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Where New Yorkers Moved to Escape Coronavirus
The Richest Neighborhoods Emptied Out Most as Coronavirus Hit New York City
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By Kevin QuealyMay 15, 2020
Roughly 5 percent of residents - or about 420,000 people - left the city between March 1 and May 1. In the city's very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes.
Relatively few residents from blocks with median household incomes of about $90,000 or less (in the 80th percentile or lower) left New York. This migration out of the city began in mid-March, and accelerated in the days after March 15, when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he was closing the city's schools.
The highest-earning neighborhoods emptied first.
In March, the United States Post Office received 56,000 mail-forwarding requests from New York City, more than double the monthly average. In April, the number of requests went up to 81,000, twice the number from a year earlier. Sixty percent of those new requests were for destinations outside the city.
The empty feeling is the most pronounced in Manhattan. In April, a little more than half of those requests for destinations outside New York City originated in Manhattan, led by neighborhoods on the Upper West and Upper East Sides.
The data from neighborhoods that saw the most requests mirrors cell phone data showing that the city's wealthiest areas saw the most movement.
"Right after Covid hit, everyone just blasted out of here," Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal said of the Upper West Side. "You could walk just in the middle of Columbus Avenue. And I often did."
Many New Yorkers who fled their homes in the city moved to nearby areas in Long Island, New Jersey and upstate New York.
In most locations, the United States Postal Service allows individuals and families who normally get mail at a given location to temporarily forward their mail somewhere new, for up to a year.
Now, mail that used to go to Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan is going to Maine and Connecticut. Lower East Side letters are being rerouted to Florida and Pennsylvania. Packages meant for Park Slope, Brooklyn, are going to Texas and Rhode Island.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/16/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-moving-leaving.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/upshot/who-left-new-york-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Editors Picks&pgtype=Homepage
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