What Living in New York City Is Like Now:  From Rent to Rats

New York is faring better than before the pandemic on a key measure of prosperity: real gross domestic product.

Yet it’s not hard to find cracks in the city’s economic recovery. New York City’s unemployment rate was 5.2% in 2024, up from a 4% annual rate in 2019. Though jobs have been returning after the early wave of layoffs, much of the growth is in relatively low-paying roles, like home health aide.

New York’s inflation rate surged well above the national one shortly after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, and continues to outpace the country overall.

Soaring prices meant that, even as median incomes grew by 10%, many New Yorkers were likely left feeling it was harder to stretch their paychecks.

While middle-class and lower-income families were struggling to figure out how to absorb price increases, New York’s ranks of ultra-wealthy residents grew: There was an 11% increase in those making seven figures or higher from 2019 to 2022, according to the latest available tax data.

Housing in New York has become more expensive, contributing to a broader cost-of-living crisis. Apartment rents have soared and there were fewer affordable housing starts than in 2019.

The median home sale price has risen — an obstacle for many would-be buyers. And while some owners have seen a boost to their equity, many are grappling with higher common costs for items such as maintenance and insurance.

High borrowing costs and the expiration of a key tax break have also limited new construction in the city recently, which risks exacerbating the housing crunch.

Pandemic work-from-home policies emptied many New York office buildings, and the Manhattan office market is still recovering. While leasing activity was strong to start the year, tenants have favored newer buildings, leaving some older properties struggling to fill up space.

New York saw its tax revenue boom, with 2024 receipts 21% higher than 2019. That’s in part because higher home values pushed up property tax revenue, and inflation contributed to greater sales tax revenue. Receipts dramatically outpaced the city’s doomsday estimates, allowing Mayor Eric Adams to restore budget cuts he’d implemented amid a surge in spending on the migrant crisis.

Ultimately, while the city spent billions sheltering and caring for thousands of migrants, it still had the cash to expand bike lanes, social programs and fund labor contracts with pay raises for nearly all the city’s unionized workforce.

On key health and safety measures, the city has backslid from before the pandemic. Drug overdose deaths have more than doubled, though they are starting to trend downward. It’s also taking longer for the fire department to respond to life-threatening medical emergencies, which officials have blamed on traffic congestion, lack of emergency medical technicians and an increase in the number of emergency incidents.

Reports of petty thefts at drug stores have surged — one reason some products remain under lock-and-key at these retailers — to the frustration of many shoppers.

In 2021, Eric Adams, a former police captain, won election after a primary against a crowded field of Democrats on a platform of addressing crime and quality-of-life issues that had come into focus in the pandemic.

City sanitation officials say rat sightings are a number that historically goes in one direction: up. But since the city in 2024 began requiring residential buildings to put trash into hard containers instead of rat-magnet trash bags on city streets, rat sightings have begun to decline, the Sanitation Department says.

The pandemic unleashed an exodus from New York, with health fears and the rise of remote-work arrangements spurring residents to flee for smaller cities and towns. Later, a run-up in housing prices sent more people packing.

But the latest data show that the dip in population has been partly erased, boosted by a wave of migrants that the city housed in former hotels and other properties it turned into shelters.

Even as the population has recovered and workers have returned to offices, subway ridership remains well below 2019. Still, it has improved since the depths of the pandemic.

Tourism is mostly back in force. Area airports, including newly remodeled LaGuardia Airport, have surpassed their pre-pandemic number of travelers.

New York, like the US overall, has struggled to recover from the learning loss of pandemic-era remote schooling.

Test scores for the city’s fourth and eighth graders have yet to surpass 2019 figures, despite major policy efforts. That’s a gloomy showing for a system where, on measures such as fourth-grade reading proficiency, New York already lagged the nation.

Student absenteeism, a roadblock to achievement, also has climbed.

Public school enrollment has not returned to 2019 levels, while charter school enrollment has steadily increased. That divergence is a sign that parents frustrated by remote learning and concerned about learning gaps are exploring alternatives.

Meanwhile, New York parents have grappled with soaring child-care expenses. Affordability, including housing and the cost of raising a family, is a key reason why New Yorkers with young children were more likely to leave the city than others, a Fiscal Policy Institute report found.