The U.S. Census Bureau has released a new report detailing county population changes in New York.
The report finds that since the 2020 Census, New York has experienced a 1.7 percent overall population loss.
While a majority of New York regions saw their populations decline, some areas saw an increase.
To learn more, WAMC’s Lucas Willard spoke with Leslie Reynolds, an applied demographer at Cornell University.
The decennial census is every 10 years, but obviously there's so much that happens within those 10 years. And so, there's a program at the Census Bureau, the annual population estimates, and these are estimates of state, county and national populations. There's also metropolitan areas and cities. But this release we're talking about today is the county population estimates, and this is the vintage 2024. So, that means that it covers the years since the 2020 census until now. So, this period is 2020 to 2024 and so these estimates every year come out, and they have a period from the April 1st, 2020 census, but also from July 1st, 2020, so all of those years you can track change over time. And one of the pluses from this release is that they also estimate the components of change. So, these are net migration, the number moving in minus the number moving out, as well as natural increase or decrease – so births minus deaths. And those are part of what we call the demographic balancing equation. So, population change is comprised of these components.
Does the report give us any clues as to why we're looking, statewide, a 1.7% population decrease?
Yes, and that's one of the beauties of the components of change. So, in one of our tables, we have, we have the total difference, which was a loss of 336,524 people since the census, or actually since the base. Because, just for clarification, these estimates don't use the full census as their base year. It's actually something called the blended base, but it does represent the population on April 1st, 2020. So, we have our count and our percentage difference, and we see that the state gained 124,970 people due to natural increase. So, there were almost 130,000 more births and deaths since 2020 but then we have a loss of almost 447,000 people due to net migration, and that had a rate of negative 2.2% so there were almost 447,000 people more leaving the state than coming in.
Now, are there any regions in New York where population actually increased? And then maybe we can talk about some of the regions that saw a decrease over the last few years.
Yeah, absolutely, there were three regions since 2020 that gained population, and those were the Capital Region, Long Island and the Mid-Hudson. The gains are. The largest gain was in the Mid-Hudson for both percentage wise and numerically So, Mid-Hudson region gained about 28,896 or a rate of 1.2% and Capital Region gained about 9,600 people, and Long Island was about 6,600. And so, they were really the only regions to gain, and that was mostly driven by natural increase. Capital Region was the only of those three regions to be driven by net migration. So, they had positive net migration, 17,217 more people moving in than moving out. But the other two regions, Long Island and Mid-Hudson, that was driven by more births and deaths.
Now, how about regions across the state that actually lost population over the last few years? What are some of the numbers looking like there?
There were seven regions that lost population since 2020, but, like I said, that whole period is a little bit different. So, it captures those COVID years where there were some very stark losses. So, New York City, for that whole period, was the largest decline. So, they lost about 3.7% of their population. 327,522, so that was the largest loss and that was driven primarily by net migration. So, 432,000 more people moving out than moving in, a rate of 4.9% loss due to net migration. But we have seen that turn around in the last year, and New York City was the largest gainer in the past year, and that was driven by net migration, primarily net international migration.
Obviously, there's a lot of political conversations that happen around population, especially in New York State. But does this report change any of the rhetoric that has been floating around, I guess, since 2020
Yes, I think we're seeing some things unfold, and I think population change is always quite nuanced, and sometimes it's difficult to capture all of those different parts. But also, an important part of this product and estimation is the methodology. And one of the things that they've updated in the last year for this vintage, specifically, is their measurement of international migration. So, in past years, we had seen New York losing a lot of population, but in this release, the same estimate for the last year shows an increase, or the beginning of net migration becoming positive, and it was driven by people moving, more people moving in than out internationally. And so, they had some methodology updates and other sources that they used to better capture this movement. It's difficult to do. And of course, there were the large influx of migrants and asylum seekers, and so it's difficult to capture this all in one place. And so, that had a large impact on New York City, and therefore New York State. And that's something important to consider too, is that these estimates come out every year, and it's kind of a rolling basis. So, each year they get the opportunity to edit or to revise their methodology, and that can update the estimates that we get. So, it's important not to put too much stock in one single year, but the time series, overall, is really what shows us what the change looks like, especially at the end of the time series. But, as it comes out, the larger period is very important, and the last year is definitely subject to change. But, we think that this better captures what has been happening in New York and that it really benefited us to have a revisitation of the methodology to update these new flows.
