A Haven For New York Families , Now They Can't Afford To Stay

As the cost of living climbs, parents like Caroline Fermin are finding it harder to raise children in Washington Heights, an Upper Manhattan neighborhood that has lost about half of its under-18 population since 2000.

Credit...Carolina Hidalgo for The New York Time

Caroline Fermin is part of a close circle of friends with children in the Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. They push strollers along tree-shaded blocks and meet up for play dates and birthdays.

And just about every week, they talk about how they can’t afford to stay in the neighborhood. At least half-a-dozen families from her group have left for upstate New York, New Jersey and beyond.

Ms. Fermin, 39, and her husband, Jean-Paul Bjorlin, 42, don’t want to be next. But together, they make under $100,000 a year teaching dance and music at Barnard College, along with side gigs. In October, they moved into a four-bedroom apartment that will cost $50,000 in rent per year, on top of the $36,000 they will spend on day care for their two children.

“We’re kind of treading water,” Ms. Fermin said, adding that they were dipping into their savings, which would only last for a year, and had stopped contributing to retirement funds. “Why put up with this? What are we getting back from the city?”

Ms. Fermin’s family is at the center of an affordability crisis that is reshaping New York City’s population. Their neighborhood of Washington Heights, a hilly enclave of nearly 144,000 residents north of Harlem and sandwiched between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, has long attracted families with its large apartments, sprawling parks and close community of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. It is often regarded as one of the last affordable places to live in Manhattan.

But increasingly, many families are being pushed out of the neighborhood by a housing shortage and soaring rents and child care costs. The result is a significant drain of a demographic group that is vital to the city’s future.

Rents have soared in Washington Heights with very little new development taking place.  Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times

Washington Heights lost 48 percent of residents under 18 — and 14 percent of all neighborhood residents — from 2000 to 2020, even as New York City’s population boomed during those decades and reached a record 8.8 million, according to a census analysis by Social Explorer, a data research company.

 

Overall, the city’s population of minors shrank 10 percent in the same period. The drop was steepest in parts of Upper Manhattan and further south in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, and in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick, Crown Heights, Ocean Hill and Brownsville, the analysis found. 

Across the country, an “urban family exodus” over the past decade has helped lead to significantly fewer children in some of the biggest cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, said Connor O’Brien, a research and policy analyst with the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

High living costs made these cities increasingly unaffordable for families, and concerns over public safety, schools, transit services and other quality-of-life issues were also deciding factors, Mr. O’Brien said. The exodus only accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic, as flexible work policies allowed families to relocate to smaller cities and towns, particularly in the Sunbelt, where jobs were plentiful and life was more affordable.

Perhaps nowhere else in New York City exhibits the population shift like Washington Heights, one of the best-known Latino hubs in the country. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who grew up in the area, captured its rhythms in his 2021 film, “In the Heights.”

Luis A. Miranda Jr., his father, said there were noticeably fewer children around than there were when his family moved to Upper Manhattan in the 1980s. Mr. Miranda, 70, whose family is from Puerto Rico, said that while there was still a strong Latino presence in Washington Heights, he worried that would change as more Latino families left.

“In the end, you can lose a neighborhood,” said Mr. Miranda, a political consultant and activist who has worked in city government and the nonprofit sector. 

In recent decades, a similar demographic trend has helped transform some of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. As Black families have left and white and Asian newcomers have moved in, the overall Black population has declined.

Mr. Miranda pointed to the effects of gentrification in other parts of the city like Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The Latino share of the population in that area, a longtime enclave for Puerto Rican families, has shrunk faster than any other group in the last two decades.

“That, I don’t want to happen in Washington Heights — or I want to be dead,” Mr. Miranda said.

Vanishing Families

Signs of a shift are already underway in Washington Heights.

Juan Vasquez, 58, sells shaved ice treats to children and parents from a cart on the streets. As families have left, his sales have dropped to about $200 a day last summer — his worst ever — from more than $500 a day a decade ago. 

A few blocks away, the dolls, plastic ponies and toy cars in aisle 2 at the Discount Outlet store no longer have to be restocked as often. There are fewer after-school snack runs to the Camilo Rosado Deli Grocery.

Joseph Lorenzo, wearing a checkered blue shirt and jeans, poses in front of his store, Macson, in Washington Heights. Shop owners in Washington Heights, like Joseph Lorenzo at Macson, an apparel and shoe store, have noticed fewer families as the cost of living has driven some neighborhood residents out of the city.Credit...Carolina Hidalgo for The New York Times

“We hardly see families anymore,” said Joseph Lorenzo, the owner of Macson, a family apparel store, where sales of children’s shoes have fallen more than 30 percent since 2019.

New York City had as many as 2.2 million children in 1970 following a baby boom after World War II. But over the next decade, the city’s fiscal crisis drove away many families, as did concerns over rising crime, declining municipal services and urban blight.

It was not until the city recovered and grew again in later decades that the under-18 population bounced back to 1.9 million in 2000. Since then, it has fallen again, dropping to 1.7 million in 2020 largely because of declining birthrates.

Rising living costs, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods like Washington Heights, also sent many families packing, even before the pandemic.

 

“I think what you have now is really about affordability,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, the faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. “This is a key reason why people with kids are leaving the city — and it’s only been compounded during the pandemic as prices and rents have spiked and families may want more space now to accommodate working from home.”

From 2017 to 2022, families with at least one child younger than 6 were twice as likely to leave New York City as families with no young children, according to a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning policy think tank. “When you have young children, there’s a lot of cost pressures all at once,” said Andrew Perry, a senior policy analyst.

Yocely Concepcion, 41, and her husband, Denny Antonio Duarte, 44, immigrated from the Dominican Republic and raised their three sons in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights that they shared with a relative. In 2021, they finally saved up enough to buy a home: a four-bedroom house with a lawn in Rochelle Park, N.J., for $470,000.

Alicia Baez, an agent with Corcoran Infinity Properties in Bergen County who sold the house to the couple, said about 70 percent of her recent clients had moved from Upper Manhattan.

Limited Housing, Rising Prices

In Washington Heights, families have faced a housing shortage because there has been little new residential development until recently. Between 2010 and 2020, the overall housing stock in Manhattan increased by more than 6 percent, or 52,048 new units, but it increased in the community district that covers Washington Heights and its neighbor, Inwood, by under 1 percent, or 622 units, according to city housing data. 

There were 505 units for rent in Washington Heights in October, less than half the number available four years ago as people fled the city during the pandemic, according to StreetEasy, a real estate website. The shrinking inventory has helped drive the median asking rent up 33 percent to $2,650 a month from a pandemic-era low of $2,000 a month in December 2020.

Ana Almanzar, the city’s deputy mayor for strategic initiatives, said that city officials had worked to create more affordable housing through initiatives like the City of Yes housing plan. They have also expanded the city’s free 3-K program, increased funding for after-school and summer programs in poor neighborhoods, and created more jobs for youths.

“We know that every single action counts in helping families have a more affordable experience in New York City,” Ms. Almanzar said.

Still, it has not been enough for families like Ms. Fermin’s.

Ms. Fermin and Mr. Bjorlin said they tried to enroll their 3-year-old son in the city’s 3-K program, but he was offered a spot in a program that was too far away to manage with their work schedules. They ended up putting him in a day care program near their home that cost about $20,000 a year. On top of that, they pay more than $16,000 a year for their infant daughter’s child care.

City officials declined to comment specifically on Ms. Fermin and Mr. Bjorlin’s situation, but they emphasized that they had rapidly expanded the city’s 3-K program and said they were “dedicated to ensuring all families have a child care option available to them.” 

Ms. Fermin and her husband have been dipping into savings and stopped putting money away for retirement as they try to keep up with the cost of living.Credit...Carolina Hidalgo for The New York Times

 Caroline Fermin crosses the street pushing a stroller carrying her infant daughter while also holding the hand of her 3-year-old son. 

The average annual cost of center-based care for an infant in New York State was nearly $22,000 in 2022, significantly more than a year’s tuition at a public state university, according to a 2023 State Department of Labor report.

“It’s one thing to go into debt for college,” said Rebecca Bailin, the executive director of New Yorkers United for Child Care, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It’s another to go into it for child care.”

The exodus of Hispanic families from Washington Heights has contributed to a 25 percent decline in the neighborhood’s overall Hispanic population, which fell to 92,279 in 2020 from 123,718 in 2000, according to the census analysis. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population there rose 42 percent to 31,155 from 21,998 during that period.

In contrast, the Hispanic population citywide rose 15 percent to just under 2.5 million over those two decades while the white population fell 3 percent to 2.7 million. 

With fewer children in the neighborhood, and some choosing private and charter schools, traditional district schools have struggled to fill their classrooms.

First-grade enrollment in district schools in Upper Manhattan has declined 42 percent — compared with 30 percent citywide — to 1,255 students in the 2023-2024 school year from 2,152 students a decade before, according to an analysis by Aaron Pallas, a sociology and education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University.

When schools lose students and, in turn, funding — which is based partly on enrollment numbers — they have to make “hard decisions” about cutting staff and programs, including art, music, foreign languages and special education services, Mr. Pallas said. “If the dollars shrink, that becomes hard to deliver,” he said.

City education officials said they were addressing enrollment declines citywide with a range of strategies, including restructuring and merging schools and adding new programs in response to interest from students and families. After years of declines, citywide school enrollment also increased last year, and remains level this year, as thousands of children from migrant families have attended local schools.

Ms. Fermin, who is half Dominican, moved to Washington Heights more than two decades ago after studying dance at the Juilliard School. She wanted to stay and raise her children there, but now finds herself questioning why.

 

Ms. Fermin and Mr. Bjorlin, who is from Sweden, are now considering moving out of the country altogether to her husband’s homeland.

“I don’t want to,” Ms. Fermin said, “but there’s much more government support there.”

Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City. More about Winnie Hu

By Winnie Hu and Stefanos Chen

Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s economy. He previously covered real estate in the city for over a decade. More about Stefanos Chen

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