New York City accounted for about 57 percent of the New York state’s growth. (iStock)
New York City isn’t dead. In fact, the city may be stronger than ever after adding over half a million people over the past decade.
The latest census figures reveal that New York City added 629,000 people between 2010 and 2020, an increase of 8 percent. The city now boasts over 8.8 million people in its total population, according to the New York Times.
Mayor Bill de Blasio touted universal pre-K, safe streets and investing in working families as drivers of the increase after the data was revealed. City officials sounded a more cautious note, claiming that the recent count was simply more accurate than the 2010 tally after New York’s Department of City Planning added 265,000 housing units to the list used by the Census Bureau.
Every borough in the city grew, but Brooklyn and the Bronx were standouts. The Bronx reached a population of 1.47 million, a level not seen since 1970, before the borough’s steep decline. In Brooklyn, the population reached 2.74 million, just 2,000 shy of the 1950 record for Kings County.
New York City continues to have an outsized effect on the rest of the state’s population. The city makes up 44 percent of the population of all of New York State, and accounted for about 57 percent of the state’s growth.
But New York City isn’t the only part of the state growing, either. The census data reveals a 3.1 percent increase in the population of Long Island, including a surge of minority residents who make up 40.2 percent of the region’s population.
[NYT] — Holden Walter-Warner
