Tracy Alloway and Laura Nahmias
A total of about 800,000 people moved out of large urban counties last year, or twice the pre-pandemic rate, EIG said. Moves out of the city have combined with lower birth rates to drag down the number of young children in big urban counties. Birth rates there have fallen at twice the rate of those in rural areas over the past decade or so, EIG found.
The loss of families with small children is persisting as cities like New York grapple with rising childcare and housing costs, and questions about whether those financial pressures are driving New Yorkers — particularly middle-income families — to leave.
In a separate report released recently, the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute found that households with children under the age of six were 47% more likely than the rest of the population to leave the state of New York post-pandemic.