COUNTDOWN TO 9 MILLION
Make room for a lot more N.Y.ers
RELENTLESS GROWTH fueled by immigration, people arriving from other parts of the country and more residents simply staying put will push an already swelling city population past the 9 million mark in the decade beginning 2030.
The growth rate — similar to the average increase of 75,054 between 2010 and 2015 — is forcing city leaders and policy experts to confront how to house, transport and school another half-million people.
“New York City is a magnet for people from all around the world,” Mitchell Moss, director of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation, told the Daily News on Tuesday. “We have a problem that is based on our success.”
The population, which was at 8.55 million last year, is projected to reach 9.03 million by 2040 at the latest.
Since 1990, the city has added another 1.2 million people, and in 2011 the city for the first time in decades saw more people move in than move out, according to census data.
Subways are already at their highest ridership level since the 1940s, but the number of annual trips through the Metropolitan Transportation Authority system is projected to reach 3.1 billion by 2030, up from 2.7 billion today, according to an MTA report.
According to the 2013 projections, the Bronx is expected to grow the fastest, 14% between 2010 and 2040, an increase of 194,000 people. Brooklyn’s population is projected to grow 11%.
For Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, the highest level of growth was projected to be in the 2010-2020 period, with growth slowing thereafter.
Moss said the city still has plenty of room to fit a growing population, with its “special genius” at creating residential neighborhoods where they didn’t previously exist, like Manhattan’s far West Side and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront.
“There are vast areas of the city that have potential for more housing,” Moss said, citing Red Hook and the Atlantic Ave. corridor in Brooklyn and several parts of the Bronx.
The city’s total number of housing units, which was 3,375,000 in 2010, is projected to increase to 3,696,000 by 2040, according to 2013 city projections.
But the challenges don’t end there, and will include making sure the city’s roads and mass transit are up to the task.
That may require expanding the capacity of subway cars, which the MTA is working on now, and bolstering alternate forms of transportation like ferries and modernized bus systems.
“It’s abundantly clear that the transit system we have today cannot support the ridership that it has today,” said Rich Barone, vice president for transportation at Regional Plan Association. “Street space needs to be rethought in a way that doesn’t just focus on providing capacity for automobiles. Instead it needs to focus on people, on cyclists and transit.”
Mayor de Blasio, who spoke at a Crain’s New York Business breakfast on preparations for the population surge Tuesday, says the city will need to be taller, denser and conquer neighborhood fears that development will force locals out.
“It’s true there are types of development that can exacerbate inequality and reduce inclusion. There’s also types of development that can increase inclusion, that can open up opportunity. And we have to have a good and clear conversation about what the difference is,” he said.
For Crain’s, experts and developers dreamed up ambitious ideas like using existing track beds to allow light-rail commuter lines and commercial development, building a suspended tram line encircling the five boroughs and parts of New Jersey, or shrinking city highways to take advantage of the advent of selfdriving cars to free up more space for development.