New York City Was Never That Great
Nostalgia Must be Hunted Down and Destroyed With Fire
Few things annoy me more than political nostalgia. Maybe that’s the basic character trait that turns me off to Donald Trump, but whatever. The point is, I just can’t stand once-upon-a-time-ism unless that previous time is actually being correctly described. Usually, when people talk about how things “used” to be, they forgot vital context, and misread history.
But sometimes, they’re just plain wrong, as in, completely and fabulously bonkers level of wrong. Consider, for example, the story of Rust Belt migration, which I’ve hammered before at least twice. Outflows from the Rust Belt have always been high. Whenever people moan about how bad the Rust Belt’s migration record is now, it just shows that they haven’t put the work in to see what migration really used to be. They’re being nostalgic, and that nostalgia is making them say silly things.
But even more than the Rust Belt, one place gets this treatment all the time. That place is New York City. Consider just the most recent example I saw, a post by Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution. He says:
In the past, when a city like New York became more productive it attracted the poor and rich alike and as the poor moved in more housing was built and the wages and productivity of the poor increased and national inequality declined. Now, when a city like San Jose becomes more productive, people try to move to the city but housing doesn’t expand so the price of housing rises and only the highly skilled can live in the city.
We’ve got our nostalgic clue-in words there, “In the past… now…” and this wonderful picture of difference. Things are so much worse now.
Uh, no. The truth is, New York City has not been a big magnet for domestic migrants for a very, very long time.
How Long Ago Was “the Past”?
10 Years? 30 Years? 200 Years?
Tabarrok doesn’t tell us when “the past” was. But he has a graph going back to the 1970s. I don’t have a dataset directly measuring New York City’s domestic migration back to the 1970s. I do have one going back to the 1990s. Below are three metrics: ACS-measured net migration, PEP-measured net migration, and a very rough population-residual-based net migration rate I’ve discussed previously:
So at least since the 1990s, New York City’s net migration has always been negative. But it’s actually doing much better these days than it used to. So the idea that migration into New York City has slowed down as rents have risen is kinda challenging. It may be true, but we’d need more evidence.
Before 1990, we don’t have all that much good, regular domestic migration data. However, that Native Residual can be extended farther back in time. It provides us only a rough guide, and we shouldn’t compare too strictly across a decade or two at a time, but still, it gives us at least an idea of what’s going on.
First thing to note is that the Native Residual data probably overstates net migration, as it would tend include the children of immigrants as “domestic migrants.” So anywhere with lots of immigrants will tend to have overstated domestic net migration based on this very simple residual method.
New York City has a lot of immigrants, and always has. Here’s a chart of the foreign-born share of the population of NYC back to 1820:
Broadly speaking, you can probably shave of 0.25% to 1.5% from the native residual based on New York being a high-immigration city. So let’s come up with an estimate band.
Okay. So the true net migration rate is probably between those two lines, probably nearer the bottom one than the top one. But the trend should follow the lines fairly closely.
Whichever method you choose, New York City probably did see positive domestic migration in the immediate post-war years from 1945–1950. That is the only period since WWII when New York City has received positive net migration. Probably the sharpest outflows were during the 1970s, the period at the beginning of Tabarrok’s migration graph, presumably the “past” to which he was referring.
Before WWII, New York City almost certainly got positive net migration during the late 1920s. That positive flow may have continued through the 1930s, but definitely during the war years, New York City lost people to domestic migration, largely as soldiers mobilized and moved out to military installations.
Before the 1920s, New York City has an ambiguous migration record. From the 1860s to 1919, it seems possible net migration could be moderately positive or moderately negative.
Conclusion
New York City has not had any sustained period of net inflows since either the 1930s or the 1910s, and possibly not since the 1850s. Even then, possible errors in my method mean that I may be overstating 1850s inflows, which in turn means New York City may never have had sustained positive net flows. There’s simply no evidence for the nostalgic past where Americans liked to move to high-productivity cities like New York. In fact, even the paper that Tabarrok cites demonstrates this.
Notice that in these charts showing higher population growth in high productivity states, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey are all below the trend line, and New York by quite a bit. New York state has lagged behind the population growth of its income-level peers since at least 1940, possibly even earlier. And what growth it has experienced is almost certainly a product of immigration as much as domestic migration.
Before researchers make assertions about how things used to be, they should check how things used to be. New York never used to be a big domestic migration destination. It may become one in the future, or it may not; we just don’t know. But while I do believe that supply-side restrictions are important, this facile story that once upon a time today’s expensive cities were the Texas’ and Floridas of their day just isn’t true, with the possible exception of California.
See my older post about just Brooklyn here.
See my previous post, about oil booms and migration.
Check out my new Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
