More People Are Moving to Manhattan Than Before the Pandemic
New York City is making a comeback.
After the US was briefly frozen by Covid, the city started to see more movement than the rest of the country, much of it in one direction: out. Now, that migration out of many NYC neighborhoods has reversed. In fact, even as the city’s population is still decreasing, more households are moving into Manhattan now than were moving in before the pandemic in 2019, according to moving data provided by Melissa, a global data intelligence and address analytics company.
“New York City had one of the largest declines in the first stage of the pandemic and one of the fastest rebounds,” said Rob Warnock, a senior researcher at the rental search platform Apartment List.
The largest US city still faces a tough road ahead with overall population declining, low office return figures threatening business survival and fear of crime cited as a deterrent to moving to the city. But the data show how the most extreme migration patterns have already started to reverse, making last year’s dip seem like a pandemic-era blip.
New York’s Dramatic Covid Migration Curve
In that first pandemic year, New York City saw more outbound migration than any other metro area in the US, with at least 160,000 households fleeing between March 2020 and February 2021, according to the data provided by Melissa, which is sourced from US Postal Service change-of-address records. The borough of Manhattan lost people at the highest rates during that period. Many of those Manhattan households found new homes in nearby suburban locales like Rockland County, Suffolk County and Westchester County. Some also moved farther afield-at least temporarily-to destinations like Miami and Los Angeles in search of more space for work-from-home setups and out-of-school kids.
But as suburban housing prices spiked and businesses reopened, the data shared by Melissa show that in the second year of the pandemic, migration out of Manhattan slowed down, and migration into the borough increased.
Manhattan Lost the Most Population—and Then Gained the Most Back
A gradual return to in-office work, at least part-time, and the city’s enduring allure as a global destination are driving some people back. Limited and increasingly expensive housing inventory outside the city may also be making it harder to leave. “I feel like people have no choice but to stay where they are, because it’s just too difficult to find something,” said Anthony Lando, a realtor for homes in New York’s Rockland and Westchester counties, two big beneficiaries of early pandemic migration.
But overall, the New York metro area is still seeing more people moving out than moving in, a trend that predates the pandemic.
“In the past decade most of the counties [in New York City] have been experiencing out-migration,” said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the population division of the US Census Bureau. “And in 2020, which is the first year of the pandemic, we saw that same trend kind of persist.”
And the city’s recent population loss hasn’t just been because of people moving out of the city. The pandemic brought with it increased death rates, lower birth rates, and declines in international migration, according to Delbé. But at the height of the pandemic, between July 2020 and July 2021, domestic migration became the key driver of population change.
Experts warn that based on the current status of New York City’s recovery, some of the bruises to the population inflicted by Covid will likely endure. Only 36.6% of office workers in the New York metro area were back to working in person in the week ending June 1, according to the building security company Kastle Systems. That means that regardless of how many people live in the city, the daytime population of commuters will be way down, affecting the city’s economy.
When it comes to full-time residents, Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom says that even though the exodus has stopped, there may not be enough of a “reverse flood” of movers into the city to make up the loss. “If there isn’t a heavy reverse flow within the next 3 to 6 months I don’t think there’s ever going to be,” he said.
Many New Yorkers may have a longer-term plan to leave, according to a poll released Tuesday from Siena College and Spectrum News NY1. More than half of respondents said the city was headed in the wrong direction. And when asked if they think they’ll be living in New York City in five years, 36% of respondents said no.
For now, current data suggest a more encouraging migration pattern for the city. Of the five New York City boroughs, all but Staten Island and the Bronx have gained new residents compared to the first year of the pandemic. Manhattan gained the most. Meanwhile, almost all suburban counties that gained movers during the first year of the pandemic lost some in the second. The ones that saw the most leave were Hudson County and Essex County, both in New Jersey.
Elizabeth Woods, 24, moved to Downtown Brooklyn last month, after pandemic stints in San Francisco and Baltimore, where she finished a public health graduate school program this year. It was always the plan to live in New York post-graduation, she said, to be nearer to friends in a place that feels “invigorating and life-affirming” to visit. “It’s the center of the universe,” Woods said. The rental market she and her boyfriend, 27, encountered there, though, was “batsh*t,” she said. “When I was looking for an apartment, it was truly a full-time job.”
As housing prices skyrocketed in those first pandemic months, Manhattan was an outlier even among the five boroughs, with the median home values dropping sharply as people left. This year marks the first time those Manhattan median prices have returned to their 2018 baseline, echoing changes in demand. The rental inventory is dropping, too, as the city revives, said Nicole Bachaud, a market analyst for Zillow. “There’s not these huge swaths sitting vacant anymore.”
Home Prices in the New York City Metro Area
New York City’s rent prices, which are up close to 10% since before the pandemic, haven’t spiked as much as the rest of the country, which has seen well over a 15% increase compared to pre-pandemic rates, she said.
However, the year over year increase in rent, especially in Manhattan, has been brutal to those who had managed to land a Covid rental deal, with median rent up 32% across the borough between March 2021 and March 2022. “It comes as a pretty big shock,” Bachaud said. Rental prices in Manhattan are now the highest in three decades, according to recent estimates.
Woods’ experience exemplifies the new normal for NYC renters: She and her boyfriend had to blow hundreds of dollars on a broker, line up behind 35 other prospective tenants for a cheaper-than-average rental showing, and bid $400 a month over asking price on it to get their application accepted. After all that, they ultimately secured a different rent-controlled one-bedroom that had hit the market at 9 p.m. the night before they drove from Baltimore to see it. “It was like, boom, next day,” Woods said. “I feel very lucky.”
Meanwhile, the hot New York City market hasn’t translated to less competitive real estate in the suburbs. Isabel Estevez lives in a condo with her husband and three kids in Tarrytown, a river town in Westchester County. She’s been trying to buy a house there since 2019. She says “it’s been very, very difficult for us to get our dream house,” in part because she keeps getting outbid by cash buyers from New York City, a dynamic she was frustrated by even before the pandemic. Now, it’s even more competitive, she says. “I see less houses for sale but more people want to get [them],” she said.
Those motivated to move out of New York City because they were working from home tend to be looking for more square footage, says Bloom, the Stanford economist. That drives prices up. “When people spend more time at home, they’re more focused on having a nice dwelling,” he said. “Our relative budget share on housing goes up, but there’s a fixed stock of housing.” A recent working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that in the aggregate, US housing costs rose an estimated 15.1 percentage points as a direct result of remote working.
Inventory Is Down Everywhere
Bachaud predicts a rebalancing will come eventually. “In terms of inventory, it’s going to take a while to come back to pre-pandemic level,” she said. “In the 2008 financial crisis, we saw prices going down. That’s not going to happen: this is just the new baseline.”
Even as out-migration slows, the dynamics that often drive young families out of the city—and the new work patterns that make it easier—haven’t evaporated. Mike Johnston, who does strategic public relations, made the agonizing decision to leave the apartment he rented on the Upper East Side after he and his wife had a baby last September.
“There’s so much that drew us here and kept us here,” he said, “but my wife and I decided that raising a baby in the city during Covid is just too difficult and we’d be a lot happier closer to where our families live.” After moving in with his in-laws in Connecticut this January, and trying out an occasional commute back to New York—three hours, round-trip—Johnston found a new job with a Connecticut office and a more flexible remote work policy, and is now looking for a house in the Hartford area. “The things that we’re looking at in the Hartford suburbs are a fraction of the price that they would be in New York City suburbs, or the Boston suburbs,” he said. “The market has a lot more inventory at prices that young professionals can afford.”
But as New York City loses one family, it’s keeping another: Johnston says he’s passing along his apartment to his brother-in-law and his wife, who are moving in from a few blocks away. “He never left.”