ALBANY – Florida last year had the most people in the U.S. move in from other states. It has New York to thank.
New York contributed the most to Florida’s inflow of people, with 63,722 people moving from the Empire State to the Sunshine State in 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau said Monday.
Overall, the net loss to Florida was 35,577 people in 2017, because while 63,722 moved out, 28,145 Floridians moved to New York, the records showed.
Florida has long been a home away from home for New Yorkers, but the outmigration from New York has become more acute in recent years.
More than 1 million New Yorkers have left for other states in the past decade, with Florida being tops on the destination list.
The outmigration in New York meant that Florida surpassed New York for third in total population in 2014, and New York has overall been losing population in each of the past three years.
“Here’s the reason why people are coming: Lower taxes, weather is better — it is a lot better down there,” Sen. Rick Scott, the former Florida governor, said March 22 on Fox and Friends.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pushed back against Florida’s efforts to entice New Yorkers, responding that the problem in recent years has been federal tax policy that has hurt New York despite an improving economy and tax climate.
Leaving New York
The population shift has been an ongoing problem for New York, which last year had 19.5 million people compared to 21.3 million for Florida.
The state faces a loss of as many as two congressional seats in the next reapportionment in 2022, from 27 members to 25 members.
There has also been declining enrollment at New York’s public colleges, mainly at its community colleges. At public schools, the 2.6 million students is the lowest in nearly 30 years, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy.
The population loss has been most pronounced in upstate New York.
From 2010 to 2018, 46 of New York’s 62 counties, mostly upstate, reported population declines, census figures released earlier this month showed.
Over the past year, New York City also had a population drop.
Indeed, the new census figures showed Manhattan and Brooklyn ranked fourth and fifth among U.S. counties in the highest outmigration over the past year, behind San Diego, Maricopa County in Arizona and Dallas.
President Donald Trump has regularly knocked his home state over the population declines, including on Monday when he tweeted in part, “People are fleeing New York State because of high taxes and yes, even oppression of sorts.”
Cuomo has countered that he has sought to lower taxes in the state, but last year he even recognized that the better weather in Florida is a factor.
“Some of them are climate-based. Some of them are based for personal reasons. So the diminishing population in upstate is not new. People were leaving upstate New York because they had to in the past,” Cuomo said last September.
Some good news?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke Feb. 8, 2019, about the New York economy during a speech on Long Island. Joseph Spector, Albany Bureau Chief
New York, though, didn’t have the most domestic “outmovers,” according to the Census Bureau.
That distinction went the nation’s largest state, California, where 661,026 people moved to another state in 2017.
New York ranked second at 452,580 people moving out, and Florida was third at 447,586.
But Florida more than made up for the loss by having the most “inmovers,” with 566,476 people moving from another state, the census figures showed.
Next with the most people moving in were Texas and California.
Overall, the country’s population continues to shift to the South.
Last year, about 1.2 million people moved to the South from another region, while only about 714,000 moved from the South to another area of the country, the study found.
The South drew the most people, about 412,000, from the Northeast.
© 2019 Press & Sun-Bulletin
You may also like
‘Super-rich’ may balk at NY taxes, but will they walk?
E.J. McMahon, research director at the Empire Center for Public Policy, had presented estimates to the joint legislative fiscal committees earlier this year on the potential consequences of departures. He predicted that if the state lost 10% of residents with median adjusted gross income of more than $10 million, New York would lose $265 million in tax revenue, more than the entire state-funded budget for the Department of Environmental Conservation. (The total state budget is $175 billion.) Read More
Despite all the renaissance talk, the numbers tell a different story
“The upstate rural areas are declining in population; the small cities and villages are also declining. The larger upstate cities are declining the least or increasing slightly, which is presumably due to the foreign immigration, which is refugee resettlement,” says E. J. McMahon, director of research at the Empire Center. Read More
POPULATION: No slowing losing trend
Recently released population figures do not paint an improving picture for our county and region. According to the Empire Center figures — over the last nine years — all of our municipalities are losing residents. Read More
Ballston and Halfmoon state’s fastest-growing towns
"The Capital District has some of the more extreme (population changes) in the state," said E.J. McMahon, research director at the Empire Center for Public Policy, who has analyzed the figures. "Saratoga County is one of just two counties in upstate that is growing from in-migration of people." Read More
These are the top 10 states people are moving out of
E.J. McMahon, the research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, told the Post that "much more needs to be done to improve the basic climate for economic growth."
"It's just not dynamic enough to hold more of its people," McMahon said. Read More
Split New York 3 ways? Assemblyman’s petition has new approach to carving up NY
“Upstate would need to do a really significant reset of the way government is funded and what it spends, and upstate politicians have not exactly been clamoring for the reforms that it would take to make that happen,” said E.J. McMahon of the Albany-based Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank.
Read More
Niagara County high on list as fresh census data documents upstate’s shrinking population
The weak population numbers for upstate continues a pattern that has played out for at least a decade, said E.J. McMahon, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank.
"The rural areas are the weakest," McMahon said. "The upstate decline is continuing. It's not much different from the picture we have been seeing and the same components are causing it: the combination of domestic migration losses in every county but two (Saratoga and Ontario), low foreign immigration and more births than deaths in a lot of rural counties. You put that all together and you have a population decline." Read More
Cuomo claims Buffalo has seen a surge in young people
E.J. McMahon, research director of the conservative Empire Center think tank, also said that while the population of young people increased, it’s unclear how many of those people came back to Buffalo. Some of the gains could be because people stayed, or they could be from refugee resettlement programs, McMahon said. Read More