Taps Coogan – March 3rd, 2021

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According to data from UrbanDigs, median rents in Manhattan have fallen from roughly $3,800 a month in early 2020, before the Covid lockdowns began, to roughly $2.900 a month at the start of 2021, a stunning 24% decline.

Being locked-up in a tiny, expensive apartment for over a year while virtually all of the perks of city living are suspended, watching crime rates surge, enduring months of riots, seeing your favorite restaurants go under, the prospect of rising taxes, etc… has led to a genuinely historic exodus from the Big Apple.

Roughly 250.000 ‘change of address’ notifications to locations outside New York City were filed just between March and July of 2020. That is more than 2.5 times the number for all of 2019. In many cases, those ‘change of address’ requests represent multi-person households. If you assume that the average household has about three inhabitants, that means that New York City likely lost between 5% and 10% of its population in just six months in 2020. All indications suggest that that exodus is continuing and may have actually picked up speed in the second half of 2020.

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