'Affordability,' remote work, personal reasons drive New York State population exodus

ALBANY — New York has lost more than 800,000 residents to other states since 2020, the most of any state by share of population, but independent studies show the reasons for this post-pandemic exodus are complex and go well beyond the usual gripes about high taxes and bad weather.

Instead, studies point to a broad concern over "affordability," encompassing dozens of costs from rent and mortgages to electric bills, that triggered many New Yorkers to leave the Empire State. Beyond that, a large share also told researchers they left for noneconomic and personal reasons often not subject to improvement by public policy.

State and national research show those reasons include wanting to be nearer relatives, the desire to cut hours off daily commutes, valuing lifestyle over career, and the explosion of working remotely full time from anywhere.

Now, about 35% of workers who can do their job remotely work from home all the time, according to a study last year by the Pew Research Center. That’s up from 7% before the pandemic.

And not everyone is moving to Florida or other southern states. The exodus of New Yorkers since the pandemic includes residents flocking to nearby New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

"The people who moved to New England, mostly to Connecticut, not far from the state line, and Pennsylvania, like Bucks County and other near-in suburbs, probably left to work remotely, but not too far from their businesses during the height of the pandemic," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, New York’s population growth had been slow, but steady, said Joanna Biernacka-Lievestro, of the Pew Charitable Trust that studies social issues, including migration.

"But between July 2021 and July 2022, New York was one of the 18 states that lost residents," she said. "In fact, New York had the greatest decline in terms of both the number of people and the growth rate ... [and] migration played a pivotal role."

Riordan Frost, senior research analyst for the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, said that from 2018 to 2019, job seeking — at 43.1% — was the top reason to move. After the pandemic, 48.6% of people moved from New York primarily for better housing.

"That’s a really remarkable shift," Frost told Newsday.

A significant departure

Census Bureau records show that between 2020 and 2023 outmigration cost New York State 882,676 people. In raw numbers, New York’s net loss from its population of 20 million is second only to California, another high-cost state, which lost 1.2 million people to other states from its population of 39 million.

Those losses are offset to some extent by about 360,000 people from other states and other countries who moved into New York in that same time period, resulting in a net loss of 520,458.

The Internal Revenue Service measures the exodus by using tax returns. A survey of returns found that from 2020 to 2021, 489,117 individuals moved out of New York State. That includes 26,266 from Nassau County and 3,202 from Suffolk County. The survey noted they took millions of dollars in income and retirement checks with them to spend in their new communities.

In 2022, a survey by the Census Bureau found 91,201 New Yorkers moved to Florida, which is by far the state where most residents have flocked to. But more New Yorkers moved in total to nearby states — from New England to Pennsylvania — with much the same economics and weather.

The IRS survey of tax returns found Long Islanders took similar paths from 2020 through 2021:

• From Nassau, 13,764 residents moved to Suffolk ; 6,974 moved to Queens; 1,261 to Manhattan; 2,110 to Brooklyn; 750 to Westchester; 618 to Fairfield County in Connecticut; 941 to Hudson and Bergen counties in New Jersey; and 6,722 to several locales in Florida.
• From Suffolk, 6,222 residents moved to Nassau ; 2,490 to Queens; 1,771 to Manhattan; 1,488 to Brooklyn; 339 to Westchester; 314 to Horry County in South Carolina; 302 to Fairfield County in Connecticut; and 9,324 to Florida.

The reasons are varied

A Marist College poll in April found that 37% of New Yorkers said they will leave the state within the next five years, with 58% citing economic reasons and 42% noneconomic issues.

The share of New Yorkers who say they will leave for economic reasons has dropped slightly, from 62% in 2011, but pocketbook issues continue to lead the list of main reasons people said they will leave: 41% cited the cost of living; 25% cited the desire for a better quality of life; 13% cited high taxes; 4% named bad weather; and 4% said they wanted to move to a better place to retire.

"The idea that ‘people are leaving New York because of the economy’ doesn’t tell the whole picture," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

The Census Bureau surveyed people who have moved from their state, as opposed to polls of residents who claim they will leave. The 2022 survey showed more causes: housing costs, nagging everyday costs of insurance and transportation, and a yearning for neighbors who share a political view in these hyper-polarized times. Other primary reasons included a desire to be closer to family; health concerns; a hankering for a new lifestyle in a different climate or natural setting. and divorce.

The 2022 Annual National Movers Study commissioned by United Van Lines found that 60% of moves in New York were outbound, compared with 40% for people moving into New York State. The top reasons among all respondents nationally: 24% cited family reasons; 21% said retirement; 19% said jobs; 14% cited lifestyle choices; 3% cited health; and another 4% cited costs.

A 2022 comptroller’s office report found those leaving the state included 39,885 former government workers who moved to Florida in retirement. Another 25,598 pensioners moved to North and South Carolina and New Jersey.

One of those who moved to Florida is Hilary McGrath, 62, of Troy. She and her husband, Mark, 69, were vacationing in Florida when the lack of an income tax and the warm weather there got them thinking, even though she was still working for the state.

“I flew back up and put my retirement papers in,” she said, noting that the flight arrived in Albany during a blizzard. “I’ve never regretted the decision.”

Some say they are interested in moving for political reasons.

"If they feel their regions are not matching their own political values, they want to go somewhere they think their values are reflected," said Justin Gest, a professor of politics and demographic changes at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "It’s something we are starting to observe."

Transplanted Long Islanders

Among New Yorkers who left are Eric Bordin.

Bordin, 48, grew up in Old Bethpage, but has struck out to Connecticut and Atlanta and, for the past 11 years, has lived in Jupiter, Florida. Job opportunities in new fields that interested him were part of the move, along with the cost of living on Long Island — he said he spends less now on his Florida home mortgage than he did 15 years ago on his Great Neck co-op apartment. But economics weren’t the strongest drivers of his travels that led to Florida, where he grew to like the Sunshine State through visits to his grandmother.

"I love it here just because I wanted change," Bordin told Newsday. "My brother lived down here and I came to visit several times. I just wanted something different."

But mounting noneconomic irritants on Long Island also played a role. He tired of Long Island Expressway traffic, the local politics and he didn’t want to spend his life taking the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan every morning.

But he said he wasn’t moving to flee New York State, or even its snowfall.

"It’s a different vibe," said Bordin, a property manager. "It’s like being the big fish in a small pond here, where there, on Long Island, it was like everyone was a big fish. It seems like in New York, generally people don’t care, they don’t have time for you. And it’s a little different here: They want to make time for you ... overall, it’s more easygoing.

"But I’ll always be a Long Islander," Bordin said. He runs the South Florida NY Islanders Meetup Group. It’s one of several Islanders fan groups in the South and West. Bordin said most members are former Long Islanders who gather for NHL games in the arenas of Islanders’ opponents and in bars all far from Nassau County.

Some New Yorkers move within the state for some of the same reasons as expats.

An IRS study found about 450,000 New Yorkers each year move to other communities within the state each year, including Long Islander Joe Malandruccolo.

"The decision was hard finances, but in part logistics," said Malandruccolo, 55.

He grew up on Long Island, moving in 1999 from North Merrick to Beacon, a Dutchess County city of 14,290 in a rural stretch along the Hudson River. The move to Beacon brought him closer to Yonkers, where he and his father owned an auto parts store. The move cut his commute from 1 hour and 35 minutes, much of it sitting in Long Island traffic, to 35 minutes.

"I said, ‘I’m doing it, but do I really want to do this for the next 30 years?’ " Malandruccolo said.

In 1999, he said he paid about $12,000 a year in taxes on his "postage stamp" small house on a busy road on Long Island. Today, 25 years later, his much bigger Hudson Valley house includes nearly an acre of land and taxes are about $10,000 a year.

He said he only fleetingly considered moving out of state, to Pennsylvania.

"I consider myself too much of a New Yorker," he said. "We’re not going anywhere."

High cost of housing

To be sure, economic conditions are a major factor for most people who left the state, according to state and federal data. Among the key frustrations are high rents and mortgages, researchers agreed.

"I looked more closely at the housing-related reasons for moving out of state both from New York and from any state and discovered that moving for cheaper housing is the most common reason for housing-related interstate moves," said Frost, the senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. "It’s safe to say that the higher share of New Yorkers moving out of the state for housing-related reasons during the pandemic are being primarily motivated by affordability."

So why is housing so costly? Limited space, growing density and some of the most coveted addresses in the country in part drive housing costs in New York City and on Long Island.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported in February that between 2012 and 2022, New York State added 5.7% more housing units, which was far below other states and ranked New York the 32nd state in terms of housing production. Further, renter-occupied residences grew more slowly than single-family homes, which can be more lucrative to build. That contributed to what DiNapoli calls a crisis in which monthly household costs grew by 39% for renters during the 10-year period and by 28% for homeowners.

The independent Citizens Budget Commission said this "underproduction" of new housing over decades has heightened demand and prices as supply dwindled.

Other factors include local zoning, particularly in suburbs such as Long Island, which long has favored single-family housing that attracted New Yorkers to the suburbs in a boom following World War II. Multifamily housing that could ease the density didn’t keep up.

Gov. Kathy Hochul blames much of the state’s housing affordability crisis on decades of suburban growth, under local zoning laws that gave preference to single-family homes. She said those zoning laws also "intended to keep people out," referring to racial minorities.

Studies over several years have shown zoning laws often have led to segregation.

Yonah Freemark, who researches fair housing, land use and transportation for the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank, said, "We recently completed a study of Connecticut’s zoning patterns, and found that neighborhoods with single-family zoning were much more likely to have higher concentrations of white people and fewer people of color. This is consistent with a history of single-family zoning being associated with segregation."

Another common theme of the opposition at the state and local level to increasing housing, and in particular multifamily housing, is the fear that property values would drop.

However, "There is no consistent evidence that the addition of affordable housing to a neighborhood reduces nearby property values," Freemark told Newsday. "In a recent study, my colleagues of Alexandria, Virginia, for example, they found that being close to affordable housing actually increased property values in the surrounding area."

Hochul is staking her legacy on improving housing affordability. She said 800,000 new housing units are needed statewide over the next decade to lessen the demand and cost. But she has faced early opposition in the State Legislature and in local governments. Her plan now underway includes turning thousands of unused parcels owned by the state into housing while easing regulations for developers.

What else drives a high cost of living?

Many other elements add to the cost. Among them:

• Local property taxes. New Yorkers paid the second-highest rate of property taxes in the country, driven by school taxes.
• State taxes. The Census Bureau also shows New York takes in more than twice as much in total taxes and fees as Florida and more than Texas, both of which have larger populations than New York. Within that total, New York has some of the highest income and corporate taxes in the country, according to independent studies by DiNapoli, the CBC and the Empire Center. 
• State spending. New York is the fourth-most populous state behind California, Texas and Florida. Yet New York State government spends more than Texas and Florida overall, according to the Census Bureau. The Empire Center, a conservative-leaning think tank based in Albany, notes New York State has the highest costs for the Medicaid health care system for the poor and working poor. 
• Education. New York has the highest per-pupil cost for education in the country, twice the national average. The Census Bureau reported in April that school spending spiked by 8.9% in 2022 compared with 2021, the largest jump in more than two decades. New York spent $29,873 per pupil compared with $25,099 in New Jersey and, at the lower end, $10,315 in Arizona.
• Unions. Public- and private-sector labor union agreements that seek better wages and benefits also drive up costs elsewhere as companies without unionized labor compete for workers. The Empire Center's Ken Girardin said that in addition to the added public cost of unionized workers in government, the political clout of unions has added to what he calls waste spending on transit, water and other infrastructure projects.

Demand drives spending

But state spending and the taxes needed to pay for it are also driven by the demand of voters and employers who want some of the best schools, transportation networks and social services in the country. 

"Higher-than-average taxes and spending is not inherently bad," concluded CBC researchers Ana Champeny and Adam Ciampaglio.

"New York has long chosen to levy high taxes to fund an extensive array and level of services that are relatively high cost. The issue is whether the value proposition — are residents and businesses satisfied with what they get? ... do not undercut the state’s job growth and attractiveness to residents and businesses."

For example, New York spends much more than Texas and Florida and nearly as much as California on parks and recreation, which reflect public interest in quality-of-life programs. 

New Yorkers also spend less in out-of-pocket costs than residents in other states for transportation, including mass transit for commuters on Long Island, to a large extent because of government spending.

While New York Republicans long have blamed the decades-long exodus on high taxes and union costs, others argue that state spending topics such as education reflect the priorities and values of New Yorkers. Each year lawmakers of both parties increase state aid to school districts, the vast majority of school budgets are approved by voters and school consolidations are opposed even though they could save money.

Siena College Research Institute polls have repeatedly ranked taxes as the state's top problem, while also ranking education as New Yorkers' top priority. A January poll found 73% of voters would prefer to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and on successful businesses compared with 23% who wanted the state to cut spending on programs and services.

And on Long Island, a January 2012 poll showed 51% of those polled opposed consolidating the Island's 124 school districts.

Many still love New York

Immigrants and residents from other states continue to flow into New York.

New York City remains a global finance, corporate and media hub and a coveted address for those who can afford it and that drives real estate costs. Further, the attraction of top cultural, educational and recreational advantages in the city and its suburbs, including Long Island, continues to draw thousands of Americans from other states, even at the premium price that those advantages can demand.

A 2022 analysis by the Census Bureau found 301,561 people came to New York State from a different state in 2021. They included 34,681 former residents of California; 21,300 from Florida; 12,233 from Texas; 10,914 from North Carolina; and 4,661 from Arizona. Nearby states also lost residents to New York, including 38,771 from New Jersey; 20,673 from Massachusetts; and 14,981 from Connecticut.

For those who can pay for it, there can be a trade-off between affordability and the assets provided in higher-cost states. Massachusetts offers a vibrant city in Boston and Cape Cod. New York has New York City and the schools and beaches of Long Island. Both states offer more cultural advantages than in many less-expensive states in the South and West. To some extent, the added cost reflects this higher demand.

"There’s a reason people like New York," Miringoff said. "There’s Broadway, major sports and there’s so much more in the way of lots of things that people might value like different restaurants, vacation places, recreational places, and there are lots of things New York has to offer. What’s happened is the downside has grown more quickly than the upside."

Levy, of Hofstra, also sees some New Yorkers may face a breaking point.

"At a certain point in their economic lives, people can no longer afford the services and attractions that make New York the unique place it is," he said.

New Yorkers’ antipathy for their state also might be exaggerated. Marist’s April poll reported that 37% of New Yorkers said they planned to leave New York within the next five years, which would translate into a highly unlikely loss of millions of people.

"We did this question 10 or 15 years ago and there was a real uptick," Miringoff said. "It doesn’t mean they are getting their suitcases out of the attic ... It’s probably more attitude ... but the growth from 21% to 37% — that’s a big deal in terms of the people who wanted to relocate."

Reasons for concern

Migration of residents from other states and other countries into New York blunts the decline a bit, but the state still has suffered six-digit net losses due to migration each year since the pandemic began in 2020, according to Census Bureau records. Immigration, mostly to New York City, has kept the state from dropping further in population and with it stemming the loss of more congressional seats and their clout in Washington.

New York lost one congressional seat after the 2020 census and three after the 2010 census. New York now has 26 congressional seats, down from 35 in 1980 and 41 in 1960.

"The net-outmigration of personal income taxpayers in tax year 2021, while lower than the year prior, remained elevated from pre-pandemic levels," DiNapoli said in his February analysis. "The changes in the labor market as well as the overall population pose a risk to the New York economy and, in turn, its revenues."

His report found some worrisome trends about New Yorkers who are leaving the state. Among them: More taxpayers with income over $1 million who work in New York are filing from homes outside the state, and in 2021 the number of New Yorkers filing income taxes declined year to year for the first time since 2008, the beginning of the Great Recession.

"The pandemic upended everyone’s life and caused a big shift in the movement of New York taxpayers in 2020," DiNapoli said. "While patterns shifted closer to pre-pandemic trends in 2021, net out-migration rates remained higher, particularly for families. Policymakers need to make sure the state remains an attractive, affordable place to work and to live."

Not looking back

Robert Bearak moved from Uniondale to Portland, Oregon, in 1996, but even the prospect of moving back to Long Island to his childhood home with minimal housing costs after his mother died wasn’t enough to lure him.

"I had no desire," said, Bearak, 53, a high school history teacher who lives in Portland with his wife and their child.

An avid outdoorsman, Bearak said the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest attracted him on a train trip around the country after he graduated from college in Buffalo. The mellow pace of life in Portland sealed it.

"You can drive an hour from Uniondale and still be in the Bronx. Here, I can drive an hour and I’m literally on a mountain," Bearak said. "That’s important."

"There’s actually a lot of New Yorkers out here," he said.

"Everyone has to follow their own path," Bearak added. "It’s much easier to do that now, and America is such a great and diverse place."

By Michael Gormley

michael.gormley@newsday.com@GormleyAlbany

Michael Gormley has worked for Newsday since 2013, covering state government, politics and issues. He has covered Albany since 2001.