New York City may be an expensive place to live. Jobs are not easy to find, even as the city rebounds from the recession. And the public transit system is not always reliable or comfortable.
But despite the challenges of city living, the city’s population is growing in ways not seen in decades.
For the third consecutive year, New York City last year gained more people than it lost through migration, reversing a trend that stretched to the mid-20th century.
For the year ending July 1, 2013, an influx of foreigners combined with a continuing decline in the loss of migrants to other states increased the population by more than 61,000, nudging it past 8.4 million for the first time, according to estimates to be released on Thursday by the United States Census Bureau.
Every borough registered a gain in population. Even the Bronx, a traditional laggard, recorded a rate nearly as high as top-ranked Brooklyn and Manhattan. While Manhattan and the Bronx lost more people to migration than they gained, the difference was made up by more births than deaths.
“Growth is now quite robust, much more so than it was in the last decade,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “These new numbers show that New York City now has recouped the roughly 250,000 population that was estimated but not found in the city by the 2010 census.”
Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division for the Department of City Planning, estimated that the number of New Yorkers had grown by 2.8 percent since 2010.
“That’s big,” he said.
While the influx from abroad has slowed somewhat since 2010, he said, the net loss to other states so far this decade has been reduced by half compared with the period from 2000 to 2010.
Overall, Dr. Salvo said, “it’s the first time since the late 1940s or early 1950s that we’ve had a net migration near zero or positive.” Three years suggest a trend that he described as “very significant.”
“These population increases underscore the need to spur creation of housing for all New Yorkers, something which we are focusing on as part of the mayor’s mandate to provide 200,000 affordable apartments over the next 10 years,” said Carl Weisbrod, the planning commission chairman.
In the past few years, the lingering effects of the recession contributed to a slowdown in the city’s growth, with fewer people transplanting to New York. Still, according to William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, “the city continues to grow more rapidly than the metro area and its surrounding suburbs.”
In the city, 73,000 newcomers arrived from abroad in the year ending July 1, with the bulk settling in Brooklyn and Queens (with 24,000, Queens ranked third among counties in the country in the number of foreign immigrants it attracted). The citywide loss to other states totaled about 67,000.
“The huge city migration losses in previous years were a result of metro-wide losses to the Sun Belt and continued suburbanization,” Dr. Frey said. “Many young people” who might otherwise move away, “are finding the city, including the outer boroughs, an attractive long-term home.”
I've lost my son and his family to NYC. It took awhile for the nutgraf/explanation for the article. Enjoyed it.
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