A new report shows the Hudson Valley continues to lose population, despite a wave of new residents following the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the report from Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, the region lost more than 10,000 residents between 2021 and 2022.
That’s despite many New York City residents moving north, which, the nonprofit’s Adam Bosch says, may seem surprising to residents who have seen housing prices spike in recent years.
During the pandemic and the years that immediately followed it, the migratory forces of people moving up from New York City, up from Northern Jersey, up from Westchester and Rockland Counties, those forces did not change the number of us, but it did change the constitution of us in the Mid and Upper Hudson Valley. And what I mean by that is, is we are much more a region of New York City metro area transplants than we were before the pandemic happened. And as those people moved up, a greater number of people who had been living here for some time, some of them, maybe even multiple generations, in the Hudson Valley, moved out and went to other places, and what the data show is they went to the neighboring counties and the neighboring states and a select handful of states in the South. So very, very important to understand, these data show something that we, as people who study demographics, have known for a long time, which is that these forces of domestic migration haven't really changed the number of us in a positive way. We've actually lost population of migration.
What they've done is they've changed the constitution of us. And that's what people kind of feel and see as they drive around the region. You know, stores popping up that maybe cater to folks with more disposable income, right? How is it selling for more money? Because there are people offering 5% more than the asking price and offering to pay in all cash. Those are some of the things that we've seen that make it feel like there's more people around. And when you add tourism on top of that, which tourism is still very high in our region compared to the pre-pandemic and pre-Great Recession baseline, that makes it feel like there's more people around. But the data have been very clear all along that there's not more people living here. There might be more people visiting here. Migration has changed the constitution of us, not the number of us.
When you're talking about the changing of the, I guess, the constitution of the folks who are moving up, or a changing constitution of folks, they're bringing their New York City incomes with them, correct? So, the folks who are moving out are not the ones who are…individuals making, you know, more than $100,000 a year.
Yeah, that's right. So, one of the things that this report and these data underscore is that remote work is going to be one of the biggest forces reshaping the Hudson Valley, now and probably at least over the next decade. And I want to compare this to post 9/11. So, after the terror attacks, with 9/11 in ’01, ’02, and ’03, we had a similar number of people move up into the Hudson Valley from New York City. Then when ’04 and ’05 came around, not only did all those people move back to the city, but they dragged a whole bunch of young people with them who were, you know, desiring a more urban lifestyle, a more walkable lifestyle, a more connected kind of non-rural lifestyle.
Now, we saw a similar migration pattern northward this time. But…there are two big factors, well, three big factors that make this time different. The number one factor is remote work. The people who moved up here post 9/11 didn't like the commute back to the city. They didn't necessarily like the lifestyle here. Well, guess what? Take one of those things off the board, now, because you can remote work five days a week, four days a week, three days a week, and that changes who can live in our region. And it makes it so that people with more disposable income can live in our region and still work in jobs that are located elsewhere. The other thing that's different this time around is downtown revitalization has really happened a lot over the past 20 years. So, if you still care about walkable living, well, guess what? You go to Kingston, you go to Hudson, you go to Poughkeepsie, you go to Beacon, you go to Middletown or Port Jervis. You're going to find something that feels familiar to where you were, a walkable place with parks, and breweries, and restaurants, and community centers, and it's safe. It's important to remember. I mean, I was a courts and crime reporter during the post 9/11 wave, and during that during that wave, we were at like, a significant peak in small city. Crime in the region, the FBI was sweeping through Newburgh. We had gang issues in Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Monticello. We don't have that. I mean, a lot of people maybe underestimate the degree to which crime is really, really, really low right now. And so, if you moved up here, you have remote work, you have great downtowns, you have low crime, why wouldn't you stay? That was not the way things were set up in the post 9/11 period, where a lot of those factors were driving people back.
So, just to reiterate, you know, we're going to come out with a separate little report on this, but remote work is going to be one of the most dominant factors reshaping the demographics and socioeconomics of the Hudson Valley for some time to come.
So, do you think that for the communities that may not have seen a net increase of population…I mean, I'm looking at the report, and Ulster County, which is the county where you have communities like Kingston, which you just mentioned, as well as New Paltz, which is…there's been a lot reported about the prices of homes and the housing crunch in New Paltz, as well. But when you look at some of the other counties in the Hudson Valley, like Greene County, for one example, where I live, there are communities that are feeling that change. But, do you think that those communities that maybe did not see as large of an influx of migrants from New York City are going to see a future wave of people coming up and continuing to buy homes and establish themselves, just that little bit further away from New York City?
Probably not. And the reason I say that is it's not in this report, Lucas, but one of the other things that we're seeing, and this is a little bit generational, it's a little bit economic, we are seeing a return to the cities, the villages and the areas that immediately surround them. There is really good survey data that showed the younger half of the Millennials and Gen Z do not want to live the way their grandparents lived. Their grandparents will probably be remembered as the McMansion generation. You know, they moved out to the country. Had a big house, they had a grass to mow, they had gutters to clean. This next generation wants no part of that. They want to, they value experiences over possessions. They want to live in walkable, connected places. And so, what you're seeing is that the folks who are migrating into this region are not spread evenly across the region. They're tending to concentrate in the places that just fit the criteria I shared with you, right? Walkable downtowns or near the downtowns. They really like small cities that have close proximity to nature. So, that's why you see like Hudson and Kingston, you know, really seeing explosive numbers in terms of the inward migration. And what that means is it means that our rural communities face some uncertainty in the future, and we know this because we've seen childcare disappear from the rural communities. We've seen healthcare in grocery stores and other services disappear from certain rural communities in this region. Why is that? Because the economies of scale do not exist in the rural parts of the region to support those services and those goods, right?
And so, we think that, you know, the data are pretty clear that people who are going…are people going to continue to move in the region? Sure. Is it going to be net positive? Probably not, because we now have 26 out of the past 27 years being net outward migration. But, for those who do move in, we expect to see, based on generational shifts and desires of living and other things, we expect that they're going to continue to move into the small cities, the large villages, and especially, those places that have that dual benefit of walkable and close proximity to nature. So, on the weekend, people can get outdoors in the ways that they want to.
And, Adam, I also just want to ask about gentrification. Does the data point to ongoing or anything changing as it relates to gentrification? We talked about the folks moving up from New York City with higher incomes than the people leaving the area for neighboring communities. So, what does that say about ongoing gentrification in the region?
So, yes, what we've seen is that this migration force has actually caused gentrification a bunch of communities, especially communities north of Interstate 84. Ulster County and Columbia County are really the poster children for this kind of migration-driven gentrification.
So, at the peak of the pandemic driven migration, households moving into Columbia County were making almost $100,000 more than the households that were moving out. Households moving into Ulster County were making $60,000 to $70,000 more than the households moving out. And I don't use gentrification as a bad word. It's just, it is a force. It is a it is a economic factor. And so, what you ended up having is you ended up having a very, very large amount of wealth move into these relatively small, you know, rural counties that have some urban centers in them, right? And that changed all the things we've talked about. That changed the price of homes. That changed demand for goods. When you have people moving out who are making $60,000, $70,000 it's also important to understand what you're losing. You're losing some retirees, sure, but you're also losing a portion of your blue collar sort of service industry workforce. And so, one of the things that I worry about as we watch this is folks who move up into this region have a certain expectation for being able to get goods and services, but the people who are being pushed out are the folks who provide those goods and services. And so, one of the things I think the region needs to be careful of is, do we accidentally cannibalize ourselves here where, yeah, it's great that folks are moving up with some disposable incomes, that's good for local businesses if they're going to spend money at our local businesses. But then, do the local businesses have a hard time finding people to employ to provide those goods and services, because those blue collar service workers can't afford to live here anymore? So, they move to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and all those other places that are shown in the report.
So, this is a really tenuous moment in time. This feels like a pivot point. This feels like a transition moment for the Hudson Valley, where we need to understand that some of the forces that are exerting pressure on our housing stock, on our labor force, on our socioeconomics and demographics, they're new forces that we have not felt before. We have not felt the force of remote work before, right in this way, we haven't felt the force of a rapidly shrinking youth population, because we haven't had that before. So, we really need to watch this stuff carefully, understand what it means for the region, understand what we can do to counterbalance the things that are bad and seize on the opportunities that are good, and make sure that we're really making evidence-based decisions related to migration and gentrification and the movement of people and the dollars they earn.
Thank you so much, Adam, I appreciate it.
You bet, Lucas, anytime.
