Rich New Yorkers apt to stay, poorer to move: study

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Yorkers whose annual earnings top $250,000 are among the likeliest to stay in the city, while those who only earn from $40,000 to just under $60,000 are among the most likely to leave, a new study said on Wednesday.

Those seeking schools or backyards also tend to move out: 43 percent of the New Yorkers who left had children.

That may partly explain why the average age of the heads of households who left the city was just 40 years old, according to City Comptroller William Thompson's study of 2005 data.

Heads of households who stayed on average were a decade older at 50 years.

Higher-income individuals, who earned $140,000 to just under $250,000, were also likely to seek new homes outside the city's five boroughs, the Democrat said in a statement.

However, 60 percent of them stayed in the tri-state area -- New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

These individuals remained in the metropolitan labor force, easing the loss of what Thompson called a "disturbingly high number of well-educated households." Losing this "intellectual capital" could crimp growth, he warned.

Some 76,000 of the adults who left -- about 40 percent of the total -- had at least a bachelor's degree. Yet about the same number of individuals from other countries, who also had a college education, immigrated to New York, the study said.

City residents with "moderate" incomes of $60,000 to just under $140,000 were more likely to remain.

"(But) When these moderate-income households do leave the city, they tend to move out of the metropolitan area entirely, indicating they may be seeking better job opportunities as well as more affordable housing," he said.

New York City had 8.2 million residents in 2005. Some 4 percent of its population "turned over" that year, when the impact of births and deaths was excluded.

At that rate, one-third of the city's population would change each decade, Thompson estimated.

The main ethnic groups -- black, white, Hispanic and Asian -- were stable, as each moved out "roughly" in proportion to their share of the city's total population, he said.

The city lost more than 800,000 residents from April 2000 to July 2005. Thompson called this "a huge deficit" that was only partly offset by international migration. The city kept growing because the number of births topped deaths by 70,000 a year in the first half of the decade.

People who move to the city from other states tend to fit a pattern "celebrated in drama and literature for over a century," Thompson said. They are likely to be young, and two-thirds are single and have a college degree. But native New Yorkers and foreign-born residents are more likely to stay.

New York state drew the biggest share of the 200,000 working-age city dwellers who left, followed by New Jersey and Florida, he added.