New York City adds 629,000 people, defying predictions of its decline | Hacker News Reader

New York City adds 629,000 people, defying predictions of its decline

nytimes.com

55 pointsr_singh48 comments

There are so many issues with this article its hard to believe it got past the editors and into publish. The other top comments at time of my posting already covered the most egregious but I will add this one:

“I understand that this is largely a pre-Covid population, but adding over 600,000 people is like adding the population of Miami."

This is such horseshit that any rational reader should immediate see through it. Miami, the largest city in Florida, and one of the largest cities in the united states, being reduced to just "Miami City" population is an absolute joke.

Miami-Dade, with 2,716,940 people in 2019, is the seventh most populous county in the United States. ... Miami metropolitan area, with 6,166,488 people. Census, April 1, 2020 Miami City: 442,241 people.

Miami City has only ~600,000 because practically every 4 square mile area of Miami is its own incorporated city like Pinecrest, Coral Gables, etc.

Reminds me a bit of the situation in London. It's entirely true, but highly misleading, to state that the total population of the City of London is between nine and ten thousand people.

Comparisons of both density and total population between different cities are problematic because so much depends on where boundaries that exist for somewhat arbitrary political and historical reasons are drawn. Metropolitan statistical areas sort of give you an upper bound for the latter but not the former. London is a particularly challenging case given that not many people live in the City. (Paris, and to some degree, NYC have the opposite situation where outside of the very core, density is quite a bit lower--especially with Staten Island in the case of NYC.)

Not really, because City of London is a borough of London proper and is really just the business district.

City of London is not the same as city of London.

> hard to believe it got past the editors and into publish.

Whether it is blocking Amazon HQ2, or the disastrous handling of the pandemic (If NY was its own country it would have had one of the highest per capita nCov2-mortality-rates of all industrialized nations), or the deteriorating security situation – decades of one-party rule leave behind a dysfunctional, rotten, place.

All of those failures where known to happen in the moment the root-cause policies were enacted. Dysfunctional places enact them inspite reality's warnings, because by now reality is a white supremacist.

The subway-cars can become a place to forni- and deficate for the homeless for weeks, making it unusable for citizens. But critique cannot make a dent, becaue it is guilty by association.

That's why even if tax-payers flee the place day by day, its institutions must defy that reality. Insitutions like the NYT are a major part of the city's dysfunction. They are to blame, thus you see such rediculous articles getting "past the editors".

One party rule? The mayor before Deblasio (D) was Bloomberg (R)?

And immediately before that, Guiliani...

Maybe not the perfect example of good governance, but certainly not single party rule.

This is exactly what the article was talking about. People predicting the decline of NYC based on these statements, while it turns out that NYC actually gained a ton of residents.

Also, the idea that the subway is unusable to the citizens of NYC is utterly divorced from reality. There are issues, of course, but New Yorkers depend heavily on the subway for their transit.

"The subway-cars can become a place to forni- and deficate for the homeless for weeks, making it unusable for citizens. But critique cannot make a dent, becaue it is guilty by association."

this is the type of stuff people who don't live in NYC say. guess what, I use the subway all the time and things go perfectly well! it's definitely got its problems and there's a real homelessness crisis in NYC (although nothing like the west coast tent cities exists here), but to say it's 'not usable'? you're out of touch.

Recommend watching Louis Rossmann's coverage on how NYC is deteriorating, it is shocking.

This article is talking about city limits. New York City (city limits) has added 1 Miami (city limits). New York City also has a metro area that is much larger in population than the city itself, so what are you so mad about?

He’s mad because nobody thinks of city limits. Toronto became the greater Toronto area and now it’s 6M people but the population didn’t change, just the imaginary lines around it.

It's comparing two completely different kinds of population centers. Places like Miami were built up after WW2, so populations that might live in a grid in NYC live within 30-50 minutes by car and make the trip regularly, often daily. They're not "in the city," but they're in the city.

“Largest single governing body” then?

The people who run the city also live outside the city limits.

When most people think of NYC they think of Manhattan or the five boroughs, not the greatest metro area. But if you say the city of Miami you general mean the metro area. So it is just missing is all.

Metro Atlanta is like this too. You have the core inside the perimeter with about 500,000 people, then a bunch of nearby cities, and a bunch more that still have a lot of commuter traffic to and inside the perimeter. It adds up to about 7 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_metropolitan_area

Seems like a wild overreaction to a single sentence in an article that you acknowledge is factually true

In the past year there've been articles about NYC's decline due to the many people leaving the city, unwilling to pay enormous rents when much of the city is closed for a year. With that, three of NYC's motors (continuous inflow of new people with hopes and dreams, an city with a lot of existing cultural infrastructure, and tourism) came to a standstill.

To then write an article completely not addressing any of those issues and simply saying that NYC has more people pre-covid 2020 census, than in 2010... is just silly.

Especially if you then spend the first quarter of the article immediately explaining that 500k of the 600k of the increase was due to an administrative correction.

It's not sure that NYC is in decline, but this article definitely doesn't provide any evidence to the contrary.

"In recent years, New York’s Department of City Planning, which supplies data to the Census Bureau, added 265,000 housing units that had been missing from the bureau’s list"

Sounds like the equivalent of Miami was missing, but isn't it incredible that housing the size of a city was just "missing" from the data? How is one to believe other data coming from the city offices? The article should be about this discrepancy rather than the political back and forth about the fate of NYC in the eyes of the nation.

apart from the obvious issues around pre-covid population and 2020 census stats being used here...

I expect a mass exodus once lease renewals are up and buildings don't want to give the same 2-3 months free incentives.

This comes from something I've noticed in NYC these past several months. In the winter and up until mid-April, most rental buildings were providing huge incentives (2-3 months off on a 12 month lease) for people to occupy their buildings. What's interesting is that most of the new people I'm meeting in the city ONLY moved to NYC because the city 're-opened' and rent is affordable w/incentives from certain perspectives.

Those who have been living in NYC took advantage of incentives to move into nicer/larger spaces - but this is often unaffordable to them once the lease renewals are up.

For some perspective, a $5,000/month place with 3 months off, is a net effective rent of $3,750/month. I've seen this go at some upscale buildings. A personal friend of mine can afford this at the $3,750/month rate, but not at any rate above that. If they gave a 1 month free incentive upon renewal, his net effective rent would be $4,580/month.

That's one example, but it goes for $3,500/month 1 bedroom in some areas - with 2 months off that's ~$2900/month.

So it really depends, but I hear from a lot of new people I meet that they are here for the year and got a great deal on a place - they wanted to experience the city for a year, and this seemed like an affordable time and way to do it (since they can work from home)

I believe it. Lockdowns and covid suck, but living in the city is still better than the alternative.

If the alternative you've got in mind is dying in the city then I'd agree. Living somewhere else seems much preferable though.

New York City is old. Creaking floors and walls, elevators that require you to cross your fingers to rise not too fast or fall not fast. Unpleasant smells and rude comments from passersby assail you with equal frequency when walking on the streets. Restaurants are over, crowded and priced. Apartments are tough to get, expensive, old and small. Walking in the streets at night you'll frequently find yourself flanked by packs of rats. The subways are nice, at least if you are unfamiliar with European cities.

"I understand that this is largely a pre-Covid population, but adding over 600,000 people is like adding the population of Miami."

I'd love to see what U-Haul has to say about such things. Everyone I follow in NYC, talks about how they're ready to leave.

Anecdote issue aside, there’s an observation bias at work here. People who have no plans to change their living arrangement tend to not talk about that on social media. Meanwhile unhappy people talk a lot more about their intention to change.

Also, I’ll note that the ratio of people announcing their intent to leave, and people actually leaving is nowhere close to 1:1.

Are these numbers from the census conducted every 10 years? If so isn't entirely possible the numbers are up from 10 years ago but still declining since COVID started?

Yes...but don't let the facts get in the way of the slant of the article trying to convince you nothing is wrong with NYC. Just believe what it's telling you and don't question anything.

The Census was conducted for 2020 - how many have fled in light of the egregious lockdowns?

Probably just a handful of internet cranks. How many would you estimate?

Based on the influx of license plates in my once idyllic community, far too many.

I've noticed a lot of NY plates where I live too. Since most people who live in NYC don't own cars, it seems like these must be people who are being displaced. I know quite a few New Yorkers who have moved upstate or out to Long Island semi-permanently.

If you look at NYC as a whole (i.e. all 5 boroughs), 45% own cars, so a minority but still a lot of cars.

ADDED: Manhattan is about half that percentage but, again, still a lot of cars and people.

Specifically that's 45% of all households, not 45% of residents. Those rates are super low the closer you are to manhattan, and much higher as you reach the outer parts of the outer boroughs [https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars]

And for context, the average US household owns about 1.9 cars. Not an apples-to-apples comparison, but its easy to see that NYC car ownership is MUCH lower than the nation on average. [https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/highlights_of_the_2...]

You're right. I misread the data.

Anecdotally, many NYCers own cars as family units, especially common in the non-Manhattan suburbs. It's just not typically a 1:1 adult/car pairing like the suburbs are.

Typo'd "non-Manhattan suburbs" -> "boroughs"

According to postal service data, it was an extra 1.7% compared to 2019:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/upshot/how-th...

Which is not small, but it bears out my anecdotal impression as an NYC resident- most of the people leaving are people who would have left in the next few years anyway, the pandemic just moved up their timeframe.

And no one moved to avoid the “egregious lockdowns”, it’s just that working from home is a lot harder in an NYC apartment compared to a house.

While I'm aware of specific exceptions, I expect that's the norm. People who had moving out of the city on their radar screens deciding that the past year was as good a time as any to accelerate the process.

The question will be whether the usual cycle (of about the past 20 years) of an equal or larger cohort of young people move in to replace them.

The vacancy rate in Manhattan is around 11% today compared to the more typical 1.5%-2%. Im sure it will come back over time.

9-10% of the 8.8 million would be 800-900k, taking population back to about 2010 levels.

Not sure if it’s that many but who knows. Below 34th St is around 17%. Rents are about 20% cheaper than before the pandemic. Here’s an article detailing this:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/manhat...

That’s from back in May - things have changed quite a bit since then:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/real...

In June they were already back to only 11% down, and it’s been accelerating since then. I doubt it’ll stabilize at pre-pandemic levels for a while, but it’s nowhere near where it was even 6 months ago

Curious how much of that rate is because of AirBnB's and VRBOs closing out with no travelers and these units hitting the market vs people moving away...

Just so you know, you're dead, and it looks like this comment is what did it. Many of your comments are reasonably substantive, so I thought you should know.

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