New Report: New York City is growing—and New Yorkers need places to live

Census data from August 2020 show Mayor-elect Adams inherits a city
that won’t stop growing 

NEW YORK, NY – When Mayor-elect Eric Adams moves into Gracie Mansion next year, he’ll inherit a city whose population is growing. In fact, despite headlines about outmigration, the city added almost 630,000 people between 2010-2020, a boom exceeded in the past nine decades only by the 1990-2000 population burst. What does this growth mean for the city and for the state? And how equipped is the Big Apple to accommodate its growing population in terms of housing and transit? 

In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, senior fellow Eric Kober offers a comprehensive analysis of population data released by the Census Bureau in August 2021, evaluating the city’s relationship to its surrounding region and to the state of New York. With leadership changes on the horizon, he also uses the data to contextualize policy issues that the next mayor of the city and governor of the state will face. 

Some of the key takeaways of Kober’s analysis include:

• New York City’s natural tendency is to grow substantially in population every decade: The city can only fail to grow, overall, if net migration is negative enough to offset the excess of births over deaths—a phenomenon which almost never happens.
• New York City must improve housing availability: the city needs to add housing units in proportion to population growth in order to simply accommodate the demand created by growing population. If it wants to alleviate chronic shortages and increase the availability of vacant units for rent, while continuing to benefit from a strong economy, it needs to accelerate housing production beyond the levels of the past decade.
• New York City must vigorously reform zoning to accommodate growth: To address its housing needs, New York City relied in 2010-20 primarily on areawide zoning changes that were enacted during the administrations of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg.  These rezonings created finite development potential and it is likely that without further zoning changes, comparable levels of development will not be possible in the same areas next decade. The city will need to find new locations for housing growth.
• New Jersey is providing the housing New York fails to build: the greater New York City metropolitan area offers a mixed record of compensating for the city’s unwillingness to house its growing workforce. Some portions of northern New Jersey have effectively created a “sixth borough,” filling a critical housing need for the city—even if the commuter transit linking the two remains inadequate. Westchester cities have also played a constructive role. Nassau and Suffolk Counties, however, remain among the most restrictive jurisdictions in the region.
• Upstate New York cities may be making a comeback: while on the whole New York state’s population became even more unbalanced in favor of New York City and downstate, the census data offered hope for an upstate urban revival after decades of decline. Buffalo, for example, grew by 6.5%.  As in other states, rural areas Upstate are losing population.

Click here to read the full report.