Cardiff de Alejo Garcia

Migration patterns and New York City's population

Forbes posted an interactive map last week showing domestic migration patterns into and out of American cities.  Here's what it looks like for New York:

Compared to San Francisco (which has mostly inward migration) or Detroit (mostly outward), New York appears to show a relatively balanced mix of people moving into and out of the city.  But have a look at this chart, taken from a report by the New York Department of City Planning: 

As you can see, from 2000-2007 New York lost quite a few more people to other states than it gained from them.  The city's population continued growing for a couple of reasons: First, the net domestic out-migration was partially offset by immigrants from other countries.  Second, the number of births in the city outnumbered deaths by more than the number of people lost from net migration. 

And it's been like this since the end of the 1970s:

I always get a surprised reaction when I tell someone that more people leave New York each year than arrive.  The common understanding seems to be that New York is such an attractive place that for every person that leaves, someone will always be willing to take her place.

But that's not really how it works.  Sure, people love coming here, but a lot of people also get tired of being here after a while.  Some go back to their home state.  Some will stick around long enough to start a family before moving to a more child-friendly place.  And some who emigrated here from abroad because of the city's ethnic neighborhoods, or because they had family here, will find reasons to try somewhere else.

The city maintains its vitality because the people who come here to take their places tend to be "concentrated in the young working ages, which has been relatively unchanged since 1980. More than two-thirds of all in-migrants to New York City were between 18 and 44 years of age, with almost one-half between 25 and 44. This reflects the important impetus that New York City’s labor market opportunities provide for both new immigrants and native-born young people from other parts of the nation."

 

The report concludes that young people and immigrants "continue to energize New York, fueling the city’s labor force, creating and frequenting its businesses, and sustaining its neighborhoods."

It's no secret that New York is one of the most tolerant American cities for immigrants.  This is partly attributable to historical reasons, but it's also because immigrants do their part to keep the population stable and growing.  Owing to their higher fertility rate, they account for a healthy portion of the "natural" growth shown above.  They make it possible for the city to have the kind of "churn" described in the paper.  

I can't find more updated numbers, but to back this up a bit, as of 2000 about 50% of all births in the City were to foreign-born women; adding together immigrants and their offspring born here accounts for 55% percent of the people in New York.  (That's from page 35 of this report (pdf), and see also page 4 of this one (pdf) to read more about how this impacts specific neighborhoods.)

And most anybody who has lived here long enough will recognize the importance of immigrants to the labor force.  Too many more numbers will bore you, so instead I'll just post another pretty chart (click for full size):

So if you wonder why New York residents are more favorably disposed towards liberalized immigration policies, it's not just because we're so far from the country's southern border or because we're all a bunch of squishy East Coast liberal types.  The benefits of being surrounded by a large immigrant presence are tangible here.

*****

A couple of paragraphs from the report about the destinations of New York's out-migrants, plus another chart, are beneath the fold:

Gotham to become more interesting, but at what cost?

I'm about halfway through Richard Florida's The Great Reset, which includes this passage:

The extraordinary tranches of cash pulled in by investment bankers, traders, and hedge fund managers over the past two decades skewed [New York City's] economy in some very unhealthy ways.  In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city's rising real estate prices were affecting his company's ability to attract global talent.  He responded simply, "We are the cause, not the effect, of the real estate bubble." ...

Still, stratospheric real estate prices have made New York less diverse over time and arguably less stimulating.  When I asked [Jane] Jacobs some years ago about the effects of escalating real estate prices on creativity, she told me, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave."  With the end of the hegemony of the investment bankers, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.

The trend described in the book, whereby a permanent decline in financial sector dominance leads to a more interesting and vibrant New York in the long run, seems to have begun.  Hiring has recovered in the last couple of months, but it's coming from outside of Wall Street.  The city has lost about 35,000 finance jobs, and although it's too early to know what the net effect of the crisis will be on Wall Street employment, it's likely that many of those jobs won't return or be replaced for a long time.

Some stories, based mostly on anecdotal evidence and sentiment indicators, say that Wall Street is hiring again, and certainly it's possible that job losses in the sector overshot.  But this new hiring has yet to show up in the official numbers.  City Room:

All told, the city’s private sector added almost 25,000 jobs in March, significantly more than the normal gain in the month, said James Brown, an economist with the Labor Department.

Hiring was especially strong in professional and business services, like advertising, and in management of computer systems, a large part of the city’s economy that usually expands early in a recovery, Mr. Brown said. ...

One continuing cause for worry is the persistent loss of jobs in the city’s most lucrative fields, investment banking and securities trading. Companies in those businesses shed a few thousand more jobs in March, according to the state’s numbers.

I don't know if New York was headed for a "sterile fate" before the crisis struck, but it's easy to understand how the escalating cost of living had been pricing out a lot of artists and creative types, especially within Manhattan.  (Seven of the top ten in Nate Silver's ranking of the city's most livable neighborhoods are in Brooklyn.)

Whether or not this was unhealthy for the city depends, I suppose, on how you look at it and who you are.  A higher concentration of lucrative-but-boring occupations probably did make the city a blander place, but the tax dollars generated by such jobs also made it a richer one, providing generous funding for public services.

Time's Barbara Kiviat wrote last week that New York's economic base is already impressively wide, and less reliance on "such an alcoholic boyfriend of an industry" as finance would be no bad thing: New York's economy would become less volatile and inequality would decline. 

And for people like me, it's obvious that an even more artistic, fashionable, entrepreneurial, techie, publish-y, media-ish, cheaper New York City would be wonderful.  If a decline in finance sector employment is needed to get us there, then great.

Even so, the process of getting from here to there is still something to worry about.  The city isn't inhabited only by young and relatively unattached media types.  It seems to follow that a protracted decline in the city's tax revenues will have an adverse impact on a lot of residents (on public sector workers most of all, of course) for at least a while.  That isn't exactly an original point and I could be missing something, but there's a reason the city's loss of finance jobs is described above as a "continuing cause for worry" rather than, say, as a bridge to a better New York.  I wonder how wrenching and disruptive this shift, worthwhile though it is, will turn out to be.

******

Richard Florida's blog is here.

This is a multimedia project about New York's startup scene, which includes a good interview with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

Here is Dave Winer's speech about returning home to New York, about which he says:

New York is, among other things, the center of the media industry. I think it will be that for a long time to come. And that industry must make the transition to the new communication technology. And it must do so with abandon -- without knowing in advance what the business models are. ...

That's why the startups of New York are so precious. Tumblr, Foursquare, bit.ly, gdgt, drop.io, Gawker, Boxee, Blogtalkradio, Etsy, Hot Potato, Bug Labs, Hunch, Kickstarter. These companies are not only incubating ideas that may turn into businesses, they are also developing New York-based human capital. Experience has shown that the next generation of startups will be born in the previous-generation startups. So by concentrating inteligence here, the network can develop and new ideas can develop, around the realities of a changing media business, which is a very different perspective from that of Silicon Valley.

Here is Doree Shafrir's article in NYMag about the companies listed above.

Here is Ed Glaeser on how Manhattan's "historic districts" keep real estate prices artificially high.