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Brooklyn has been extremely popular among New Yorkers, both as a residential destination and as the best neighborhood where to find top-notch food and drinks.
Alas, according to a new study by location analytics company Placer.ai, Brooklyn is slowly but surely becoming even more popular than Manhattan among tourists.
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The study looked at foot traffic data and found that "domestic tourism to Brooklyn skyrocketed between January 2022 and May 2022, with double-digit increases in foot traffic every month relative to the equivalent month in 2019."
Manhattan, on the other hand, witnessed a 14% decrease in tourism between 2019 and 2022.
The survey presents a few reasons for the noted trend, including Brooklyn's relatively more affordable offerings compared to Manhattan's and the overall effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study didn't stop at the tourism-related analysis but also compared the boroughs in connection to their respective number of residents, highlighting data that shows a 4% decrease in the number of residents in Brooklyn today versus 2019.
That is actually not the case in the "competing" borough, where resident numbers have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
To note: Brooklyn does, however, remain the most populous borough in the city.
"Year-over-year monthly population numbers have been consistently elevated, bringing the population in line with pre-pandemic levels—in the first half of 2022, Manhattan’s population was essentially the same as it was in the first half of 2019," reads the study. "And while some Manhattan residents have chosen to leave over the past three years and move to suburban Long Island (Suffolk County) or neighboring boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx, just as many people have moved into Manhattan from these surrounding counties—indicating that despite the staying power of remote and hybrid work, living in Manhattan still has serious appeal."
Which is all to say: although Manhattan reigns supreme, there is just something about Brooklyn that makes it just as worthy of attention.