by Catherine Smith
A net 70,000 New York City residents left the metropolitan region since COVID-19, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income, according to estimates released Tuesday from Unacast, a location analytics company.
Around 3.57 million people fled New York City between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7 this year — and they were replaced by some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes, the findings from Unacast said.
To reach its findings Unacast looked at cell phone location data to examine the impact COVID has had on three neighborhoods: Williamsburg, Astoria and Tribeca.
Unacast found that those people took with them about $298 billion dollars of income, while the 3.5 million who immigrated to New York in that same time period brought about $264 billion to the city, leaving about $34 billion in lost income in the 8 months of the pandemic.
“The exodus isn’t as big as people have been talking about,” said Thomas Walle, chief executive and co-founder of Unacast, a location analytics firm. “Maybe the greater impact is how the population is changing and how the demographics are changing.”
Tribeca with a population around 20,000, took the biggest hit of the three neighborhoods, with a net loss of 3,500 residents — equaling a net income loss of $1 billion. According to Walle, residents who left earned an average income of about $140,000, while the person now moving into this neighborhood earns about $82,000 a year on average.
The report comes the same day New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) reiterated his support for a second total lockdown in the area as COVID-19 cases have surged in recent weeks, The Hill reported.
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Catherine Smith reports for American Greatness.
