Quest for affordable housing drives people away from L.A. and New York
WASHINGTON — The high cost of housing seemed to sap Americans’ taste for coastal cities last year as cities in Texas and Arizona gained more population than New York City or Los Angeles for the first time in a decade, according to census population estimates released Thursday.
“What started as a promising decade for big cities is starting to crumble a little bit for them,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, in an email. “The Great Recession put the brakes on dispersal to small metro areas, suburbs and the Sun Belt; but those trends are beginning to resume again.”
San Antonio’s population grew by 24,200 between 2016 and 2017, the largest gain among cities, with Phoenix not far behind at 24,000.
It was the first time since 2007 that New York City did not lead the pack in population growth. That year, New Orleans added almost 39,000 residents as people started going back home after Hurricane Katrina.
The last time a Texas city had the largest population surge was in 2006, when Houston — a major destination for Katrina evacuees — added about 43,000 people.
One factor, based on earlier census releases, is that more people have been moving out of New York City and Los Angeles, making it harder for those cities to maintain population growth just through births and immigration. By contrast, people continue to move into more affordable cities like San Antonio and Phoenix.
New York City’s overall population grew slightly between 2016 and 2017, but 143,000 more people moved out than moved in. Brooklyn accounted for more than a third of that loss, with about 51,000 more moving out than moving in. During the same period, Phoenix’s Maricopa County attracted more than 39,000 new residents and San Antonio’s Bexar County added 10,000. (Numbers on movers are available by county, not by city).
The high and rising cost of living in coastal metropolises seems to be playing a role. The typical Los Angeles or New York City homeowner, for example, spends close to 30 percent of her income on mortgage and taxes, compared with about 22 percent in San Antonio and Phoenix.
In Brooklyn, the only New York City borough to lose population last year, housing investors have driven away first-time buyers by snapping up the remaining affordable housing, according to an April report from the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, a public-private partnership that promotes affordable housing.
“Investors are able to beat out first-time homebuyers for whom East New York and Cypress Hills’ modest two-story houses have traditionally been entry points to homeownership,” the report said, referring to two neighborhoods in Brooklyn.