New York
How NYC Has Changed Since the Covid Pandemic
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.
Change in school enrollment since the 2018-19 school year
Source: New York State Department of Education
The New York Times
Immigrants helped reverse population loss.
More than 230,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since spring 2022, an immigration wave that has been the largest in American history. Thousands were bused from the southern border by order of the Texas governor, but many arrived in New York on their own.
Their arrival has helped stem the city’s population decline. New York City ended last year with 8.48 million people, up from 8.39 million in 2023. But it is still down more than 262,000 people compared with 2020.
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.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Note: Data is not seasonally adjusted.
The New York Times
Construction jobs in New York City
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.
…and poverty is soaring.
More than 2 million New York City residents, or one in four, could not afford basic necessities like shelter, food and clothing in 2023, according to one recent survey. That represents the highest poverty rate in the city since at least 2015, said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia School of Social Work, which conducted the survey. The findings were in line with census figures, which also showed a rise in poverty since the pandemic began.
A family of two adults and two children was considered in poverty if the household made less than $47,190 a year. The median household income in the city in 2023 was about $76,500.
Source: Census Bureau American Community Survey (1-year estimates)
The New York TimesPercentage of the population below the poverty line
The surge in poverty was driven by two major factors. Government aid instituted during the pandemic, including an expanded child tax credit and cash payments to low-income families, ended at the same time that the cost of rent and household goods went up.
High inflation stretched people’s budgets nationwide, but in New York, according to the Columbia survey, the poverty rate was nearly double the national average. That’s because of the high cost of living, which was driven by housing costs, Dr. Wimer said.
“Hearing that New York is back,” he said, “for me, it begs the question: Back for whom?”
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.
Companies occupy less space in Manhattan’s office buildings than they did a quarter-century ago.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, the Manhattan skyline was redrawn with towering office buildings to serve the demands of growing companies. That building boom resulted in 419 million square feet of office space, by far the largest office district in the United States.
But companies offloaded offices as the pandemic disrupted the five-day workweek, and they now occupy the lowest amount of space in Manhattan in at least a quarter-century. The percentage of unoccupied space is more than six times higher than in 2000. That glut could fill 32 One World Trade Centers.
Source: Cushman & Wakefield Real Estate
The New York Times
Office vacancy in New York City
Many companies have found they can operate with smaller footprints and with remote workers. White-collar workers in the city now spend about 30 percent of their time working at home, up from a national average of about 7 percent before the pandemic.
Some firms have reversed course. Return-to-office demands, along with an increase in office lease signings in 2024, have led developers and brokers to hope that the market is rebounding.
And yet, in a sign of continuing uncertainty and rising construction costs, the building of new office towers has nearly stopped. No developer has broken ground on the next big property in Manhattan and may not for some time.
Tourism and Entertainment
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.
Sources: Broadway League; Internet Broadway Database Note: Broadway shows were mostly canceled between March 2020 and September 2021.
The New York Times
Total attendance at Broadway shows
Tourists are paying more and more to stay in the city.
The average nightly hotel rate last year in New York City was $314, up 28 percent from 2019. December saw the highest average monthly rate in the city’s history: $440, according to CoStar, a real estate analytics company.
John Fitzgerald, who owns two hotels in Manhattan, said that the last few months of 2024 were the strongest for bookings since the pandemic started. But many travelers, especially those from Europe, where a weakened euro has made visiting the United States more expensive, are groaning about the sticker shock, he said.
“We are still down, but the city is buzzing and our bookings are up, both corporate and leisure,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
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.
And the storefront economy made a comeback, thanks to restaurants.
The city’s storefront economy is reliant, perhaps more than ever, on food and drink.
When nearly every other type of storefront business suffered, it was restaurants that helped drive down vacancies citywide. From 2000 to 2023, the number of restaurants in the city nearly doubled, climbing to over 21,170.
While Manhattan had the most restaurants overall, over 9,400, the recent growth was strongest in the other boroughs, in neighborhoods where residents’ changing work schedules meant they were spending more time outside the city’s central business districts.
Korean fried chicken shops, Taiwanese bubble tea cafes and Greek lunch spots are among the franchises gaining traction, as some fast-food stalwarts and pharmacies shrank their footprints.
The range of cuisines is a reflection of the city’s reliance on a largely immigrant work force, Mr. Bowles said, adding that foreign-born people make up about 57 percent of the restaurant work force in New York.
There is already concern that the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants could have a chilling effect on the city’s growing but fragile restaurant scene.
“It is not an overstatement that we are going to be seeing real labor shortages at employers across the city,” Mr. Bowles said.
Nearly two decades have passed since “The Wire” ended, yet Jamie Hector’s haunting turn as the drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield still resonates. Jay-Z recently referred to the character during a freestyle at the Roots Picnic.
“I respect the fact that artists find time to appreciate another artist in that way,” Mr. Hector said. “I consider the work that we do at the highest level with great art. His is literary. His is over a track, making you feel, and mine was visual.”
Mr. Hector, 50, also a director, producer and children’s book author, has devoted much of his life to the arts as one of television’s most compelling, understated figures, currently seen in Apple TV’s “Cape Fear.”
He splits his time between his family, dramatic roles, his own projects and shepherding the next generation of artists. Mr. Hector spent a recent blistering Thursday in Brooklyn with The New York Times.
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Ryan Compton knows a thing or two about gigs. To make it in New York, he has worked as a retail associate inside the Museum of Modern Art’s gift store, a cashier for a downtown taqueria and a paint mixer for Takashi Murakami. He has experienced the paradox of a city both known for its artists and for pricing artists out.
Financial constraints forced Mr. Compton, who is from South Jersey, to move away from New York twice over the course of two decades. He has lived in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia, but remains convinced the resources and people inside New York are unparalleled.
“You never know who you’re going to run into,” he said. “Everyone’s curious about each other.”
Since moving back in 2022, he has whittled down his source of income to a single gig as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he made $51,000 before taxes last year. It’s his second time at the museum. He first worked there part-time in 2011 before leaving in 2015 to earn his master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I know I couldn’t afford graduate school and the cost of living in New York at the same time,” he said.
A third try at New York life has forced Mr. Compton, now 46, to confront the sustainability behind a career as both an interdisciplinary artist and a security guard — even inside one of the most famous museums in the world.
Love at First Sight (With New York)
As an undergraduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mr. Compton looked forward to spending weekends at his friend’s apartment gallery in the East Village in Manhattan.
A combination of showing face and knowing the right person led to his side project at the time — fashioning 3-d printed stuffed animals with skull faces — which were featured in an issue of Vogue Japan. He even sold a few inside a handmade craft store in Tokyo’s Ginza district for about $1,000.
“I was interested in the contrast between fuzzy-shaped animals and skulls,” he said, later adding, “You know, stuff when you’re a 20-something-year-old being kind of edgy.”
The early moment of success propelled Mr. Compton to chase after opportunities to showcase his work. While supporting himself financially through retail and service jobs, he helped write the artist Roman Ondak’s interactive performance piece at MoMA, “Measuring the Universe;” and worked as a collaborator for “No Souls for Sale,” an experimental project temporarily at Dia Chelsea and later, the Tate Modern in London. Both went unpaid.
“The chance to work in modern art before I was 30 is unheard of,” Mr. Compton said. “It only happens in New York.”
A Slower Pace
Tens of thousands of people flock to the Metropolitan on weekends, and it’s Mr. Compton’s job — one he has found increasingly difficult — to make sure the art is untouched. He believes social media has altered the way visitors engage with the museum. Think more selfies and poses leaned against Hellenistic marble.
The one hour work commute from Parkchester in the East Bronx gives him time to prepare for a long day ahead. He splits a two-bedroom with a co-worker for $1,000 a month and pays $50 in utilities. Heat and water are included in his rent, and his roommate covers the cost of Wi-Fi. He pays $90 each month for his phone bill.
The slower pace of the residential neighborhood matches the stage of life he’s in now. In the last few years, Mr. Compton has slowed down as he has come to terms with the expenses behind his art.
He no longer has free access to fabrication laboratories pegged to his university, and he has opted for the more cost-friendly hobbies of zine-making and book binding. He is, however, eyeing a $1,000 3-d printer. For now, he has settled on $20 a month Photoshop subscription.
The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school. The window for his deferment period closed, and even with some money he inherited after his mother passed, he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans. “I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.
Splurging on Plants and Experimental Harsh Noise Records
Mr. Compton may not have any children, but he is a proud “plant dad.”
His apartment houses $1,000 worth of plants sourced through Facebook groups, pop-ups and by following Brooklyn Horticulture online. He typically pays $30-$50 for medium to large sized plants, but he is constantly on the lookout for deals.
When he isn’t at home with his plants, Mr. Compton treks into Manhattan to do his weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. He prefers the prices there to local spots in the Bronx and estimates he spends $70 each week.
A cash guzzler of Mr. Compton’s food budget is the $20 a day — an additional $80 a week — he spends at the Metropolitan’s staff cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. When working 12 hour shifts, “I’m not gonna go home and make something to bring the next day,” he said.
On his days off, he seeks out affordable food deals. He frequents Vanessa’s Dumplings in Chinatown for their $8 dumpling special.
When in the mood to treat himself, Mr. Compton rides the train a few more stops out to Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit his favorite record stores like Fringe Records and Nexus Records. An experimental harsh noise aficionado, he spends no less than $100 each visit.
His biggest and most recent splurge was a 10-day trip to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in Japan in February. He was able to cut his $900 round trip ticket to $700 with credit card points. Add in the cost of hotels, meals and souvenirs, he spent close to $5,000 total.
“I wanted to go because my artwork had been to Japan, but I haven’t been to Japan,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Mr. Compton wants to strike a balance between saving and enjoying the life he dreamed of in New York. To help pay off his loans, he considered applying to be an art handler for the Metropolitan, a job with a slight pay bump. But without his present benefit of overtime pay, he’s afraid he would be making less than he does currently.
Over the years, Mr. Compton has found community among other security guards at the Metropolitan, who, like him, are artists. He has also built inroads with notable names at the museum, one being Sheena Wagstaff, the former chairman of modern and contemporary art, who he said took the time to know Mr. Compton not only as a co-worker, but also as an individual, too.
Because of his connections, he feels like he has nowhere else to go. He considered a quieter lifestyle upstate in Westchester or the Catskills, but believes he will make less money outside of the city. And, of course, he would have to leave the place he’s called home for the majority of his adult years.
“I did four other cities, and they weren’t as good or great as I like New York,” he said. “I always end up here.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Look up.
Before you commute home to suburbs like Tarrytown and Larchmont, or race toward the next stop on your tourist map, take a minute.
Look up to see the stars.
One hundred and twenty-five feet above you are 2,500 stars and six signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, a line that represents the path of the sun across the sky:
The signs are joined by a few others: Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum and, in the center of it all, Musca Borealis (the Northern fly, or sometimes called Apis, the bee). The Milky Way streaks across the ceiling in the opposite direction. The whole thing is ringed by intricate plaster moldings along the clerestory windows. Fifty-nine of the stars twinkle.
Who says there isn’t magic in Midtown?
The original early 1900s plan for the ceiling was to build a massive skylight so commuters could look up at the actual stars:
But time and money were short, so the architects asked the artist Paul Helleu to design a version of the sky on the ceiling instead. Helleu took inspiration from star atlases from the 1600s. His main resource was the Uranometria from 1603, a lushly illustrated volume that was the first detailed cataloging of individual stars, their positions and brightness. See how similar the figures are. This is Aries:
Here’s Taurus, the bull:
A heart balloon — one of several — had floated up the day we took this photograph, nestling between Orion’s club and Taurus’s horn (maybe an earthly sign that this heavenly hunt might finally resolve).
Converting the flat drawings of a spherical sky re-projected onto a semi-cylindrical vaulted ceiling would have been no easy task. The design work was done by a famous scenic designer and muralist, James Monroe Hewlett, and was overseen by the Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who in 1910 assured a panicked public that Halley’s comet would not hit Earth.
Dozens of painters got to work. The terminal opened at midnight on Feb. 2, 1913. The New York Central Railroad boasted “that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.”
Two weeks later, a commuter from New Rochelle (and a hobby astronomer) looked up at the ceiling and realized that west was east and east was west and the sky was not, actually, in a proper arrangement. Only Orion was shown in the “correct” orientation. He wrote a “wrathful” letter to the station. As The New York Times reported in 1913, officials at Grand Central “did not deny the charge that things were a bit mixed, but held that it was a pretty good ceiling for all that.”
How this happened is still a matter of debate, given Professor Jacoby’s astronomical blessing.
Michael Allison, a former NASA planetary scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and a former adjunct in the Columbia astronomy and astrophysics department), met me last month at the great clock under the ceiling to explain his theory.
“I’ve stared at the ceiling I don’t know how many hours,” he said. “I keep hoping I can discover one more thing.”
The liberties taken, Mr. Allison said, like re-sizing the constellations to fit the space and flipping Orion (in relation to the rest), were carefully done. Ultimately, a good marriage of art and science. He thinks Jacoby was a victim of big project bureaucracy, that it was all a mixup.
Jacoby probably expected the design he approved to be projected overhead, where the result would match the plans if you held them above you. The painters put them on the floor instead. Hence, the flip.
But this “heavenly view” — the stars as if they could be seen from above, looking down — may not be a bad view at all.
“There are just so many bad things happening in the world now that I think the sky offers a perspective that can lift us above that,” Mr. Allison said.
For Deirdre Newman, the great-granddaughter of the muralist Hewlett, who painted the ceiling, the imperfection “is what art is.”
Ms. Newman, it turns out, is also a painter of murals and ceilings. But these days, if she has to flip an image, she just hits a button on the projector.
“Anytime I make a mistake painting, I’m like, this proves that it’s art,” she said. “It is not perfection, and it shouldn’t be — it would be a sad thing if it was.”
The stories that we’ve given to the stars over millenniums, some of the most retold tales in history, are hardly orderly — stories of fate, violence, betrayal, revenge, sex and punishment. Cancer helps Hera in pinching a rival’s foot. Orion, son of Poseidon, is placed in the stars by Zeus, locked in an eternal hunt. The two fish of Pisces (Aphrodite and Eros) are linked together to escape the monster-of-all-monsters, Typhon.
Or the stories are totally different if you were Babylonian or Egyptian, Greek or Roman. Today, the stars mean something else again to a devoted user of the horoscope app Co-Star, seeking reassurance after a breakup. And to a commuter standing in Grand Central, looking up while waiting for the train, the stars might just be a momentary diversion, a decorative way to pass the time. Or more.
Take what you want. Take what you need.
***
By the 1940s, the ceiling had fallen into disrepair, so they painted a whole new one on four-foot-by-eight-foot asbestos sheets over the old one. This is the version that exists today. Eventually that second ceiling, too, grew dark with grime and had to be cleaned from 1996 to 1998. The difference was stark. As you were zooming in, you may have noticed a little dark square by Cancer. They deliberately left one bit of the uncleaned ceiling here:
The best time to take all of it in — the ceiling, and the majesty of the station — might just be coming this weekend. The setting sun will line up with Manhattan’s street grid and should (pending clouds) bathe the terminal in a beautiful golden glow Saturday at 8:19 p.m. and Sunday at 8:20 p.m. I plan to be on the east balcony looking west on Sunday for that moment.
See you there.
How we took the photograph
To generate a high-resolution panorama of the ceiling, The Times captured 232 close-up images. We then used software to stitch these photos into an equirectangular projection, to approximate the curve of the ceiling. We also developed custom computer vision software to ensure consistent color blending across varying lighting conditions. To optimize for display efficiency and clarity during navigation, the image was then re-projected into the shape of a cube. We think it’s still a pretty good picture for all that.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.
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