Is Manhattan pricing out the young? What 14 years of data show

The Census Bureau says Manhattan gains more young people, not fewer

The Census Bureau's Population Estimates are not a survey. They roll the last census forward with birth and death certificates, Medicare enrollment and IRS address changes, and give a count of residents by age for every July. I took everyone aged 20 to 24 in one July, found the same cohort aged 25 to 29 five Julys later, and treated the difference as net migration.

The result pointed the wrong way. Manhattan's 20 to 24 year olds gained about 56,900 net arrivals over 2010 to 2015, 69,500 over 2015 to 2020 and 71,600 over 2020 to 2025. Citywide the same cohort went 137,100, 142,900, 167,400. Every five-year window in this series adds more young people than the one before.

Split by sex, the same thing: nearly equal for men and women in Manhattan, women ahead citywide, no window smaller than the one before.

Then I tried to join the 2010s series to the 2020s series and found the seam. The 2010-based estimates had walked Manhattan's 20 to 24 year olds down to 110,400 by July 2020. The 2020 census counted 135,900. The Bureau did not revise the old series. It started a new one at the new number and let the two sit in different files.

If the 2020 census is right, the 2010s series lost about 25,000 young adults and every net migration figure from that decade is too low. If the 2010s series is right, the census found 25,000 people who were not there. The Bureau's documentation acknowledges the break and offers nothing to bridge it, so I kept the two series apart.

Net migration is arrivals minus departures. 100,000 arriving and 65,000 leaving looks the same as 40,000 arriving and 5,000 leaving. My question is about arrivals, so the estimates could neither prove the claim nor kill it.

The IRS says 20% fewer by 2020, then changes how it counts

The IRS knows where every filer lived last year and this year, because both addresses are on consecutive returns, and publishes the moves as county-to-county flows with returns, people and adjusted gross income. No age below the state level. But it covers nine in ten adults and asks nobody to fill in a survey.

Returns arriving in Manhattan from outside the five boroughs fell from about 49,200 in the 2011 to 2012 filing year to 39,600 in 2019 to 2020. That is a 20% drop before the pandemic touched anything. Citywide, 18%. And in the state-level file, which does carry age, filers under 26 arriving anywhere in New York State fell 20% over the same years. Three numbers, one direction, and the claim was alive again.

Then the series turns straight up: 42,300 returns in 2020 to 2021, 59,300, then 65,500 in 2022 to 2023, the highest in the file. The first jump may be the post-pandemic rush. For the last one the IRS writes that the data “begins a new series” with enhanced address matching and asks users not to compare it with earlier years. Nationally, filers under 26 moving between states jumped 40% that year with no event to explain it. Young people did not discover moving in 2022; the IRS discovered young people. So the IRS series is a clean 20% decline through 2020 and then a wall.

The $50,000 line, and why it moves

The IRS low income band is under $50,000 of adjusted gross income. Among filers under 26 arriving in New York State, the share below that line fell from 89% in 2012 to 72% in 2020. Read quickly, the young arrivals got rich. Read slowly, the bands are nominal dollars: $50,000 in 2012 buys what $66,000 buys now, and the IRS does not say where inside a band people sit, so the line cannot be deflated. The only fix was a control group.

Inflation and wage growth hit all four rows; the gap between rows is what is left. Young arrivals to New York fell 7 points further than young people already living there. In every other state combined the gap was 2.5 points. Filers under 26 arriving in New York with AGI under $50,000 fell 35% from 2012 to 2020, against 20% for all young arrivals. Hold on to that 7-point gap. The Manhattan survey in the next section does not find it.

A return is not a person: a 24-year-old on a parent's return does not appear, two roommates are two returns, a married couple is one. And the age split exists only for New York State, so this table says nothing about Manhattan specifically.

The survey nobody fills in

The American Community Survey is the only source with age, sex, income, last year's address and neighborhood in one record. It is mailed to about one household in a hundred, legally mandatory, with no penalty anyone has paid. Response ran 97% in 2011 and 85% by 2023, and the drop is concentrated in young renters in big cities, the group I care about.

I pulled every respondent aged 20 to 29 for 2011 through 2024, except 2020, which the Bureau did not publish. An arrival is anyone who lived abroad or outside the five boroughs a year earlier. Each record carries 80 replicate weights, which give a margin of error.

Citywide, young arrivals went from about 111,900 in 2011 to 109,000 in 2024, margins around 9,000 each, so no change. Manhattan went from 61,100 to 52,000, a 15% decline that clears its margin by a hair. This does not match the IRS, which had citywide returns down 18% by 2020: different years, different unit, different source, and the survey runs through the post-pandemic rebound the IRS could not measure cleanly. The 2013 and 2018 dips are as large as the whole 2011 to 2024 change.

Women are about 60% of Manhattan arrivals every year. Their line fell into 2019 and came most of the way back; men's barely moved, so the Manhattan decline sits almost entirely on the women's line.

The income split is where the claim finally holds. Arrivals to Manhattan earning under $50,000 in 2024 dollars fell from about 36,700 to 25,900, a 29% drop, and the margins do not overlap. Citywide, 77,200 to 62,300, down 19%. Fewer broke young people arrive in Manhattan than in 2011. That sentence is true, and it survives the error bars.

What it does not survive is the grey line. Among Manhattan 20 to 29 year olds who lived in the same home a year earlier, the share under $50,000 fell from 60% to 47%. Among new arrivals, 60% to 50%. Movers and stayers have almost the same income mix in 2011 and in 2024. Nothing at the door is filtering out poorer arrivals; young Manhattan as a whole got richer.

That is not what the IRS table said. There, young arrivals to New York State pulled 7 points ahead of residents; here, Manhattan arrivals and residents move together. The two measure different things: state against borough, returns against people, AGI against personal income, under 26 against 20 to 29. I cannot make them agree. The Manhattan question is the survey's to answer, because the IRS has no age below the state level.

$50,000 in 2024 dollars corrects for prices, not for real wage growth. A version that draws the line at the national median income for 20 to 29 year olds each year is in the repo, unfinished, and I am not quoting it.

Where they went then, and where they go now

The finest geography the survey allows maps onto one or two community districts. Not a ZIP code, not a corner. The boundaries were redrawn in 2022, so I averaged three years at each end and pooled the Midtown districts.

Midtown and Chelsea take more young arrivals than the next two districts combined, in both periods, and their under-$50,000 share fell 15 points, the largest drop in Manhattan. Williamsburg and Bushwick entered the top ten; Williamsburg's arrivals are the richest on the list. Park Slope and Washington Heights fell off. Morningside and Hamilton Heights lost a quarter of their arrivals and stayed the poorest destination in the top ten.

Outside the top ten the growth is in central Brooklyn and Harlem: Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights North roughly doubled their young arrivals, Harlem went from 1,500 a year to 2,700. Each row has a margin that could swallow half the change; the pattern across eight or nine districts is harder to wave away.

Where I ended up

The claim that fewer young people move to New York rests on a 20% fall in IRS arrivals that stops dead in 2020 when the IRS changed its method, and a Manhattan survey decline that clears its margin by a hair. Citywide, 111,900 and 109,000 inside a 9,000 margin. I would not print that headline.

The claim that fewer broke young people move to Manhattan holds in the survey and means less than it sounds. The young people already here got richer by nearly the same amount, and the state-level IRS file, which says arrivals got richer faster, does not measure the same people. Manhattan did not start turning away the poor at the tunnel. It stopped producing them, or it priced the ones it had out to Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, where arrivals are up and incomes lower. No federal dataset I opened can say which, and I think the people who talk about this most confidently are working from the same three anecdotes I was.

Every number and the code behind it are in the repository linked below, under CC BY 4.0: credit me, link back here, say what you changed. When the 2025 survey lands in October I will rerun it.

At a glance

Sources

Census PEP, IRS SOI, ACS PUMS

Years

2011 to 2024 (Census estimates run 2010 to 2025)

Who

Ages 20 to 29 in the survey; 20 to 24 in the Census cohort; under 26 in the IRS file

Geography

NYC, Manhattan, 54 community districts

Code

Python, pandas, matplotlib

Cost

$0 in data; a free Census API key