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The pandemic wallopped New York City’s population as city living became less appealing amid climbing case numbers.
Manhattan alone suffered an 11% drop in population in 2020, but now, we’re seeing that borough bounce back. Since then, Manhattan’s population has since grown by almost 4%, according to a new report from Placer.ai.
The report states that Manhattan and its various neighborhoods are once again seeing an uptick in residents but the rest of the city’s boroughs are actually losing them.
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In Manhattan particularly, which lost over 8% of its population between February and April 2020, there’s been a 4% increase between January 2018 and October 2022—it is the only one of the five boroughs where the population is now higher than it was pre-pandemic.
Of the neighborhoods in this borough seeing big bumps in residency, Placer.ai says the Upper West Side has seen a 30.7% jump between November 2019 and October 2022. The East Village/Gramercy in Manhattan has also seen significant growth, too, at 26%. It’s followed by a 25% increase around City Hall/Civic Center.
Placer.ai says it’s due to a downtown renaissance bolstered by the fact they’re closest to Brooklyn. It says the top five most popular neighborhoods in Manhattan as ranked by real estate searches are all close to Brooklyn, in fact.
And although Brooklyn is still very much in demand, boasting some of the highest median sales prices in the city, it still has not fully recovered from the pandemic, Placer.ai says. As of October 2022, the population of King’s County was 4.4% lower than it was in November 2019. It says neighborhoods “deeper” into Brooklyn saw their populations decline.
Areas like Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Prospect Heights were relatively unaffected or even saw positive population growth. But areas in South and East Brooklyn like Bay Ridge, Sheepshead Bay and East New York actually saw a lot of loss. There was a nearly 12% drop in population in Bensonhurst between November 2019 and October 2022.
Not surprisingly, Coney Island and Downtown Brooklyn top the list of neighborhoods with the biggest population increases 6% and 4.7%, respectively.
Placer.ai pins Coney Island’s bump on a resurgence of people eager to live on the water without contending with the sky-high real estate prices often seen in Downtown Brooklyn.