New report examines flow of money into – and out of – region during Covid-19 pandemic

A new report confirms what many of us here in the Hudson Valley have witnessed firsthand: There has been a “huge geographic shift in household incomes that happened in our region during the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The report entitled Money Migration from the non-profit organization Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress details how “relatively high-earning households from the New York City metropolitan area brought more than $1 billion in gross incomes as they moved into communities north of Interstate 84, accelerating gentrification in rural towns and small cities. At the same time, counties in the lower Hudson Valley lost more gross income to migration than they gained, as people sought less expensive places to live.”

“Some of these trends were well established for years, but the frenzy of movement during the pandemic changed the pace and scale of migration and its effects on the Hudson Valley. For several of our counties – Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Sullivan and Ulster – the annual amount of income that moved into their communities increased by as much as tenfold compared to the pre-pandemic baseline.”

For example: Households that moved into Columbia County brought incomes that were nearly 250-percent greater than those who moved out.

While the northern parts of the Hudson Valley saw tremendous growth, Rockland and Westchester counties lost a combined net of nearly 40,000 people to domestic migration from 2016-2020, and lost a combined net of nearly $1.5 billion in adjusted gross incomes.

(The organization used tax return data from the IRS to analyze the impacts from the approximately 60,000 people from NYC who moved north into the region.)

‘Exacerbating the housing crisis’

The influx of money into the region has “broad ramifications – both good and bad - for housing, local business and workforce metrics, municipal finance, schools, and other aspects of civic society in the Hudson Valley.”

While many communities have seen an influx of new residents, some are hopeful this will result in new business, and more expendable income for locally-provided goods and services. It also has “exacerbated our housing crisis in the Hudson Valley,” the study notes. “These trends pushed the median home price far beyond what longtime Hudson Valley residents could afford.”

The pressure of the rental market – with the cost of rent outpacing wages by double from 2022-2023 – has put a huge stress on many local families, to the point where “approximately 100 more families in Dutchess, Orange, Sullivan and Ulster are living in hotels now compared to before the pandemic, including many who are working in service jobs but cannot find an affordable home.”

The emergence of remote work may allow this influx to persist, experts said.

Read the full report from Pattern for Progress, here: https://www.pattern-for-progress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-HV-Money-Migration.pdf

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