In the piece, he writes about the desecration of his East Village apartment building, once home to outcasts and freaks, in his view the only rightful heirs to a downtown life. It was now the address of Kaylas and Hayleys and Ashleys with their generic habits and empty minds, their AirPods and blank stares and Amazon addictions. One of his neighbors, he tells us, is from Wisconsin.

“These new people are completists,’’ he writes. “If they don’t have professional furnishers, they order entire apartments through the mail in their first week.” He mourns the loss of a time when people appointed apartments with the discarded lamps and night stands they found on the street, even as a freegan movement thrives in New York despite whatever preferences his own neighbors have for the bland efficiency of West Elm.

In my 30-odd years of living in New York — I, too, am a transplant — I have met three people from Ohio, two of whom moved back, one an accountant who complained about the city’s high taxes. The idea that the city is being colonized by Midwesterners or others from elsewhere in the country is itself not supported by statistics. In fact, the opposite is true.

Two years ago, a study from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College looked at data from the census and the Internal Revenue Service to determine migration patterns in and out of New York. What researchers found is that while the city’s population grew by 362,000 residents between 2010 and 2016, net domestic migration was down by approximately 525,000 people, meaning that more people moved out of the city than moved in.

New York dispersed more people to surrounding suburban counties and a number of large urban counties around the country than it received.

Presumably some portion of the population moving to New York, one of the most expensive cities in the world, from other parts of the country, are compelled by job opportunities that have dried up in Indianapolis or Columbus or somewhere else. At the same time, foreign immigration to communities beyond the Northeast means that you can eat decent Mongolian food in Sioux City. The sophistications of New York — the diversity, the bohemianism, creativity and acceptance which made it unlike anywhere else — have been in the process of a slow, successful export.

When Andy Warhol and Patti Smith, the patron saints of downtown cool, arrived in New York, they were misfits from somewhere else, and they brought with them an outsize ambition both for success and to live freely, as they were. Would they come now? Maybe they wouldn’t bother. And maybe that doesn’t bear the weight of tragedy we give it.