The population shift away from New York City’s suburbs outlined in an April report from the Regional Plan Association can be attributed to a lack of affordable housing, according to the study.
The association, a planning nonprofit that focuses on the tristate metro region, said its recent findings were a “sharp departure from longstanding patterns.” The report is called “Fragile Success: Taking Stock of the Tri-State Region,” and it includes a section focusing on what is referred to as a “suburban slide.”
The report said that while urban communities like New York, White Plains, Stamford, Conn., and Jersey City, N.J., have seen population increases, suburban environments have failed to keep pace due to a lack of diversity in housing prices.
“Without more suburban housing priced for different income levels, cities will bear a heavy burden of meeting the region”™s affordable-housing needs,” the report said.
New York City has seen a 12 percent growth in jobs since 2003 but northern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut have seen a 1 percent decline, the report said. (The Hudson Valley has seen a slight uptick overall, according to the report.)
The growth in the poverty rate in the suburbs has also been outpacing the city”™s growth, with the Hudson Valley and southwestern Connecticut each having about 10 percent of their populations living below the poverty line as of 2010.
The report also cites a growing number of young adults who prefer to live in urban environments, reversing the trend of a suburban population boom overall and slowing new housing construction in the suburbs when compared to New York City.
That change was attributed to young adults, aged between 18 and 29 years old, 45 percent of whom prefer to live in urban areas.
The association commissioned a 2013 public poll of 1,300 adults in the 31-county tristate region and of those polled, 26 percent said they preferred an urban environment. That number was up from a 1995 report in which 13 percent said they preferred an urban environment.
Adults ages 20 to 34 have flocked to the city”™s boroughs from 2000 to 2010, with a net gain of more than 220,000 people in Manhattan, 98,700 in Queens and 91,000 in Brooklyn. Westchester saw a net gain of 661 migrants in that same age group over the same time period, a more promising number than many of the other suburban counties in the region. Nassau County, for instance, saw a net loss of more than 16,800 residents, Rockland County lost 2,900 net and Putnam 2,290 net.
Westchester, Rockland and Putnam each saw net growth in the 35-to-49-year-old age group from 2000 to 2010, according to the report, with net gains of 7,000, 3,900 and 3,100 migrants, respectively.
Rohit Aggarwala, co-chairman of the RPA”™s Fourth Regional Plan Committee, said the region needed to take “bold steps” to ensure future economic vitality.
“What this report makes clear is that while our region has many advantages, our institutions often have failed to make the difficult choices necessary to ensure our continued prosperity,” Aggarwala said.
The other sections of the report dealt with income inequality in the area and increasing unaffordability for middle-income families. The report said that four out of 10 households in the metro area spend more than a third of their income on housing, leaving little for other expenses and sapping discretionary spending. It also criticized a regional reliance on property taxes to fund municipal budgets and the high cost of doing business.
The report ranked the New York region as second only to San Francisco for highest cost of doing business based on price of real estate, cost of transportation, property taxes and other factors. It also noted a growing vulnerability to disasters and climate-change related issues. As much as 28 percent of the region”™s power plants are in areas susceptible to flooding and that percentage could grow to nearly 60 percent by 2050, the report said.
Paul Francis, co-chair of the Regional Plan committee, said, “While this region has made great progress in the last 20 years, the policy changes we make now will determine whether the region continues to thrive in the future.”
The group said innovation needed to be encouraged but cited obstacles such as corruption and multiple layers of government as obstacles to addressing concerns.
“Our region”™s three states, 31 counties, 783 municipalities and thousands of school, housing, fire and other special service districts bring local government closer to citizens,” the report said, “but also drive up costs, slow down decision-making and make it more difficult to implement important regional projects.”
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