The New York Observer - December
11, 2007
Graying Of the City: Young
Families Fleeing New York
By Tom Acitelli
oung
families are leaving New York more and more, threatening to turn the city in
the next few decades into one largely of older, childless and single people.
It’s these young families that lay down the sorts of roots that animate a
city’s culture and economy, and that ensure its long-term vitality. Lose
young families and, eventually, lose a city’s soul and brainpower. (Exhibits
A and B: Philadelphia and Detroit.)
“You have what’s been going on in other cities—the people staying are
childless, and the people leaving have families,” said Joel Kotkin, author
of The City: A Global History and a noted expert on the economic
trends of cities.
He is co-authoring a report due out tentatively in March on the middle
class in New York City, including population migration. Mr. Kotkin shared
with The Observer last week preliminary results of the study. These
show that more young families are leaving the boroughs, mainly because of
higher costs of living—especially housing. As time goes by, they will make
up less of the population.
New York City experienced a net loss of 8,163 young people with families
in 2006, according to the preliminary results; in 2005, the city experienced
a net loss of 8,034. These young people with families were defined as those
between the ages of 25 and 45, with children and with at least a bachelor’s
degree. Manhattan accounted in 2006 for the bulk of fleeing families, with a
net loss of 3,477 or roughly 42 percent of the city total. Only Staten
Island, among the five boroughs in either 2005 or 2006, experienced a net
gain, adding 221 young people with families last year—but losing 725 in
2005.
The city’s own estimates show the school-age population as a percentage
of the overall population dropping in every borough through 2030. Over the
same time, the city anticipates that the number of 55-and-older residents as
a percentage of the population will increase in every borough.
“It’s not even a question of, they can’t afford what they want,” Mr.
Kotkin, a Brooklyn native who lives in Los Angeles, said of younger New
Yorkers today. “When it becomes a situation of, instead of an apartment in
Manhattan, you’re paying a lot for an apartment a 40-minute subway ride to
Manhattan, you start to think, ‘Is this worth it?’”
More young New Yorkers are shouting, “No!”
Take Staten Island as an example. It is the smallest and most suburban of
the city’s five boroughs, a last stop in affordability for anyone who wants
to remain in New York City. Traditionally, home prices in Staten Island have
been a fraction of what they were in Manhattan or Brooklyn, and even in
large swathes of Queens and the Bronx.
Still, the percentage of 18-to-34-year-olds as part of Staten Island’s
overall population has shrunk since 1980, from 28.3 percent then to barely
20 percent in 2000, according to a report released in April by the Center
for an Urban Future. And, they’re not fleeing simply because it’s, well,
Staten Island. The report points out that the median sales price of a
single-family home in the borough increased 101 percent from 2000 to 2006,
the sort of titanic home-price increase that’s happened citywide this decade
and that few New Yorkers alive have ever witnessed.
“Families are leaving the boroughs; it’s not just Staten Island,” said
Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future. “And it’s not
just stockbrokers and lawyers. … These are predominantly middle-class
families.”
That New York City is expensive, and that that expensiveness may make
living within the city limits impossible, is not news. But it’s no longer a
question of affordability—it’s a larger, almost ethereal question of
livability as created by this lack of affordability.
Do New Yorkers want their city in 25 years animated purely by commuting
suburbanites, and full of gray-hairs and singletons who treat it merely as a
Disneyesque playground, all safe and homogenous? Worse, do New Yorkers want
their city to commence another long period of decline and decay as those who
might have a vested interest in its upkeep and allure—say, the parent
raising a child to pass a private home onto—disappear further into Hoboken,
Stamford, Port Washington, et al.?
“Let’s say I was living in San Francisco and I wanted to move to New York
in the early 1990’s,” said Mr. Kotkin. “I could do it. New York was more net
affordable.”
Not anymore. Like in Staten Island, homes have become prohibitively
expensive for most New Yorkers. In Manhattan, the median price of a
condo—likely the point of entry for first-time home buyers as it requires a
smaller down payment than a co-op and there’s no co-op board to pass—jumped
133 percent from 2000 through September 2007, according to research firm
Radar Logic.
The average Queens home is more expensive than the average Suffolk County
home (excluding the North Fork and the Hamptons), according to Radar
Logic—and, hey, Suffolk County is barely a two-hour train ride away, the
sort of commute one could get used to in exchange for much cheaper housing
of similar or better quality. And, in a few years, it should be noted, that
Suffolk commute will likely end not in the current low-ceilinged Penn
Station but in a more expansive, much sunnier one as part of the Moynihan
transit hub.
Then there’s Brooklyn. The city’s single greatest real estate story of
the past 15 years or so has unfolded there: the gentrification, and the
concurrent rise in home prices, within neighborhoods once thought
undesirable. A midyear report from the Corcoran Group—a major brokerage
that, like other Manhattan-based firms, had no Brooklyn offices until the
late 1990’s—concluded that the median condo price in brownstone
neighborhoods like Park Slope and Carroll Gardens had increased 11 percent
from midyear 2006, to $650,000.
People with children already generally pay more for housing than
childless people, according to Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who
with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, a former McKinsey & Company
consultant, wrote the 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class
Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke. Ms. Warren suggested that The Observer
check out chapter two of the book, which had some pretty sobering statistics
on how costly a young family’s housing can be compared to a childless
singleton’s: “No matter how the data are cut, couples with children are
spending more than ever on housing.”
That spending in New York City has only ballooned this decade. Couple
this with stagnant job growth and job uncertainty in the mighty financial
services industry, and it’s little wonder more young families are traipsing
reluctantly beyond the city’s limits.
“I think people want to stay in New York if they can,” Mr. Kotkin, the
author, said. “People leave because they have to.”
