The millionaires returned. Others are eyeing the exits.

New York City lost, on net, close to 350,000 residents from 2020 to 2023. Policymakers were particularly worried about the departure of the very wealthy and its impact on the city’s tax base.

In the first two years of the pandemic, the city lost about 17,500 residents from the top 1 percent of income earners — those making $815,000 a year or more. Though small in number, that loss represented a 20 percent decline in ultrawealthy residents, according to Emily Eisner, the chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute.

But the fears were overblown. The latest census estimates show the city’s population beginning to rebound in 2023 and 2024, growing by 121,893 people over that period.

In 2023, the net total of very rich residents leaving the city was virtually flat, and a strong stock market early in the pandemic helped mint more millionaires.

Still, other vital groups in the city were more likely to leave.

Households with children under 6 years old were more than twice as likely as households without young children to leave the city in 2023. And while migration trends have largely returned to prepandemic norms, Dr. Eisner said, Black residents were still twice as likely as white ones to leave — a trend that predates Covid-19.

Not since the Great Depression have so few babies been born in the city, and school enrollment is falling.

The rush of school-age children out of New York City during the pandemic has left behind a population that is getting older and having fewer babies.

There were 99,000 babies born in the city in 2021 and 2022 — the fewest in any year since the late 1890s other than 1936, during the Great Depression.

Attendance in New York City’s public schools, the largest system in the country, is the lowest it has been in four decades. There are 111,000 fewer children enrolled in public or private school in the city than in the 2018-19 school year.

Jobs are back. But growth is mostly in low-wage industries.

No city lost jobs like New York. Two months into the pandemic, more than a fifth of workers were unemployed.

So it was celebrated news when, in the fall of 2023, Mayor Eric Adams proclaimed that the city had regained all 946,000 private-sector jobs that had been lost, a year ahead of some predictions.

But most of the new jobs were in lower-paying industries. Home health care, a sector that pays an average of $31,800 a year, grew 45 percent from December 2019 to December 2024, more than any other industry.

At the same time, a wide swath of middle-income jobs that provide many immigrants and young people a toehold in the economy have shrunk. The retail industry, which pays workers an average of $56,200 per year, shed 54,100 jobs from December 2019 to December 2024, a 15 percent drop.

The construction industry, which pays an average of $93,300 a year, often without requiring a college degree, lost 30,700 jobs over the same period.

The wage gap is widening…

In much of the country, the pandemic actually reduced income inequality, as lower-paid workers took advantage of a tight job market and a rising minimum wage in many states.

Not in New York.

In the city, most of the wage growth since the pandemic has accrued among the highest-paid workers, according to the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

In fact, while low- and middle-wage workers’ income largely stagnated from 2019 to 2024, the highest earners — in fields like finance, tech and information — saw their hourly wages soar, said Mohamed Obaidy, an economist with the center.

Those top-earning workers, who made $312,000 or more last year, have seen their average hourly wages grow four times faster since 2019 than workers in the bottom fifth of wage earners, who made less than $36,000 in 2024. Middle-income workers did not fare much better.

“For the top 3 percent, the post-Covid period is the golden era,” Mr. Obaidy said.

New York City became an even more expensive place to live, for both renters and homeowners.

The city has never been a cheap place to own or rent a home — but it’s even more expensive five years after the start of the pandemic.

Nearly 630,000 households spend more than half their income on rent. The median asking price for an apartment was $3,645 per month in February, more than 25 percent higher than at the start of the pandemic. No part of the city is untouched. The steepest increase — nearly 40 percent — has been in the Bronx, long seen as the city’s most affordable borough.

The city’s spending on rental assistance, to help people in homeless shelters find apartments and to provide a lifeline to renters who face eviction, has soared. It is expected to hit $1.1 billion this fiscal year, which started in July. In 2021, the city spent $302 million.

Any solution to the housing affordability crisis, politicians and housing advocates say, must include the construction of housing of all kinds. Last year was a banner year for the building of new units, with nearly 34,000 added, the most since 1965. But it is not enough, and new construction has slowed significantly.

For homeowners, it has never been more expensive to buy in the city. The median sale price was $865,000 in February, a 28 percent increase since early 2020. The median cost to buy in Brooklyn or Manhattan remained about the same: around $1 million.

Tourism collapsed at the start of the pandemic as visitors stayed home.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of tourism to New York City. It sustains numerous industries, employs hundreds of thousands of workers and contributes substantial tax revenue.

Before the pandemic, the city welcomed record numbers of tourists annually and was on track to host 76 million visitors in 2024. The pandemic decimated those projections.

As the city reopened, tourists returned. More than 64 million people visited in 2024, the third most of any year.

There are still fewer international visitors, especially from China, who have historically spent more money in the city and stayed longer than domestic visitors. More than 1.1 million tourists from China traveled to New York City in 2019. It was about half that in 2024.

Visits to many major tourist destinations, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has surpassed that of years before the pandemic. But a few blocks away, the Guggenheim Museum has announced budget cuts in response to lagging attendance. Other attractions, such as Broadway, have rebounded but not fully recovered.

Delivery workers are here to stay.

No other labor force in the city grew and evolved in the last five years quite like delivery workers. Once largely limited to pizza joints and mail couriers, delivery work has become a permanent feature of city life, reshaping the logistics of everything from takeout meals and groceries to retail and prescription drugs.

Since 2019, the number of delivery workers whizzing by on e-bikes and other vehicles has roughly doubled to 60,000, according to James Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs.

The rapid growth of the sector, much of it spurred by recent immigrants, gave workers leverage to push for better pay. In late 2023, after months of resistance from delivery app companies, the minimum hourly wage for food-delivery drivers was set to just under $18, not including tips. This year, it will rise to over $21, exceeding the citywide minimum of $16.50. (The pay is based on the time the workers are actively making deliveries.)

Despite companies’ protests that higher pay would hurt the industry, deliveries have continued to grow. In the third quarter of 2024, 2.54 million food deliveries were made per week, a 1 percent increase from the same period the previous year, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

A big shift in retail means the city looks less like a mall.

Many critics have long lamented an ever-growing number of big-box retail stores in New York City that evoke the feel of a suburban mall.

The economics that supported many of them were already shifting before the pandemic, but remote work and a surge in online shopping have wiped out hundreds of stores from the biggest companies.

There were 1,225 fewer chain stores in New York City in November 2024 than there were in late 2019, a drop of more than 15 percent, according to Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future.

From 2020 through the third quarter of 2024, nearly every category of store in the city — from apparel and electronics to furniture and beauty products — had more closures than openings, according to the Department of City Planning.

For a brief period, illicit smoke shops flooded many retail corridors, but a city crackdown on unlicensed businesses has forced many of them to close.