Metro

Census records show more people are moving to NYC

The entrances to the Big Apple are now busier than the exits.

For the first time in half a century, more people are moving into the city than moving out, helping to swell the population to a record of 8,336,697, according to Census data released yesterday.

“This is unique,” said Joe Salvo at the Department of City Planning. “We haven’t seen a net inflow in 50 years.”

Mayor Bloomberg pointed to the new figures as evidence his policies are working and attracting newcomers in droves.

“The truth of the matter is people vote with their feet,” Bloomberg said. “All the metrics show this is a great place to live.”

He said the fact that the city now has more arrivals than departures “reverses a trend that has been a fact of life for decades and that a number of pundits have talked about when they predicted the end of New York City.”

The latest Census numbers show that the population grew by 161,564 between April 2010 and July 2012, mostly through a natural increase in births. But there were also 151,431 newcomers who showed up, offset by 139,190 residents who decided to find out if the grass is greener elsewhere.

Small as it was, the 12,241 net difference marked a turning point in what had been decades of out-migration.

Bloomberg noted the city’s overall gain was larger than the population of Hartford, Conn.

Brooklyn led the galloping growth, adding 60,935 residents, or 2.4 percent.

Credit the hipster hordes spreading out from Williamsburg and creating rush hours on the L train that last all day.

“There’s this big group of largely nonfamily households that have formed in western Brooklyn, and it’s pushing east,” explained Salvano.

City officials cautioned that the new numbers partly reflect an undercount of about 65,000 in Brooklyn and Queens in 2010. Still, the trend was all up. Between 2000 and 2010, the city added about 17,000 people a year. In the last two years, that number has exploded to 74,000 annually.

Janice Madden, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, said New York had pulled off an astonishing transformation from a “production city” in the 1950s to one centered on “consumption” and services today.

She described the pace of growth as “amazing.”

But that growth has come at a price. The official housing-vacancy rate is 3.12 percent, making the hunt for an apartment a nightmare. Meanwhile, the subways handled a record number of 1.65 billion passengers last year, making them more crowded than ever.

Julie Menin, a candidate for Manhattan borough president and a former community board chair in lower Manhattan, said the public school that opened across from City Hall just two years ago is already full.

“You can see the growth. You can feel the growth,” she said. “It’s really incredible.”