The latest Census Bureau numbers show that New York City lost 78,000 people in 2023, after losing another 126,000 in 2022. At the same time, New York City got significantly richer.
According to the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) — a representative survey of the city’s housing stock and population — median household incomes went up by almost $20,000 in the last two years, from $60,550 to $80,000. Median incomes in renter households went up from $50,000 to $70,000, and those of homeowners went up from $98,000 to $122,000 between 2021 and 2023.
You might think that we at the Community Service Society of New York, a renowned nonprofit that promotes economic opportunity, would welcome this news. But these combined data do not show declining poverty, but rather to a loss of low- and middle-income New Yorkers. Without a strong commitment to public housing, tenant protections, and rental assistance by the city and state, New York will become a place only the rich can afford.
The HVS shows that the city added almost half a million households earning more than $100,000 since 2020, an increase of 11 percentage points. Meanwhile, the number of households earning $25,000-$99,999 declined slightly, with those earning under $25,000 experiencing the biggest decline.
Over the past two years, high earners filled more than half of the city’s available units. Growing incomes among tenants are not surprising, given the overproduction of high-rent units targeted to them. Since the early 1990s, New York City lost more than 600,000 apartments that rented for $1,500 or less, while gaining 75,000 units with rents of $5,000 or more.
The city’s unaffordability is profoundly reshaping the city’s racial and ethnic composition. The city’s Black population declined by nearly 200,000 people over the past two decades, as Black families are pushed out of the city because of its unaffordability. At the same time, the number of wealthy, white, single person households is surging.
Put simply, the illusion of rising incomes in the HVS is not due to any material improvement experienced by everyday New Yorkers, but a statistical byproduct of new, wealthier residents counted in the survey, while low- and middle-income New Yorkers disappear.
Increasing numbers of wealthier New Yorkers mask a major concern — the lack of economic mobility for struggling New Yorkers who can’t get ahead, especially against astronomical housing costs, the biggest bite of a family’s household budget. And latest census data shows that inequality overall has risen for the first time in New York City since 2011 and is currently the highest it has been in decades.
Where do former New Yorkers pushed out of the city end up? A recent report from the Fiscal Policy Institute shows that many are moving to counties with lower housing costs. Renters specifically are saving 19% by moving out of the city. Many have ended up in Hudson County, New Jersey and even Fairfield County in Connecticut, all comparatively high-cost places that are still more affordable than New York. Astoundingly, some tenants even found rental savings by moving from Manhattan to Los Angeles.
Keeping low-and middle-income tenants in their homes is not easy in this housing market. However, unlike many other cities that are experiencing parallel unaffordability crises, New York has multiple tools in place that could preserve tenants’ stability. These include an expansive public housing stock and a robust rent stabilization system. Unfortunately, both are under pressure: public housing continues to be an afterthought in state budget negotiations, as its quality deteriorates.
Landlord lobbying groups are pushing to roll back hard-won victories that have made price gouging more difficult in close to one million apartments across the city. Our representatives in Albany need to both resist the pressure to roll back rent stabilization and to advance the PHIX New York Plan for public housing, which would preserve 15,000 existing public housing units in New York City and build 3,000 new ones.
Given the scope of the problem, the state needs to finally act on two key programs that tenants have been advocating for years: Good cause eviction, which would protect 1.6 million households statewide from arbitrary eviction and the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), which would stabilize the lives of 20,000 households by both preventing evictions and housing homeless families.
Over the past decade, our state elected leaders have largely designed policies to ensure that wealthy New Yorkers would not flee the city. Today, empirical evidence shows us the harms of this effort; everyone is finding it impossible to afford to live here, except for the rich.
We need our state elected officials to stand up for everyday New Yorkers before we are all pushed out.
Torres is vice president for policy, research and advocacy at the Community Service Society of New York
