When Thomas Ferry tried to renew his Manhattan studio apartment lease in February of 2022, he was not expecting to continue with the deep discount he got during the pandemic.
Still, he did not see a 43% hike in rent coming. His payment was about to jump from $1,750 to $2,500 starting May.
The jaw-dropping increase was a good indication that once the COVID-19 vaccines had become available and most coronavirus restrictions on businesses and social gatherings were slowly being lifted, people were moving back to the city.
Now, newly released data is backing that assumption up.
Manhattan added more than 17,000 residents in the year ending last July after losing almost 111,000 people in the previous 12-month period, according to population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. The earlier decline was among the worst urban population losses from the COVID-19 outbreak.
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New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, was among several large, urban U.S. counties that either gained residents or stemmed the rate of declines between July 2021 and July 2022 compared with a year earlier, according to the data.
The reversal in population losses was particularly notable in King County, Washington, home to Seattle; as well as in large Sunbelt counties such as Dallas County, Texas; and two South Florida counties, Miami-Dade and Broward. The locations all had something in common: international immigration led the gains.
“I wasn’t expecting this quick of a bounce back for some cities and urban areas. It’s not a full recovery from before the pandemic but moving in the right direction,” demographer William Frey, of the Brookings Institution’s metropolitan policy program, Brookings Metro, said Thursday.
Population change is driven by migration, both within U.S. borders as people move around, and international trends as people arrive from abroad. It also depends on whether births outpace deaths, or vice versa.
It was exactly during that time period (July 2021-July 2022) that Aly Berger made her move to Manhattan.
She first realized what she was missing as she viewed Instagram stories from her friends in New York City.
“People were back at bars and restaurants without masks and having fun and kind of returning to normal life,” said Berger, a product marketing manager for a tech startup who watched the action unfold on social media from her apartment in San Francisco.
In August, Berger and her boyfriend, Ryan Jacobsen, an investment banker, both of whom have been working remotely over the pandemic, had decided to test out the Big Apple by renting an apartment on Airbnb for four weeks.
By October, they had rented an apartment of their own.
The growth in Manhattan’s New York County was propelled by international migration, and to a lesser extent by domestic migration and births outpacing deaths. It came despite rising Manhattan rents and coincided with many businesses’ partial return to their offices, which ended some opportunities for remote work.
This was despite the fact that net effective median rent, calculated after accounting for landlord concessions, surged 33.4% year over year to $4,100 in July 2022, exceeding the $4,000 threshold for the first time and reaching a new high for the seventh consecutive month, according to Douglas Elliman.
“The pandemic rental market recovery has been a rocket ship,” says real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller, who prepares the monthly Douglas Elliman Real Estate report for New York City.
All the population estimates rely on birth, death and migration data.
Despite the most recent gains, New York County was still running a population deficit of almost 98,000 residents as of last July when compared with April 2020, when COVID-19 spread quickly across the U.S. and the metropolitan area became an epicenter of the virus, spurring tens of thousands of residents to flee. Surrounding counties continued losing population last year.
While millennials abandoned NYC in droves, with 96,600 members fleeing the city, the Big Apple turned out into a big draw for Gen Z, according to an analysis of Census Bureau 2021 American Community Survey by Today’s Homeowner, gaining over 3,043 members of this generation – the largest net gain for NYC across all age groups.
The three counties encompassing the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens recorded among the biggest population declines in the U.S., with losses ranging from 40,000 to 50,000 residents.
Contributing: Associated Press
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a housing and economy correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on Twitter @SwapnaVenugopal and sign up for our Daily Money newsletter here.
