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Comment by weimerica | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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"

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.

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