Image Credit: Getty Images / MCCAIG 
California and New York continue to shed residents as new Census Bureau data shows that each state has lost more than 500,000 residents since July 2020.
As rents continue to climb to sky-high levels in Manhattan and the other five-boroughs, and crime surges are nowhere near ending, one-time New York residents are leaving in droves.
The state has lost more than 523,000 residents since April of 2020. Its population fell from 20,201,230 to 19,677,151 – and that figure is just the record through July 2022.
In California, where the weather is mostly warm, but once-a-year massive wildfires and treacherous mudslides threaten homes, the population has also dipped by slightly more than half-a-million since 2020.
Deputy director of external affairs at the California Department of Finance H.D. Palmer told the Sacramento Bee that the shrinking population of the Golden State is a reflection of its ongoing housing affordability crisis.
‘If you talk to demographers, they’ll say that one of the factors is the cost of housing. And that’s continued to be a challenging issue for the state,’ he said.