How Long Islanders' Manhattan jobs help fuel Nassau, Suffolk economies

More than three years since the start of the pandemic, an estimated 306,000 Long Islanders continue to commute to jobs in Manhattan, using their city salaries to help fuel the economies of Nassau and Suffolk counties, with $15 billion spent on housing, restaurants, health care and entertainment, according to a new report by the Regional Plan Association.

Meanwhile, the report, released Tuesday, found a growing number of New York City residents are reverse commuting to largely service-oriented jobs on Long Island — more than in northern New Jersey, the mid-Hudson Valley or southwestern Connecticut.

The report, "Commuter Dividend: The Economic Value of Commuters for City and Suburbs in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Region," found the economic connections linking the metropolitan region with Long Island remain strong, even as fewer employees have returned to a five-day-per-week office routine.

"The economies of Long Island in New York City are still tightly intertwined," said Chris Jones, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit civic organization that reports on the metropolitan area. "And commuters are a big part of the of the economy of Long Island, whether they travel into the city every day or whether they're working from home."

In 2022, 306,000 commuters living in Nassau or Suffolk — second only to the residents of northern New Jersey — worked at jobs in Manhattan, earning an average wage of $124,000 annually or combined total of nearly $38 billion, RPA researchers found. 

Those same residents, the report said, used their Manhattan-driven incomes to generate $15 billion in spending back home — along with nearly 180,000 in jobs on Long Island — in industries such as home construction, retail stores and professional services, while generating income, sales and property taxes for their states, cities, towns and school districts.

It's a part of a phenomenon the RPA coined called the "COVID conundrum," which refers to a counterintuitive finding that even as fewer people physically travel to the city daily, more dollars are flowing to the suburbs, in part through high employment levels and increased salaries from Manhattan-based jobs.

The association also found 113,760 city residents work on the Island — a slight uptick from 112,000 in 2019 before the pandemic — while commuting either every day, maintaining a hybrid schedule or working remotely. Those reverse commuters earn an average salary of $63,557, the report said.

Those reverse commuting numbers, Jones said, will likely continue to increase, in part because of improvements to the Long Island Rail Road, including the Third Track project. 

"As long as Long Island continues to grow with the economy and add more jobs, you should definitely start to see an increase in reverse commutation," he said. "You couldn't before because you couldn't run the trains to get people there. So now you can, and I think you should expect to see that increase."

Felicia Park-Rogers, director of regional infrastructure projects at the Manhattan-based tristate Transportation Campaign, said that ​while the pandemic temporarily changed the landscape of regional commuting, the underlying facts remain constant.

"Our regional urban and suburban economies are interdependent on one another," Park-Rogers said. "The ability to move back and forth between these geographies is the key to our long-term success as a global economic power region. Regional rail and mobility via the Gateway Project, Penn Access, LIRR, and bus and subways are some of the most important investments we can make to crash-proof our economy and keep the region growing and healthy.”

To grow the region's interdependent economy further, the report concluded state and federal investments are needed to build a new Port Authority Bus Terminal and complete the Gateway Project linking Manhattan's Penn Station to New Jersey; the next phase of the Second Avenue Subway; and the Penn Station Access Project that will connect Metro-North to Penn Station.

"The Long Island and New York City economies are inextricably linked, showing that smart infrastructure investments like the Third Track and Grand Central Madison create more jobs on Long Island while improving the commute of tens of thousands of employees," said Matt Cohen, president of the Long Island Association, the region's largest business group. "It also shines the light once again on our region’s existential challenge to build all types of new housing in order to remain vibrant and grow.”

The group also supports the implementation of congestion pricing — tolling drivers in Manhattan's central business district, below 60th Street — which is expected to generate $15 billion that will be invested in MTA subways, bus and commuter rail service and the construction of more affordable multifamily housing, particularly on Long Island, around transit hubs.

"It's lagging behind the rest of the region and has for some time," Jones said of transit-oriented housing. " … Without providing more of that workforce housing and more opportunities for people to stay on the Island, you're really constrained in terms of how much Long Island's economy can grow."