New York City is still adding jobs overall, Wall Street remains a source of strength and the city’s economy grew faster than the nation’s in 2024.

But a new Citizens Budget Commission analysis argues that those headline signs of resilience are masking something more troubling: the city is losing residents and taxable income, public school enrollment is down, housing costs keep climbing and the city’s fiscal cushion remains thin.

The latest CBC tracker, released on Monday, found that between 2019 and 2023, New Yorkers who moved out of the city made $68 billion more than those who moved in. CBC says that the income shift included about $23 billion to other parts of New York state, $14 billion to Florida and $2 billion to Texas.

The group says most people leaving the city are still staying relatively close — heading to Long Island, Westchester and nearby states including New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania — while others are moving farther south and west, especially to Florida, California, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.

Andrew Rein, the group’s president, told amNewYork that the problem is not one bad data point, but several indicators moving in the wrong direction at once.

“Too many indicators are showing our value proposition is uncertain,” Rein said. He pointed in particular to the rise in domestic out-migration, which increased to 114,025 from 94,024, and to the sharp drop in international immigration that left the city with a smaller population in 2025. He called that uptick in out-migration “a warning sign.”

NYC’s economy is not entirely weak

The city’s economy, in other words, is not weak in every respect. CBC’s tracker says New York has 129,000 more private-sector jobs than it did in January 2020, and that gross city product has exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

But the tracker also says job growth slowed in 2025, with losses in trade, food service, accommodation and construction, even as finance and information kept growing. Rein said that “a declining population with shrinking jobs in most industries demonstrates the challenges we now face right now.”

There is also a technical wrinkle in those job numbers. CBC notes that a state reclassification shifted about 40,000 health care and social assistance jobs out of the city’s count and into other parts of New York.

Without that shift, the group says, total jobs and health care jobs would have increased in 2025. Even so, Rein argued that too much of the city’s post-pandemic employment recovery was driven by lower-wage, publicly funded health care jobs, which he called “a shaky foundation on which to build an economy.”

Rein said Mayor Mamdani’s affordability focus makes sense, but he questioned whether the administration has a clear enough plan yet for broad-based job creation, especially good-wage jobs.

The affordability picture is no easier. CBC says asking rents are now 15.2% higher than they would have been if the pre-pandemic trend had continued, and are rising at roughly twice the pace they were before 2020. Rein said the city’s out-migration was “fairly evenly distributed among income groups.” He pointed to net losses among middle-income New Yorkers as well as lower-income households.

Fewer children enrolled in NYC public schools

CBC’s new school data fits into the same story. The tracker shows the city has more than 100,000 fewer school-age children than a decade ago, and Rein said traditional public school enrollment is down by 158,000 over that period while charter enrollment has risen by 63,000. The group also found that nearly half of city schools now enroll fewer than 400 students. Rein put shrinking schools alongside stagnant jobs and rising out-migration as the indicators that should “give everyone pause.”

Then there is the city’s budget. CBC says city-funded spending would be $16.4 billion lower this year if it had simply kept pace with inflation since fiscal 2017. The group projects spending will exceed revenue by $5.9 billion between fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2026, with budget gaps of $6.7 billion to $7.1 billion in the years after that.

And while the city now has a rainy day fund, Rein said the reserve is nowhere near large enough for a downturn: “we only have $2 billion in our rainy day fund.”

Rein’s broader argument is that all of this comes at a crucial moment for City Hall. He said the mayor and City Council are negotiating a budget now, and that the decisions they make will shape the quality and scope of city services, taxes and the city’s fiscal stability — “and all those factors underpin New York’s competitiveness.”