Note: there are many surprises in the changes in the peoples of New York City. For religious groups, it is really important that they keep up with the latest trends among their potential congregants. Here at A Journey through NYC religions, we are committed to providing the quickest and most in-depth first looks at the trends. On June 30th, we broke the news about the exact dimensions of the lost population of New York City. Here we are reprinting the article as a lead into our more comprehensive looks at the changes in the peoplings of the city.
Before the crime wave and COVID hit, the population trends in the city were upward. The above map of the United States 2020 Census results shows unexpected gains all over the city, particularly in Brooklyn which gained 9.2% more residents since 2010. However, since the spring of 2020, we have been waiting for a lead shoe to drop.
On June 30th, we found officially what all of us expected: the city has had a significant population drop.
The United States Census Bureau released its annual Population Estimates. Drawing upon many data sources generated by the federal, state, and local governments, the results show that in 2021, New York City lost 3.5% of its population, This means that the city has lost about 300,000 residents. The biggest losers were Manhattan and Brooklyn. Manhattan lost 6.6% of its residents in 2021.
A recap of significant population milestones in New York City
In 1978, New York City hit its lowest point since the Great Depression in the number of residents. It seemed that people couldn’t wait to get out of the city, and the NYPD was handing out pamphlets to visitors at the city airports with nine “guidelines” for surviving “Fear City.” But miraculously, there was a group that didn’t give up on the city. The number of religious congregations was increasing for the first time in over a decade. Partly the product of new immigration and partly determination topped with spiritual hope, invisibly but surely the city was starting to change. It took a few years before the changes started to show up in the population numbers.
In 1990, the city experienced the highest birth rate in its history. In 2000, New York topped over 8 million people for the first time in its history.
From 2010 to 2020, the growth rate was 7.7%, not as much as some other parts of the country, but large enough to surprise a lot of people. The number of new churches in the city was growing at times three times faster than the population.
Analysis of the current decline
The current decline had several obvious sources. The crime wave which started in 2018-2019 has been a bitter shock to residents. The injustice of lax policing policies led to attacks on all neighborhoods and led to the election of a new mayor. New Yorkers decided that they needed an ex-cop as mayor.
COVID, of course, barged into town in 2020. 32,375 of the deaths occurred in New York City. Many professionals left the city to work via zoom and other online modalities. The lower and working classes didn’t leave the city as much as the wealthy and professionals. Consequently, Queens and The Bronx had less of a decline in population and Staten Island hardly declined at all.
This means that the religious congregations that serve the wealthy and professionals probably saw a significant drop in income and more members leaving the city or attending via online services. These congregations were, at least theoretically, better able to take advantage of online and social media and create innovations in new forms of worship and online services.
The new annual Census estimate takes a bit of work to translate into numbers that are consistent with the 2020 Census. We have given you the results in an easy-to-read chart, but have described the analytical process in the footnotes for those that are interested:
Because of the way the Population Estimates adjust racial and ethnic categories to be consistent over several data sources, we are still evaluating the data concerning the current racial and ethnic populations in New York City itself.
Some Record Books figures for the NYC metropolitan area
The New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA metro area had the nation’s largest White population, (13,120,012), the largest Black population at 4,194,108, the largest Asian population (2,633,881), and the largest American Indian and Alaska Native population at 336,842.
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