Saying so long to the Empire State’s high taxes, stagnant economy and problematic schools isn’t just for rich white folks anymore.
A New York Times story underscores what was suggested in both last year’s raw Census numbers and a poll of young people in the state last month — and which has been anecdotally obvious for years.
That is, the reason the city’s population barely grew over the last decade is that many longtime residents — particularly from the black community — have decamped for more economically favorable climes.
As the Times reports, about 17 percent of the African-Americans who headed to Atlanta and other southern destinations over the last decade came from New York — the most of any state.
Of 44,474 who left the state in 2009 alone, more than half went to the South, drawn to Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. It’s inter-generational, too, with younger African-Americans opting to raise families in Atlanta rather than middle-class black enclaves in, say, Queens.
In other words, these New Yorkers are making some of the same decisions that their white counterparts have been making for decades — and are continuing to make.
In May, a NY1/YNN-Marist survey found that 36 percent of residents under 30 — and a quarter of all New Yorkers — are planning to leave New York state, the vast majority citing taxes, living costs or a lack of job opportunities.
Perhaps not all black New Yorkers are leaving for those exact same reasons. Many have familial connections to the South going back decades, extending to the mid-20th-century Great Migration that sent blacks fleeing Jim Crow to jobs in the North.
But, as the Times notes, now the South is being seen as more inviting in terms of job opportunities and a generally less expensive place in which to live.
One can only hope that Gov. Cuomo — who saw the importance of passing a no-tax-hike budget this year — figures out how to overcome his biggest challenge.
After decades of poor decisions by his predecessors, too many New Yorkers no longer believe their state offers real economic opportunity.
So they leave. Who’s to blame them?