Study: New York lost net 70K residents and $34 billion in personal income this year

Roughly a net of 70,000 New York City residents have left the area since COVID-19 first hit the country earlier this year, resulting in approximately $34 billion in lost income, according to a study released Tuesday by location analytics company Unacast. 

The report, which examined the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on three New York City neighborhoods — Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Astoria in Queens and Tribeca in Lower Manhattan — found that about 3.57 million people in total left the city this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7. 

Unacast found that those people took with them about $298 billion dollars of income, while the 3.5 million who immigrated to New York in that same time period brought about $264 billion to the city, leaving about $34 billion in lost income in the 8 months of the pandemic. 

However, Unacast chief executive and co-founder Thomas Walle told Reuters that he does not think this change will have a considerably detrimental impact on the city’s economy. 

“The exodus isn’t as big as people have been talking about,” he said. “Maybe the greater impact is how the population is changing and how the demographics are changing.”

The firm noted that the people who have flocked to New York City make less money than those who had been there before. Unacast predicted that this will likely lead to the rise of companies with more affordable products. For example, those lower-income residents are more likely to opt for H&M rather than Chanel. 

This change can be seen especially when looking at individual neighborhoods. In Tribeca, Walle told Reuters that residents who left earned an average income of about $140,000, while the typical person now moving into this neighborhood earns about $82,000 a year on average. 

The report comes the same day New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) reiterated his support for a second total lockdown in the area as COVID-19 cases have surged in recent weeks.

In March, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) implemented a temporary ban on all “non-essential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason” and closed all nonessential businesses. 

“Clearly these numbers are going in the wrong direction,” de Blasio said in a press conference Tuesday, according to NBC4 New York. “Unfortunately, and I don’t say it with anything but sorrow, but I do think it’s needed. We’re going to need to do some kind of shutdown in the weeks ahead, something that resembles the pause we were in in the spring.”

As of Tuesday, New York City has recorded more than 16,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the past week, with 1,368 hospitalizations due to the virus. 

According to de Blasio, the city had 2,813 new infections and 160 new hospitalizations on Tuesday alone.