessness: things are not great at the moment, and the mood in the city is borderline defeatist. Despite everything, fewer people were motivated to vote for the Democratic candidate for president, so Trump increased his vote share across the city in 2024; ghouls of administrations past are back in City Hall. The candidate leading the Democratic primary for mayor is a retread from the past, more concerned with his own redemption than creating a future for the city. Voter participation will likely still be abysmal for this month’s primary. Everything old is old again, but we’re never getting the Court Street theater back. 

You can pop a blood vessel in your brain trying to think of all the ways the city has changed in the past eight years, but it’s a losing battle. You’re better off getting off the internet and enjoying the city as it is today instead. You never know whose 2017 you’re living through right now.