NY Shrinking
Can leaders reverse the COVID-driven flight?
THE US Census Bureau this week officially confirmed what was informally obvious: A whole lot of people moved out of New York state after last year’s COVID-19 outbreak and government-imposed lockdown restrictions. The burning question: Will the outflow continue?
While hardly surprising, the bureau’s latest annual state population estimates are a stark reminder of how much New York has lost in the pandemic — and of how much is at stake in the state and local response to the Omicron outbreak.
During the 12 months leading up to last July 1, per the Census Bureau, the state’s population dropped by 319,020, or 1.6 percent. This was the biggest singleyear decrease in New York’s history, wiping out nearly 40 percent of the surprisingly large population growth found by the 2020 national census.
The demographic decline of the Empire State was due mainly to a “domestic migration” loss of 352,185 residents — meaning 352,185 more people moved to other states than moved into New York during the period. That’s not a new trend: New York has been the nation’s largest net exporter of peo- ple for decades.
Since 1970, the state has lost nearly 9 million more interstate migrants than it gained — but these departures were more than replaced by a combination of foreign immigrants and the “natural increase” of births minus deaths.
Last year, however, those usually offsetting factors collapsed under the weight of international travel restrictions and the COVID-19 death toll. Compared to an already elevated migration loss in 2019-20, New York’s estimated added outflow during the 12 months through July 1, 2020 came to 148,292 people — equivalent to the entire population of Syracuse, plus a tiny village or two.
As a share of its 2020 population, New York’s net migration loss of 1.7 percent — one of every 60 residents — was an outlier among the 16 states that sustained any outflow in the post-pandemic period. The next biggest losers, Illinois and California, each had negative domestic migration rates of barely 1 percent.
The new Census data cover only the national and state level, and don’t trace migrants to their destinations — but the stats provide strong hints of other states that likely gained at New York’s expense last year. New Jersey, for one, saw its average annual migrant outflow cut in half, while Pennsylvania’s usual migration losses slowed to a trickle. Connecticut gained a net 12,207 residents from other states after losing an average of nearly 22,000 a year from 2010 to 2020.
On the sunnier side, burgeoning Florida took in nearly 221,000 more residents than it lost, a roughly 50 percent increase over its average gain in the 2010s. North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia saw similarly large upsurges in total domestic migrations.
The Census numbers are consistent with the latest economic indicators. In November 2019, entering the last pre-COVID Christmas season, New York City private employment had reached a new all-time high of nearly 4.7 million payroll jobs. As of last month, employment still was 425,000 jobs below that level.
On a statewide basis, private employment in New York as of November was just over halfway back to the February 2020 level — by far the slowest recovery of any state not located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A year ago, with COVID vaccines on the way, there was hope for a quicker comeback. It seemed apparent that the moves of many New York City residents, in particular, had been only temporary — to vacation homes, short-term rentals, or (in the case of millennials) back to Mom and Dad.
However, the Census domestic migration estimates are derived largely from records of permanent address changes for federal income-tax filers, Social Security recipients and Medicare beneficiaries. While the pandemic no doubt prompted many of those permanent migrants to accelerate moves they’d already planned for the next few years, New York — especially Gotham — needs to meet the challenge of replacing them at a faster rate.
Some grounds for optimism can be gleaned from apartment rents in New York City, reportedly up by more than 20 percent over the past year, although still slightly below 2019 levels. Yet the latest COVID variant could slow or even reverse the restocking of New York’s people pool. Gov. Hochul and Mayor-elect Eric Adams will have a large say in whether New York’s post-pandemic population losses are any more or less “transitory” than the ongoing rise in inflation.