For starters, a bit of terminology. The Census Bureau tracks two sorts of American movers. First, there are “domestic migrants,” who move from one U.S. county to another. Second, there are “international migrants,” who move from a foreign country to America. Somewhat confusingly, the latter definition does not mean “all immigrants.” A Guatemalan-born woman who lives in Houston for two years and then moves Dallas is considered a domestic migrant, since she’s moving between American cities.
That sounds like some methodological mumbo jumbo, but it’s critical for understanding what’s happening to New York and the rest of America’s largest cities.
Net domestic migration to New York City metro area (which includes the five boroughs plus slivers of New Jersey and Pennsylvania) is down by a whopping 900,000 people since 2010. That means that, since 2010, almost a million more people have left New York for somewhere else in America than have moved to New York from another U.S. metro—more than any other metro in the country. This is the “fleeing” that the Post finds so “alarming.” But the New York metro has also netted about 850,000 international migrants since 2010. That number is also tops among all metros—more than Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, combined.
So, that’s the story of New York City, today. It is an extremely popular first-stop for immigrants. It is also a popular destination for young, upwardly mobile Millennials who have graduated from top colleges and don’t yet have families with children. But since it’s expensive, chaotic, and mostly lawn-free, it’s not a great place for middle class families who dream of an affordable house, car, and yard.
In this regard, New York is a microcosm of the American city. Population growth in big cities has now shrunk for five consecutive years, according to Jed Kolko, an economist and writer. While well-educated Millennials without children have concentrated in a handful of expensive liberal cities, the rest of the country is slowly fanning out to the sunny suburbs.
It’s the revenge of the past, in a way. In the housing boom of the 1990s and 2000s, Americans moved south and west. Then the housing crash happened. For a few years, it seemed as if America might be experiencing a great rewinding, as the exurbs and ex-exurbs collapsed, and some families moved back to the largest, most prosperous cities.
But that rewind button was really a pause key. Gas prices spiked, and then came back down. Population growth in the densest urban areas—places like Manhattan and San Francisco—has been falling each year since 2010, and it’s the sparsest suburbs that are seeing the fastest growth. In the last few years, the winners have shifted from the southwest to the southeast. Out of the ten fastest-growing large metros in 2016, seven were in the Carolinas and Florida.