When Thomas Ferry tried to renew the lease on his Manhattan studio apartment in February of 2022, he didn’t expect to stick with the hefty discount he got during the pandemic.
However, he did not expect a 43% increase in rent. His payments were about to jump from $1,750 to $2,500 as of May.
The staggering increase was a good indication that once COVID-19 vaccines became available and most coronavirus restrictions on businesses and social gatherings were slowly lifted, people were returning to town.
Now, newly released data support this assumption.
Manhattan added more than 17,000 residents in the year ending last July after losing nearly 111,000 people in the previous 12-month period, according to population estimates released Thursday by the US Census Bureau. The previous decline was among the worst urban population losses from the COVID-19 outbreak.
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New York County, which includes Manhattan, was among several large metropolitan counties in the United States that either gained population or halted the rate of declines between July 2021 and July 2022 compared to the previous year, according to the data.
The reversal in population losses was particularly noticeable in King County, Washington, home to Seattle. as well as in large Sunbelt counties such as Dallas County, Texas; and two from South Florida counties, Miami-Dade and Broward. All of the sites share one thing in common: International migration has led the gains.
“I wasn’t anticipating this rapid recovery for some cities and urban areas. It’s not a full recovery from pre-pandemic but it’s moving in the right direction,” demographer William Frey, of the Brookings Institution’s Capital Politics Program, Brookings Metro, said Thursday.
Population change is driven by migration, both within the borders of the United States as people move around, or international trends as people arrive from abroad. It also depends on whether births outnumber deaths, or vice versa.
During that exact time period (July 2021 – July 2022) Ali Berger moved to Manhattan.
She first realized what she was missing when she saw Instagram Stories from her friends in New York City.
“People are back in bars and restaurants without masks and having fun and kind of getting back to normal,” said Berger, director of product marketing at a tech startup who watched the event on social media from her San Francisco apartment.
In August, Berger and her boyfriend, investment banker Ryan Jacobsen, who are both working remotely due to the pandemic, decided to test the Big Apple by renting an Airbnb apartment for four weeks.
By October, they had rented an apartment of their own.
Growth in the New York borough of Manhattan was driven by international immigration, and to a lesser extent by domestic immigration and births that outnumbered deaths. This came despite rising rents in Manhattan and coincided with many companies partially returning to their offices, ending some remote work opportunities.
This was despite the fact that actual median net rent, calculated after factoring in owner’s privileges, rose 33.4% year-on-year to $4,100 in July 2022, topping $4,000 The threshold is for the first time and is reaching a new high for the seventh month in a row, according to Douglas Elliman.
“The pandemic rental market recovery has been a rocket ship,” says real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller, who prepares Douglas Elliman’s monthly real estate report for New York City.
All population estimates are based on birth, death, and immigration data.
Despite recent gains, New York County still had a population shortfall of nearly 98,000 residents as of last July compared to April 2020, when COVID-19 spread rapidly across the United States and the metropolitan area became the epicenter of the virus, spurring the virus. Tens of thousands of residents flee. Surrounding counties continued to lose population last year.
While millennials have abandoned New York City in droves, with 96,600 members fleeing the city, the Big Apple has turned into a major magnet for Gen Z, according to an analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey by Homeowner Today, gaining more than 3,043 members from this generation – New York City’s biggest net earner across all age groups.
The three counties that include the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens recorded the largest population declines in the United States, with losses ranging from 40,000 to 50,000 residents.
Contributing: Associated Press
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is USA TODAY’s housing and economics correspondent. You can follow her on Twitter @SwapnaVenugopal and sign up for the Daily Money newsletter here.
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