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How Has New York Remade Itself Since the Pandemic Arrived?

Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic tore through New York before any other large city in America, paralyzing the biggest municipal economy in the world and killing more than 46,800 residents. Offices closed, businesses shuttered and restaurants folded. Streets and sidewalks were bare while dire predictions spread.

As soon as the pandemic subsided and life in the city began to approach normalcy, residents began asking the big question: Is New York City back?

 

The millionaires returned. Others are eyeing the exits. Not since the Great Depression have so few babies been born in the city, and school enrollment is falling. Immigrants helped reverse population loss.

 

It’s a question that still reverberates. But it might not be the right one.

The economy has in many ways recovered from the pandemic, but the city that has emerged is held together by lower-paying jobs, sparsely filled office towers and services catering more than ever to the wealthy.

So, how has New York City been transformed?

 

Demographics

New York City lost, on net, close to 350,000 residents from 2020 to 2023. Policymakers were particularly worried about the departure of the very wealthy and its impact on the city’s tax base.

In the first two years of the pandemic, the city lost about 17,500 residents from the top 1 percent of income earners — those making $815,000 a year or more. Though small in number, that loss represented a 20 percent decline in ultrawealthy residents, according to Emily Eisner, the chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute.

But the fears were overblown. The latest census estimates show the city’s population beginning to rebound in 2023 and 2024, growing by 121,893 people over that period.

In 2023, the net total of very rich residents leaving the city was virtually flat, and a strong stock market early in the pandemic helped mint more millionaires.

Still, other vital groups in the city were more likely to leave.

Households with children under 6 years old were more than twice as likely as households without young children to leave the city in 2023. And while migration trends have largely returned to prepandemic norms, Dr. Eisner said, Black residents were still twice as likely as white ones to leave — a trend that predates Covid-19

The rush of school-age children out of New York City during the pandemic has left behind a population that is getting older and having fewer babies.

There were 99,000 babies born in the city in 2021 and 2022 — the fewest in any year since the late 1890s other than 1936, during the Great Depression.

Attendance in New York City’s public schools, the largest system in the country, is the lowest it has been in four decades. There are 111,000 fewer children enrolled in public or private school in the city than in the 2018-19 school year.

 

Change in school enrollment since the 2018-19 school year

More than 230,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since spring 2022, an immigration wave that has been the largest in American history. Thousands were bused from the southern border by order of the Texas governor, but many arrived in New York on their own.

Their arrival has helped stem the city’s population decline. New York City ended last year with 8.48 million people, up from 8.39 million in 2023. But it is still down more than 262,000 people compared with 2020.

 

Labor

No city lost jobs like New York. Two months into the pandemic, more than a fifth of workers were unemployed.

So it was celebrated news when, in the fall of 2023, Mayor Eric Adams proclaimed that the city had regained all 946,000 private-sector jobs that had been lost, a year ahead of some predictions.

 

Jobs are back. But growth is mostly in low-wage industries. The wage gap is widening, and poverty is soaring.

 

But most of the new jobs were in lower-paying industries. Home health care, a sector that pays an average of $31,800 a year, grew 45 percent from December 2019 to December 2024, more than any other industry.

At the same time, a wide swath of middle-income jobs that provide many immigrants and young people a toehold in the economy have shrunk. The retail industry, which pays workers an average of $56,200 per year, shed 54,100 jobs from December 2019 to December 2024, a 15 percent drop.

The construction industry, which pays an average of $93,300 a year, often without requiring a college degree, lost 30,700 jobs over the same period.

 

Construction jobs in New York City

In much of the country, the pandemic actually reduced income inequality, as lower-paid workers took advantage of a tight job market and a rising minimum wage in many states.

Not in New York.

In the city, most of the wage growth since the pandemic has accrued among the highest-paid workers, according to the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

In fact, while low- and middle-wage workers’ income largely stagnated from 2019 to 2024, the highest earners — in fields like finance, tech and information — saw their hourly wages soar, said Mohamed Obaidy, an economist with the center.

Those top-earning workers, who made $312,000 or more last year, have seen their average hourly wages grow four times faster since 2019 than workers in the bottom fifth of wage earners, who made less than $36,000 in 2024. Middle-income workers did not fare much better.

“For the top 3 percent, the post-Covid period is the golden era,” Mr. Obaidy said

More than 2 million New York City residents, or one in four, could not afford basic necessities like shelter, food and clothing in 2023, according to one recent survey. That represents the highest poverty rate in the city since at least 2015, said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia School of Social Work, which conducted the survey. The findings were in line with census figures, which also showed a rise in poverty since the pandemic began.

A family of two adults and two children was considered in poverty if the household made less than $47,190 a year. The median household income in the city in 2023 was about $76,500.

 

Percentage of the population below the poverty line

The surge in poverty was driven by two major factors. Government aid instituted during the pandemic, including an expanded child tax credit and cash payments to low-income families, ended at the same time that the cost of rent and household goods went up.

High inflation stretched people’s budgets nationwide, but in New York, according to the Columbia survey, the poverty rate was nearly double the national average. That’s because of the high cost of living, which was driven by housing costs, Dr. Wimer said.

“Hearing that New York is back,” he said, “for me, it begs the question: Back for whom?

 

Real Estate

The city has never been a cheap place to own or rent a home — but it’s even more expensive five years after the start of the pandemic.

 

New York City became an even more expensive place to live, for both renters and homeowners. Companies occupy less space in Manhattan’s office buildings than they did a quarter-century ago.

 

Nearly 630,000 households spend more than half their income on rent. The median asking price for an apartment was $3,645 per month in February, more than 25 percent higher than at the start of the pandemic. No part of the city is untouched. The steepest increase — nearly 40 percent — has been in the Bronx, long seen as the city’s most affordable borough.

The city’s spending on rental assistance, to help people in homeless shelters find apartments and to provide a lifeline to renters who face eviction, has soared. It is expected to hit $1.1 billion this fiscal year, which started in July. In 2021, the city spent $302 million.

Any solution to the housing affordability crisis, politicians and housing advocates say, must include the construction of housing of all kinds. Last year was a banner year for the building of new units, with nearly 34,000 added, the most since 1965. But it is not enough, and new construction has slowed significantly.

For homeowners, it has never been more expensive to buy in the city. The median sale price was $865,000 in February, a 28 percent increase since early 2020. The median cost to buy in Brooklyn or Manhattan remained about the same: around $1 million

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the Manhattan skyline was redrawn with towering office buildings to serve the demands of growing companies. That building boom resulted in 419 million square feet of office space, by far the largest office district in the United States.

But companies offloaded offices as the pandemic disrupted the five-day workweek, and they now occupy the lowest amount of space in Manhattan in at least a quarter-century. The percentage of unoccupied space is more than six times higher than in 2000. That glut could fill 32 One World Trade Centers.

 

Office vacancy in New York City

Many companies have found they can operate with smaller footprints and with remote workers. White-collar workers in the city now spend about 30 percent of their time working at home, up from a national average of about 7 percent before the pandemic.

Some firms have reversed course. Return-to-office demands, along with an increase in office lease signings in 2024, have led developers and brokers to hope that the market is rebounding.

And yet, in a sign of continuing uncertainty and rising construction costs, the building of new office towers has nearly stopped. No developer has broken ground on the next big property in Manhattan and may not for some time.

 

Tourism and Entertainment

It’s hard to overstate the importance of tourism to New York City. It sustains numerous industries, employs hundreds of thousands of workers and contributes substantial tax revenue.

 

Tourism collapsed at the start of the pandemic as visitors stayed home. Tourists are paying more and more to stay in the city.

 

Before the pandemic, the city welcomed record numbers of tourists annually and was on track to host 76 million visitors in 2024. The pandemic decimated those projections.

As the city reopened, tourists returned. More than 64 million people visited in 2024, the third most of any year.

There are still fewer international visitors, especially from China, who have historically spent more money in the city and stayed longer than domestic visitors. More than 1.1 million tourists from China traveled to New York City in 2019. It was about half that in 2024.

Visits to many major tourist destinations, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has surpassed that of years before the pandemic. But a few blocks away, the Guggenheim Museum has announced budget cuts in response to lagging attendance. Other attractions, such as Broadway, have rebounded but not fully recovered.

 

Total attendance at Broadway shows

The average nightly hotel rate last year in New York City was $314, up 28 percent from 2019. December saw the highest average monthly rate in the city’s history: $440, according to CoStar, a real estate analytics company.

John Fitzpatrick, who owns two hotels in Manhattan, said that the last few months of 2024 were the strongest for bookings since the pandemic started. But many travelers, especially those from Europe, where a weakened euro has made visiting the United States more expensive, are groaning about the sticker shock, he said.

“We are still down, but the city is buzzing and our bookings are up, both corporate and leisure,” Mr. Fitzgerald said

 

Retail and restaurants

 

Delivery workers are here to stay. A big shift in retail means the city looks less like a mall. And the storefront economy made a comeback, thanks to restaurants.

 

No other labor force in the city grew and evolved in the last five years quite like delivery workers. Once largely limited to pizza joints and mail couriers, delivery work has become a permanent feature of city life, reshaping the logistics of everything from takeout meals and groceries to retail and prescription drugs.

Since 2019, the number of delivery workers whizzing by on e-bikes and other vehicles has roughly doubled to 60,000, according to James Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs.

The rapid growth of the sector, much of it spurred by recent immigrants, gave workers leverage to push for better pay. In late 2023, after months of resistance from delivery app companies, the minimum hourly wage for food-delivery drivers was set to just under $18, not including tips. This year, it will rise to over $21, exceeding the citywide minimum of $16.50. (The pay is based on the time the workers are actively making deliveries.)

Despite companies’ protests that higher pay would hurt the industry, deliveries have continued to grow. In the third quarter of 2024, 2.54 million food deliveries were made per week, a 1 percent increase from the same period the previous year, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection

Many critics have long lamented an ever-growing number of big-box retail stores in New York City that evoke the feel of a suburban mall.

The economics that supported many of them were already shifting before the pandemic, but remote work and a surge in online shopping have wiped out hundreds of stores from the biggest companies.

There were 1,225 fewer chain stores in New York City in November 2024 than there were in late 2019, a drop of more than 15 percent, according to Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future.

From 2020 through the third quarter of 2024, nearly every category of store in the city — from apparel and electronics to furniture and beauty products — had more closures than openings, according to the Department of City Planning.

For a brief period, illicit smoke shops flooded many retail corridors, but a city crackdown on unlicensed businesses has forced many of them to close

The city’s storefront economy is reliant, perhaps more than ever, on food and drink.

When nearly every other type of storefront business suffered, it was restaurants that helped drive down vacancies citywide. From 2000 to 2023, the number of restaurants in the city nearly doubled, climbing to over 21,170.

While Manhattan had the most restaurants overall, over 9,400, the recent growth was strongest in the other boroughs, in neighborhoods where residents’ changing work schedules meant they were spending more time outside the city’s central business districts.

Korean fried chicken shops, Taiwanese bubble tea cafes and Greek lunch spots are among the franchises gaining traction, as some fast-food stalwarts and pharmacies shrank their footprints.

The range of cuisines is a reflection of the city’s reliance on a largely immigrant work force, Mr. Bowles said, adding that foreign-born people make up about 57 percent of the restaurant work force in New York.

There is already concern that the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants could have a chilling effect on the city’s growing but fragile restaurant scene.

“It is not an overstatement that we are going to be seeing real labor shortages at employers across the city,” Mr. Bowles said

Author: Stefanos Chen, Matthew Haag and Alex Lemonides.

Source: N.Y Times

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