there's a market, but it says it's offering something differently. virgin galactic charges passengers up to a quarter $1000000.00 for 6 minutes of weightlessness. space perspective says it's trips cost half that price and last 6 hours. but without the 0 gravity experience, it says there's enough demand for every one and predicts a booming industry in the years ahead. we get our study with a walner. now marketing company market research company doesn't live on the market for the kind of like we're doing is on the order of 250000000 callan buddy and have done their own studies with this kind of like their thing. 500000000000, the 700000000, whatever the right number is, the market is huge. and if you can afford the sky high prices, it promises to be a trip that's out of this world. victoria gay to be al jazeera. ah,

your challenges they were with lisa who rahman and reminder of our top news stories, a search and rescue operations on dwayne, florida, after an apartment building collapsed, at least one person's died and 100 law. i'm missing my ski work as a pulled on dozens of survivors from beneath the rubble. we had dogs out in the middle of the night, looking for survivors in the, in the rubble. but it was just so dangerous and so dark that they bade one pass and they did not get any hits. i know that they were coming back at daylight, so i know they're out there right now looking. the problem is the building has literally pancakes. it has gone down and i mean there's, there's just feet in between stories where there were 10 feet. that is, it is heartbreaking because it does it mean to me that we're going to be successful as successful as we would want to be to find people alive. a leaders

have rejected germany and france, his proposal to hold talks with russia, vladimir putin chance langler mark lead admitted it was a difficult decision as eastern european lead is expressed concern over what they called moscow's aggressions. russia has worn the u. k. it'll target any far more ships testing its territorial claims, the waters of crimea. it follows a tens confrontation with a british war ship in the black sea on wednesday. british prime minister boris johnson says the u. k. doesn't recognize russia's annexation of crime in a group of republican and democratic senators has announced an agreement outlining house to spend more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure. a plan championed by president joe biden, while the president has hail the agreement is not clear. if a votes can be secured in the full senate and you follow those stories on a website stop, is there a dot com? i'll be more news and half. now. see, see reporting in the field means i often get to witness. not just news is breaking,

but also history as it's unfolding probably from serbia, asia hungry, the rep one day, i might be covering politics. and we're actually covering what's most important to me just talking to people, understanding what they are going through so that i can convey the headlines in the most human way possible. we believe everyone has a story worth hearing. the the current of ours pandemic has raised fundamental questions about the future of the world's biggest cities as luck, dams, social distancing, and remote working back to the economies reliant on constant human interaction. in early 2020 new york was one of the earliest to be hit. all the shutting down as commuters and taurus stayed away and business is closed. now it's starting to

recover the will things ever be the same again. hope apes has a lifetime resident has been finding out the me this read to new york post by covey 19 is far less than it was a year ago when the city was the global epicenter of death and illness from the virus. today about 4000000 of the cities, 8 and a half 1000000 residents have been fully vaccinated against covert mayor build. blasio expects new york to fully reopen for business. this summer. we all are going to get ready for a new world, a world of more freedom because we've earned it by getting vaccinated,

but hundreds of thousands have already read new york. and those who stayed know that bringing it back won't be easy. like other global cities, new york is facing immense challenges as a result of the corona virus. new york is my home. so i set out there to investigate the impact of the pandemic and major cities and what's needed to restore their vitality. first stop time, square new york's crossroads in midtown manhattan. before over 1900 hit about 400000 tourists and commuters mingled here each day. the daily traffic now is only about one 135000. hello. how are you got n j a series helps run the souvenir store and it's also a wholesaler of merchandise to other shops. house business. it's been very bad since last year. in my life, i'm the only one who has offered 80 percent are bits of the brand on the fashion stories about them. it's so hard to say i'm, you know, new york leading urban tourism destination in the us at 13 and

a half 1000000 international visitors in 2019 tourism provided some $7000000000.00 in tax revenue. and more than 400000 jobs in my also business about 30 percent off my customer wanted to close because they couldn't hang in there. or there it's expensive. it is very expensive. small so can pay like from $40000.00 and the biggest shops close to $200000.00 a month. well, that's an enormous sum. how much is your business? depending on broadway shows, i think people come to new york to see the fight then to go to a broadway show, you know, australia show, i have a lot of customers coming into the store. so gardner shows are still important to us with the late and broadway have been off since march 2020. when the city shut down to combat the corona virus at $330.00 on normal wednesday, the street would be full of people. when do you think your broadway is going to come back to that level? you know, i don't really know,

for sure. teach cindy has performed in several broadway shows. and it's president of the actors equity union. it's been really devastating. we went from record employment in 2019 to 100 percent unemployment in 2020, and 2019 broadway was responsible for $15000000000.00 of the city's economy and $95000.00 jobs. broadway contributes more to new york's economy than all of the professional sports teams combined. for every person an audience member sees on stage, they are probably a dozen people you don't see who are working on the show as well. what's it like to be cut off from doing the thing you love? artists, i believe, have an internal engine that's constantly telling them to create, create, create. it's a big part of what makes new york new york. there's a real hunger to get back to doing what we do. ready many broadway theaters have announced plans to reopen in september, but it remains to be seen if enough people come to revive the industry for shows to

be profitable while the seats must be filled. it's not for the faint hearted because the margin very tight. my sense is businesses and sectors like tourism and the arts. they will start to rebound, but they're not going to be like they were before. james perry is an economist at the new school center for new york city affairs. he focuses on the labor market and workforce policies. your expend hit hard economically by the depression, the fiscal crisis of the 7911. how do you compare the economic challenges new york city's facing today to those in the past? well, as far greater than anything we've seen since the 1900 thirty's, more than a 1000000 jobs were lost and we'll get to the end of 2021. we will still be down 3 240-0000 jobs in new york city. so you think new york is really facing a jobs crisis? absolutely. new york city's job loss is 2 and a half times the job loss around the country and the coven pandemic. impact has

been largely concentrated on the face to face service. for people who occupy these largely people of color, 80 percent of the job loss is in that sector. and only, you know, like 6 percent of higher paying jobs have been affected by this. so it's really much more lopsided than anything we've seen before and hadn't experienced 2 thirds of the cities job loss because it is the center of service sector jobs connected both to tourism and office work. there are 1200000 office workers in new york city that supports a lot of daytime economic activity in restaurants and retail, barbershop, snail's log only, but 10 to 15 percent of those office workers have come back in 2 years from now. 100 percent won't be back because there will be a permanent increase in people working from home if come up here. and here are

standing all over all of new york city. one real estate tightened force to reckon with the impact of the pandemic and bo, tourism in office workers is anthony malkin the chairman and ceo of the company that owns the iconic empire state building. you can see new development to the north in mid town and beyond. you can see everything that's occurring down to the south. this is never going away, as can only come back before the 10 demik, how many tourists would normally be on a day and a slow day. 5700 and on our busy day, are we max out in 24000. now, as we publicly disclosed about what we'd see on a slow day, we see in a week now, cans, empire state realty trust also owns 12 other commercial properties in new york city . office space available to rent in manhattan is at an all time high. i don't think we have a bottom until the end of the 1st quarter of 22 and we rebuild from there. so most analysts say that commercial real estate is facing an existential crisis. if you're

not well capitalized, right now, are you in danger? in this particular. busy environment right now over the next 18 to 24 months and the past 12. absolutely. will we come out of this? yes, one of the things we have bob in our portfolio is a focus on energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. in march, we had the highest number of tours of office space that we have seen since the pandemic vacancies have been driving. rents down on both the office and retail side until we actually see the tourists return. the certain elements of retail, it simply will not come back, also issues the neighbor, jobs around the office worker. areas of new york city where to be blunt. if the office workers aren't there, they have no customer in a recent survey, just 22 percent of new york's largest employers expect their workers to work full time from offices in the future. what impact do you think that's going to have on commercial real estate in your i think truly that the surveys actually had begun to

change. and over the next 18 to 24 months, we'll see where we actually are. and i think people are, we'll have to experiment what it does to teens what it does to onboarding new team members. and where the smartest upcoming individuals want to be the best we can gauge is that remote work was about 5 to maybe 10 percent of the workforce before the pandemic. that surely looks like it's going to grow to about 20 percent. so it's going to double part time. remote is going to be more. richard, florida is the author of several best sellers and urban policy and a professor at the university of toronto school of cities. the big impact of the pandemic is not about who's going to move to the suburb who's going to move to this rural area. we now know that a lot of that's been overblown. the big impact is on the office district there. i think looking forward, you could project

a 20 to 30 percent decline in office occupancy. you've written that. the impact of the pandemic and central business districts is as great a challenge as d industrialization was in the past. what do you mean? you look at the skyline behind me, that was originally built up as a place to pack and stack office workers. before we had computers, digital technology could share on the internet. it will take a factory for information processing. what's happening now is i think this year one experiment the pandemic has shown us that people no longer need to work that way. do you think part of the solution is to convert office towers into affordable housing? yeah, i think the point is how do we make these office districts in ways that are not only just better economically, but more inclusive in better form, a broader range of people. and we have to convert office towers and hotels and you know, these, these residential luxury buildings that they thought were going to be built for the plutocrat class, the skinny condo towers for the wealthy, now loom half empty over the city. meanwhile more than 200 hotels are shuddered

according to the head of the hotel association of new york, v j n. to pick those up as a fell off a precipice and march of last year and it really hasn't recovered. the real occupancy is between 15 and 20 percent on average for the whole city and the return of office workers is even more important than tourism to reopen, you know, tells us, travis absolutely pay the most money tours stay and the value of that business. but they simply don't pay the same dollar it. when do you think the hotel industry is going to recover here in new york and for 20? 25? because that's how long it takes for convention company to come back. our estimate is 20 percent of the inventory of new york hotels is just going to go away either to other uses or be torn down completely and be rebuilt as something else. some 5000 of the cities 25000 eating and drinking establishment already gone away and thousands more barely hanging on

a grand central station the flow of office commuters, that restaurants and other small businesses depend on has dropped 75 percent. how does this compare to what it was like before the pandemic? it's a ghost town. this place would be more people waiting for trains. cindy ingbert is the executive chef at the waster bar, a legendary sea food restaurant and watering hole, a grand central that hopes to reopen soon. why or places like the oyster bar. so important to the vitality of new york. i mean, when you're in this restaurant and it's full up, you know, what does it feel like? it's an amazing feeling. people, it's, it's loud, it's busy, and we have a lot of happy people. is something about new york, it's a real food down. i mean, just so many foodies here, 1st, right, or very, very important employer in new york city and the chain of supplies in effects from me, dary vegetables, everything that

a restaurant has to purchase and down the line is affected. everybody. last september, the oyster bar tried to reopen a 25 percent capacity. the state limit at the time, and after 8 days, it just wasn't sustainable. 2 percent revenue out of 25 percent capacity. how concerned are you about the change in work cabinets and remote work in terms of the survival of the restaurant? it's number one on my mind. you know, how long will it take to be back to normal? and will it ever be outside the office? districts, restaurants have done better. those to manage to stay open, survive by expanding, take out and offering dining and newly permitted outside areas. vaccination, the eating of inside seni limits and warm weather have increased business. but most places are still serving fewer customers than before the pandemic, according to the new york city hospitality alliance. the president of the group is

the owner of a restaurant in harlem. melba wilson opened street out there city was a lifeline. and you can each your way through any culture, any diverse culture around the world. if you eat at 5 borrows in new york, you go around now there's so much eating, that's fine out side has new york become paris in that regard. it's going to be one of the things that stays from the pandemic. do you think we, we, i do feel a little tardy here in new york and i'm loving it. so are you becoming profitable again or profitable? yes, i don't think i'll be there for a while because of the losses that we incurred. we've had a lot of closures. so we've lost quite a few. we're struggling. we are struggling. there are a lot of making storefront in this city. but, you know, at this point, i'm happy to say we're hiring more people. we are putting people back to work.

that's what's important in the decade before covey, 19 restaurants and bars were the main source of employment for less educated workers in new york. today there are 835000 fewer of the shops. what's been the impact on workers from the difficulties the restaurant industry has. a lot of them for the 1st time, found themselves at food pantries, at food banks. and a lot of found himself on welfare for the 1st time, the so many people dealing with mental illnesses as well as homelessness. so the impact that it's has on our industry and on our people is devastating. and it's also been devastated in terms of illness and people of color in the city were twice as likely as whites to be hospitalized from covey. 19, and one and a half times more likely to die. we refer to this as a new strain of inequality. so compounding the long standing economic inequality associated with wage and wealth disparities,

the pandemic hit hardest at people of color. one neighborhood hit hard by covey 19 is flushing queens, which has a large agent and latino population. many of them, undocumented immigrants, elmhurst hospital, which had one of the highest death rates in the city last year, is just a few miles from this food pantry. god, thank you very much for the food that you have given us today. pedro rodriguez and his organization larger not run the food bank. whenever they make it, people were coming from everywhere. recall is not maybe were not ready for it, but at the end of the year, 711000 pharmacies. is it only queens where you see food lines like this? now you can see them anywhere in new york. the need anything to help a lot of immigrants, where are they from? from everywhere. we have like 14 different languages in this, brian, i don't know, thousands of thousands of people overseas in this community and the work no food.

and i see them sulphur like nobody gets over before the immigrants make up almost half of new york city's workforce. what are the jobs that people were doing before cove with people that are coming to this pantry to get into the restaurant, to get to you in the longer the most, any kind of service in the city that you had with was taken away by your work and hotel industry, i've been out of work for a year now. are you going to be able to go back to work? they pretty much terminated the whole staff. so from the way it looks and i going to hire us back. what kind of work were you doing before cove? it it was. hang on. i'm going to hang on to the one out of the i'm going to daddy on your you've been with bro hunt this or keep us from clinton restaurant. they have the programs that are provided by the government. have you been able to access them at all? you're going to see when you have the fullest access,

which you can use almost fairly soon after he went to the food bank, the new york state legislature passed at 2 and a half $1000000000.00 excluded workers. one to help undocumented immigrants with food and red. but difficulties and accessing the money remain where they were talking about food security. very about small business help to get people through this period. there's a wide band of social services that need to be strengthened. thomas dies as the author of the recently released book, new york, new york, new york exam, as the city's history from its flirt with bankruptcy in the 1970 to the 2 thousands under former mayor michael bloomberg. immigrants who really saved the city in these 40 years without the best way of, of immigration over that time. we would not have done what we did here. about 300000 people left new york because of depend demik. but since in 1970 s, the city has attracted a steady flow of immigrants. today,

it is estimated that around 3000000 new yorkers were born in another country. if we're talking about a few 100000 people moving or leaving, we can absorb that are under 7000000 people in 1978. and now we're talking about 8 and a half. so whether we're talking about restaurants or hip hop or, you know, real estate agents, you know, these are people who came from all parts of the world and contributed immensely to the city and really recharged it. it led to blocks of rubble being turned into housing again and neighborhoods coming back, crime going down. it was they played major role, concerned about crime is rising again in 2020. the city recorded 462 murders in increase of 45 percent. and students have surged, similar to what has happened in other american cities during the pandemic. what we're looking at today is serious in real and deadly, but it is still nothing compared to where the city has been in the past where you had, you know, 2200 people year being murdered. so i think we are well within our ability to

control it. crime is also up on the subway system doing part to this t dropping ridership from the pandemic. the subway is critical to the cities recovery earlier this year and faced cuts in service of up to 40 percent due to reduced revenue. but president biden's american rescue and provided 6 and a half $1000000000.00 to keep the subway running at full strength to 2024. hell is on the way. this is the most significant piece of legislation in so many ways in decade championed by senate majority leader, chuck schumer, who hails from brooklyn, the rescue package allocated a $100000000000.00 to new york state, and it's residence many cities around the world based major revenue shortfalls. as a result of the pandemic, luckily for new york, democrats are in control and washington, and it can provide much needed funds to bind in ministration is now pushing for a to trillion dollar infrastructure bill, which would provide additional money for this city. is a single largest investment in american jobs since world war 2. the president

biden's american rescue plan and the infrastructure plan, the american jobs plan that he's put forward is absolutely critical to our recovery . catherine wild is the president and ceo of the partnership for new york, which represents many of the city's largest companies and 2019 led by the financial sector. new york city comprise 10 percent of the entire u. s. economy. the new york economy is absolutely critical to the united states, and we are the gateway to the global economy for the american economy. in many, many respects. do you think the pandemic could change that? i don't think append demik changes new york's role in the economy. i think that we can with our public policy, change it. so new york has moved politically far to the left and we've had major tax increases when people have been working remotely. that can in fact have

a major discouragement factor for bringing talent back to the workplace. particularly in the financial services industry since wealthy and those who are doing better be willing to make more of a contribution to the recovery of the city. absolutely, and they're doing that both through their taxes and through their philanthropic contributions. but there was a decision to make the rich pay more. it's become sort of a, a class warfare. and that's not how new york city has worked in the past. it's not what's going to drive our recovery new york, but the, but addressing inequality exacerbated by the pandemic is a central theme of the new york city mayor's race that is currently underway. i'm katherine garcia. i was this city to work for every family. the impact of coven 19 along with protest connected to the george board killing, have created new pressures for change. we're facing the crisis,

unlike anything ever seen before. with the right leadership, we will rise up against a june prime. there you will decide the candidates for the november general election. the democratic nominee will likely become mayor and one of the most consequential campaigns in new york's history, the city is terribly divided. it's divided by class, divided by race. it's divided by where people live and i think new york needs and mayor is going to pull the city together and can be a mayor of everybody. what do you think the next mayor should focus on in terms of the cities recovery? we need to bring people back to work. that's the number one thing we need to bring the tourists back. we need to welcome people who spend money provide the jobs that allow taxes collected people to pay their rent, put food on the tables. we need to be welcoming a lot of these jobs are not going to come back. and because of the pandemic technology is more important. e commerce is more important. the challenge in new

york city is facing now is commensurate with what the city face after world war 2, where tens of thousands of people from the military service re entered civilian jobs. and we should be planning for that and putting in place the training programs to make sure that we don't have a prolonged and deep unemployment crisis margin. and our neighborhood are coming to us and say, listen, i'm behind more than 6 months that they can pay thousands of small businesses and hundreds of thousands of new yorkers are also facing eviction. the state of vixen moratorium expires on august 31st. they compared it last year to us to nami. yes. i just on the path with you know what the jobs are here. we will be hand over and i hope that button is located. worked for all these people that happens in live will come out. okay. the vaccination is changing like in new york by today at

a recent pro basketball game stands out to prove they've been vaccinated or had a recent coby test to get in 15000 and felt safe enough to crowd together again. just in some people say that new york won't come back until broadway comes back. and broadway won't come back into new york comes back. yes, i think broadway probably has the most demanding path. but gradually, i think people will be more comfortable that they're safe and those kind of close spaces. right. and the vibe of the city feels much different to me than i did a few months ago. and so i think new york will be back. new york, doom has been predicted, many historically, epidemics, and other catastrophes have been catalyst for progress in cities. that could be one of the legacies of covert 19 as well. as of course, there's hope in my believe, like the international choice will start to come maybe in december we're hoping something for christmas. and then it will continue,

hopefully little by little. and it's so important that we have all the people back in time for, i mean, maybe on has to be alive again, you know, and we're going to come back strong, strong. we're better. i think we're better than how we do to be the across the world, young activists and organizers around them are motivated and politically engaged. we were the one who had life on what was going on. and the way the more means to me did the generation change is al jazeera is looking at fresh ideas for the transformation of global politics. the day we do the work of making sure that our voices are heard. coming soon on al jazeera, a faith can collect story without uttering a single word,

the convention of life. witness through the lens of the human eye analysis era. ah, it's a dark and tragic day. searching for survivors and apartment building collapses ne, miami, in florida leaving nearly 100 people missing. ah, the whole rahman you want to, you know, they were like my headquarters here in the also coming up not welcome you. leaders reject a proposal to meet with russia's president saying it would send a bad message.