New York City added jobs, beat national GDP growth in 2024, and kept Wall Street humming. None of that tells the full story.
A new analysis from the Citizens Budget Commission finds that beneath those headline numbers, the city is losing residents, hemorrhaging taxable income, and watching public school enrollment shrink while rents keep climbing faster than any pre-pandemic trend would have predicted. The report, released Monday, makes a pointed case that the city’s celebrated economic resilience is obscuring a set of structural problems that don’t show up in a jobs report.
The income drain is stark. Between 2019 and 2023, New Yorkers who moved out of the city earned $68 billion more than those who moved in, according to the CBC tracker. That net income loss broke down into roughly $23 billion to other parts of New York state, $14 billion to Florida, and $2 billion to Texas. Most people leaving aren’t going far, the commission says. Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania are pulling the largest shares of departing residents. But a significant slice is heading to Florida, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Andrew Rein, the Citizens Budget Commission’s president, told amNewYork that the problem isn’t any single bad data point. It’s the direction of several indicators moving together. “Too many indicators are showing our value proposition is uncertain,” Rein said. He flagged the jump in domestic out-migration specifically, which climbed to 114,025 from 94,024, and called that uptick “a warning sign.” A sharp drop in international immigration compounded the damage, leaving the city with a smaller overall population heading into 2025.
It’s not a clean collapse.
The city does have genuine strengths. CBC’s tracker shows New York holding 129,000 more private-sector jobs than it did in January 2020, and gross city product has cleared its pre-pandemic level. Finance and information sectors kept growing through 2025 even as trade, food service, accommodation, and construction posted losses.
There’s also a quirk in the job numbers worth understanding. A state reclassification shifted roughly 40,000 health care and social assistance jobs out of New York City’s count and into other parts of the state. Without that shift, CBC says, both total jobs and health care employment would have shown increases in 2025. But Rein didn’t treat that as a reason for comfort. He argued that too much of the city’s post-pandemic recovery depended on lower-wage, publicly funded health care work, which he called “a shaky foundation on which to build an economy.” Job growth, he said, slowed in 2025. His framing was direct: “a declining population with shrinking jobs in most industries demonstrates the challenges we now face right now.”
Housing costs give the picture no relief.
CBC’s tracker puts asking rents at 15.2% higher than they would have been had pre-pandemic trends simply continued, and rents are rising at roughly twice the historical pace. For a city that’s already among the most expensive in the country, that gap matters enormously to the workers and families the city needs to attract and keep.
Rein said Mayor Mamdani’s focus on affordability makes sense as a starting point. But he questioned whether the administration has put together a plan that’s specific enough to drive broad-based job creation, especially in good-wage industries that don’t depend on public subsidy. That’s not a small gap to fill. The city’s fiscal cushion, CBC says, stays thin, which limits the city’s ability to absorb shocks or make the kind of sustained investments that would change the underlying trajectory.
The commission’s concern isn’t that New York is in free fall. The concern is that the city’s leadership is measuring success with indicators that flatter the status quo while the indicators that actually predict long-term fiscal health are all moving the wrong way at once. Population decline reduces the tax base. Income outflow reduces it further. Slower job growth in most sectors and a school enrollment drop that signals fewer families with children in the city compresses the outlook for the next decade.
CBC’s tracker is designed to keep that full picture visible, not just the Wall Street gains and the GDP line that make for easier headlines. Rein’s central argument is that New York still has time to act, but the window for treating this as someone else’s problem is getting shorter, and 114,025 people who left last year didn’t wait around to see whether the plan improved.