New York City is having a moment.
COVID migrants are returning, plutocrats who decamped to Miami are slinking back, and the city’s firms are hiring. A Muslim socialist mayor is about to take office but—despite the panic among Upper East Side moms—there are no signs of imminent Sharia law, nor is there any evidence of a tax-avoidance flight from the five boroughs. In fact, contrary to national trends, New York City rents and prices are rising healthily.
Home Economics is proudly based in midtown Manhattan. We feel this is a great place to do business. But even we have to admit that, when we look beyond the current moment, the data is worrying.
New York City’s population has stagnated since the 1970s, but outright declined through the 2010s. The city’s population has historically been a balance between natural growtha and international inflows offsetting domestic outflows. In recent years outflows have dominated. Looking through the recent wobbles (both down and up) to the longer term trends, New York appears to be shrinking at the fastest pace since the 1970s.
Components of change
To be fair, New York isn’t alone among cities losing population.
Five of the country’s ten largest cities have shrunk since the Covid pandemic began. But the pace of New York’s contraction—more than 3% between April 2020 and July 2024—is twice that of the next-fastest-shrinking city, Philadelphia. Los Angeles, New York’s closest peer, lost only half a percent of its population over the same period.
Although New York has recently returned to growth on the back of surging international in-migration, about half of this is asylum seekers and humanitarian flows—these are different in nature than highly skilled immigrants, in terms of contribution to growth and tax base. Moreover, these flows are collapsing. Border encounters are a good proxy for asylum flows into New York City, and they have slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, it seems hardly likely that other international arrivals (from highly skilled workers, for example) will—in the current environment—accelerate to fill the gap.
So as international migration normalizes, the outlook for the city is increasingly uncertain, and hinges on domestic outflows. Can New York stem those outflows?
Waterfall chart
We have argued that NYC shedding workers to other cities is not necessarily a bad thing, from a national perspective. Firms spreading out from NYC represents geographic economic diversification across the country. This is a rational response to the costs of agglomeration: high prices and wages.
But even if economic activity is somewhat fungible—remote work means that Charlotte is often an equally effective place for finance operations as Manhattan—not all aspects of New York City are replaceable.
This remains a global capital and unique among American cities for its size, dynamism, and cosmopolitanism. It’s hard to imagine NYC continuing to occupy this unique position if it continues to hemorrhage population.
An analysis in parts
In this multipart series we delve into data that we hope will help real estate participants and policymakers gauge the scale, momentum, cause, and future of outflows from New York City. In particular, we address the following questions:
- Who are the leavers: what are their demographic characteristics?
- Which parts of the city are they leaving from, and where are they going?
- How does age and income map to where these migrants are headed?
- Why are they leaving (we answer this by reading between the lines of the data, but also directly from surveys)?
- To what extent is affordability a driver of these moves?
- To what extent has a desire for lower taxation, less regulation, and a more coherent abundance agenda motivated these moves?
In this first part of the series, we tackle the question of identifying NYC leavers: who are they, how do they compare with people who stay in the city, and what do the destinations they move to tell us about what NYC wasn’t able to offer them?
Our data and methodology
All of the analysis here pertains to New York City—i.e., the 5 boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Our data sources are primarily the Census American Community Survey (ACS; spanning 2009 through 2023—approximately 203 million individual records), the Census Current Population Survey (CPS; specifically the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC)), and the Census Population Estimates Program (PEP).
Demographics
Those who leave New York City for other American cities are disproportionately young.
The median age of leavers is 33, compared to 48 for the general NYC adult population. By far the largest group of emigrants are those between 25 and 34 years old—almost 35% of leavers fall into this age category, compared to only 20% of the general New York City population.
Leavers are younger
Leavers also have fewer children.
72% of leavers have no children, compared to 62% of NYC residents. While a plurality of New Yorkers have no children, the childless are over-represented among leavers by 10 percentage points.
Leavers don’t have kids
They are also well educated compared to the general NYC population.
47% of leavers have a bachelor’s or advanced degree, compared to only 37% of the city population.
Leavers are educated
The data on incomes is more nuanced.
The young leavers (those under 44 years old), who constitute the bulk of all leavers, have substantially higher incomes than the general population. Leavers under 35 earn 13% more than stayers in the same age group, and those aged 35-44 earn 13% more as well. But older leavers (45+) have slightly lower incomes—about 3% less than their peers who stay.
Leavers are high earners
Occupations
What do people who leave New York City do for work? The answer depends on where they are going.
The table below shows the most common occupations (measured as a difference to the general NYC population) by destination. The results are mostly intuitive.
For those who move to Los Angeles, ‘Producers and directors’, ‘Actors’, ‘Writers and authors’, and ‘Artists and related workers’ are over-represented. For those who move to San Francisco, it’s ‘Software developers’, and for those who move to Stamford, CT (‘hedge fund alley’), it’s ‘Securities, commodities, and financial analysts’.
But there are also some interesting and counterintuitive results.
Miami is the most common destination for NYC out-migrants. Among those, ‘Animal trainers’ is the most over-represented group (and interestingly, ‘Real estate brokers and sales agents’ is second). ‘Cashiers’ are over-represented among those moving to Albany, NY. Teachers move in outsized numbers to Atlanta, lawyers to Washington, DC.
| Metro Area | Migrants | #1 Overrepresented | #2 Overrepresented | #3 Overrepresented |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL | 186,667 | +1.1pp Animal trainers | +1.0pp Real estate brokers | +0.8pp Other engineers |
| Los Angeles, CA | 140,158 | +2.5pp Producers and directors | +2.2pp Actors | +1.7pp Writers and authors |
| Philadelphia, PA | 134,635 | +1.5pp Physicians and surgeons | +1.3pp Other life scientists | +1.2pp Food service managers |
| Boston, MA | 120,698 | +1.7pp Physicians and surgeons | +1.2pp Management analysts | +1.1pp Software developers |
| Washington, DC | 119,017 | +3.6pp Lawyers and judges | +1.5pp Software developers | +1.0pp Community service managers |
| Bridgeport-Stamford, CT | 117,551 | +2.4pp Securities analysts | +1.4pp Financial managers | +1.3pp Other managers |
| Albany, NY | 84,295 | +6.6pp Cashiers | +2.2pp Laborers and freight workers | +1.8pp Physicians |
| San Francisco, CA | 81,530 | +2.6pp Software developers | +2.5pp Designers | +1.7pp Artists |
| Atlanta, GA | 80,297 | +1.3pp Postsecondary teachers | +1.1pp Licensed practical nurses | +0.9pp Sales workers |
| Chicago, IL | 69,868 | +2.4pp Accountants and auditors | +2.1pp Miscellaneous managers | +2.0pp Military tactical ops |
Destinations by income and age
One intention of this series is to show how nuanced the factors driving New York City’s shrinking population are. This is on display in the chart below, which maps the destinations New Yorkers emigrate to, broken down by age and income.
For each destination, the size of the bubble is proportional to the migration flow to that place from NYC. Each bubble’s placement on the y-axis represents the weighted average income of New Yorkers who move to that destination, while each bubble’s x-axis placement represents the weighted average age of New Yorkers moving there.
Where do they go?
The results are both fascinating and intuitive. Older New Yorkers tend to move to Florida—with Naples being the top choice for wealthier people, Miami for middle income people, and Tampa and Orlando for lower income migrants.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, young and low-income New Yorkers move upstate: to Syracuse, Binghamton, Albany, and Buffalo. These are likely moves to attend college.
Among the 25-34 year olds who constitute the bulk of leavers, destinations are highly differentiated by income.
Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Dallas, and Washington DC attract middle-income migrants. Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco attract higher-income migrants. Among large destinations, Bridgeport, CT attracts the highest earners (the table above shows these are disproportionately analysts and traders).
Conclusions, so far
This is only one facet of a complex question, but we can already rule out one common explanation for NYC’s outflows.
To the extent most migrants are young, have relatively high incomes and smaller families, this does not appear to be a story solely about the cost of housingb.
Part two of this series will examine both implicitly-derived and explicitly stated reasons people leave New York City.