STEVE FORBES: 4 ways to fix what’s wrong with New York City and stop the exodus
The political class in New York keeps looking for complicated explanations for a very simple fact: people leave when government makes life too expensive, too cramped, too disorderly, and too unrewarding.
That is what has happened in New York City.
For years, City Hall and Albany behaved as though New York’s appeal was permanent and its taxpayers, captive. They assumed families would tolerate shrinking apartments, swelling rents, dirty streets, unreliable transit, rising taxes, bureaucratic arrogance and diminishing public order because, after all, this is New York. That conceit is now colliding with reality. New Yorkers across income levels have been voting with their feet.
The numbers are striking. The Citizens Budget Commission found that New York City lost 166,000 people, representing 52,600 households, to domestic outmigration in 2022 alone. That loss reduced city tax revenue by an estimated $309 million, including at least $259 million in personal income tax revenue.
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This is not merely a story of a few wealthy financiers decamping to Palm Beach. It is broader and more troubling than that. The New York City Comptroller found that between 2019 and 2023 the city lost roughly 83,000 full-year resident tax filers and nearly 347,000 people attached to those returns. The decline was concentrated among married couples and families with children, while virtually all the net decline in filers and population was concentrated among returns with incomes of $50,000 and under.
In plain English, New York is losing people from the bottom, the middle, and the family-forming ranks. Lower-income residents are being squeezed out. Families are leaving because they need space and functioning systems. Middle-income earners are leaving because they are being asked to pay luxury prices for increasingly mediocre results. And higher-income residents, newly empowered by remote work, no longer must remain in place simply because their offices once demanded it.
The same CBC report noted that one in four college-educated New Yorkers reported working primarily from home in 2022, especially in higher-wage sectors such as finance, media and technology.
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What is the root cause? Start with housing, which is where so many of New York’s other failures become most punishing. The city has spent years making it too hard, too slow and too costly to build. Zoning restrictions, permitting delays, endless procedural choke points, anti-growth politics and regulatory excess have throttled supply.
The result is not merely high rent. It is a market so distorted that ordinary life becomes harder at every stage. The CBC found that 25% of New York City households are moderately or severely overcrowded, while only 9% meet the standard for aligned household size and space.
This is what overregulation looks like in real life. It means young families cannot find an apartment large enough to stay. It means workers spend a greater share of their paychecks merely to remain in place. It means people who might once have endured New York’s inconveniences now realize they can live better elsewhere.
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But housing is not the whole story. New York also suffers from a deeper governmental disease: it spends enormous sums badly. The city’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget totals $115.9 billion. That is an astonishing level of spending. The state of Florida has a smaller budget with almost three times the population. Yet New Yorkers do not experience a city run with the competence such a budget should buy.
Here is the heart of the matter: New York does not just have a big government. It has an undisciplined one. The comptroller warned in late 2025 that chronically underbudgeted costs in Fiscal Year 2026 totaled an estimated $3.76 billion, with even larger gaps projected in the outyears. In other words, the city too often understates expenses, postpones reckoning and pretends future pressures are smaller than they really are.
That is not prudent stewardship. It is budgetary illusion.
Nor is the problem solved by simply appropriating more money. Bloated budgets are not the same thing as good government. In fact, they often conceal bad management. Taxpayers are asked to finance ever-larger spending plans while they encounter dirty streets, persistent disorder, procurement failures, service delays and agencies that too often seem incapable of basic execution. New York’s problem is not that government is too small. It is that government is too expensive for what it delivers.
Then there is labor policy, another topic the city’s establishment handles with kid gloves. Municipal workers deserve fair compensation. But taxpayers deserve a government organized around performance, efficiency and results. Too often, labor agreements in New York amount to higher costs without corresponding modernization.
The CBC has noted that health insurance costs have grown most rapidly among compensation expenses, rising at an average annual rate of 7% from fiscal year 2009 to 2019. It also points out that more than 95% of city municipal employees choose plans requiring no employee premium contribution, leaving the city to shoulder costs that are far more generous than those borne by most public and private employers.
This is where union demands become more than a budget line. They become a structural obstacle to reform. Collective bargaining becomes a one-way ratchet for pay and benefits, while work-rule reform and productivity improvements are treated as optional or offensive. Taxpayers end up with the worst of both worlds: a more expensive government and an underperforming one.
So, what should New York do?
First, it should embrace a genuine supply-side housing policy. Upzone more neighborhoods. Streamline permitting. Reduce procedural delays. Remove rules and mandates that make construction financially irrational. A city that will not build is a city that will drive out its families. Along the way, why don’t the state and city knockout the rent control and rent stabilization jungle that is ruining landlords and leading to structural decay?
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Second, it should restore honesty to budgeting. Stop lowballing predictable costs. Stop relying on rosy assumptions and fiscal gimmicks. Force agencies to justify spending according to measurable performance and real outcomes.
Third, it should reform labor costs with seriousness and fairness. Future labor agreements should link compensation growth to productivity gains, modernized work rules, greater managerial flexibility and sane benefits.
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Fourth, it should focus relentlessly on the visible quality of daily life. Clean streets, safer public spaces, dependable transit, responsive city services and orderly neighborhoods are not superficial concerns. They are part of the city’s competitive position.
New York is still one of the world’s great cities. But as ancient Rome demonstrated, greatness is not self-executing. A city can live for a long time on inherited prestige, accumulated capital and memories of better management. Eventually, however, reality intrudes. If government overregulates housing, mismanages budgets, inflates payroll costs and delivers declining performance, people will leave.
And they have.
The lesson is not that New York is doomed. It is that New York must rediscover a truth it once understood well: prosperity does not come from squeezing the productive, subsidizing dysfunction and governing through inertia. It comes from freedom to build, discipline in spending, competence in management and respect for the taxpayers and families who make the city possible.