New Yorkers Moving Out of the City at Pre-Pandemic Level Again

By:  Hellen Zaboulani

New Yorkers are here to stay.

The pandemic-induced rush out of New York City is a thing of the past.  A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland indicated a full recovery, with the number of New Yorkers fleeing the city almost back to pre-pandemic levels.  In 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic, as remote options flourished, migrations out of New York skyrocketed with more people opting to leave for less dense and cheaper regions across the United States.  Now, that imbalance of fleeing residents seems to have corrected itself.  The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which has been analyzing urban migration data in the U.S. since 2010, predicts that New York’s net migration will be fully back on course with pre-pandemic levels within the next three to nine months.  “It seems like the pandemic boost of net out migration is sort of unwinding,” said Stephan D. Whitaker, a policy economist at the Fed, who wrote the report.

As reported by Crain’s, to be clear, the recovery does not mean that we no longer have more people exiting than entering—that is still the case as it has been for many years before the pandemic.  The rate of the population decline, however, has slowed to normal levels.  “There’s always more people moving out of New York, moving out of the Chicago metro than are moving in,” Whitaker said. “The trend line has been increasing net out migration for the last ten years, and that’s still pretty much the case. That’s where the recovery has taken them.”

The good news is that the exodus out of New York and other large cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, at mass levels has ended, and is back to normal levels.   “You can definitely see a pandemic impact, but in those cases it’s reversing pretty quickly. It’s heading back to at least the trend line—if not the level—that it was at prepandemic,” Whitaker wrote. On the other hand, other large cities continue to bleed citizens, with out-migration continuing to get worse. Metros areas including Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Phoenix, Portland and Seattle are still struggling with downward emigration rates that appear not to be improving. “They’re not going back to their trends,” he said about those cities.

Also, net domestic migration is not the only factor that population trends depend on.   “Whenever we think about population change, there are three things that feed into it: international migration, domestic migration and natural increase,” Whitaker said.  So big cities like NY, can offset their negative domestic migration by other factors, including having a high birth rate as well as a strong international appeal.  Per Crain’s, New York will not really see significant population drops because of domestic out migration, because it has other factors increasing its population.

New York’s urban neighborhoods saw a net loss of about 31,600 residents during the first quarter of 2023, per the report. That’s about half the decline experienced in 2021 in the city, and it is in line with prepandemic trends.