Nearly 30,000 People Fled Astoria, LIC In 2020, Study Finds

ASTORIA/LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — Nearly 30,000 people fled Astoria and Long Island City amid the pandemic, according to a new study by the global real estate firm CBRE.

The study, which looked at 29 million change-of-address requests filed with the U.S. Postal Service last year provided ZIP code-based insights into which neighborhoods across the country saw the most people leave — and where those residents relocated to.

New York City was already shrinking before 2020, and once it became a national epicenter of the pandemic residents began to flee in droves — more people moved out of New York City than almost any other city in the U.S. last year, second only to San Francisco, the study found.

Many of those who moved headed to Sun Belt cities like Austin and Charlotte, which gained new residents according to the study.

Over 150,000 people moved out of Queens in 2020, a 10 percent increase from the year before, the study found. (The study doesn’t include ZIP codes with fewer than 10,000 individuals, so data is missing from some of the borough’s neighborhoods.)

Nearly 20 percent of those who left the borough lived in the neighborhoods of Astoria and Long Island City, according to the study.

Across the area’s six ZIP codes, more than 29,700 people moved out in 2020, while 20,900 moved in — a net loss of more than 8,800 residents.

While the neighborhood’s net-loss is less than some densely-populated Manhattan ZIP codes — like Harlem and the Upper East Side, which saw a net loss of more than 11,000 residents each — it’s a far greater exodus than the previous year, when only 2,800 people moved away.

Here is the 2020 move-out data for each Astoria/Long Island ZIP code:

11101 — Long Island City: 6,412 move-ins, 8,977 move-outs — net loss of 2,565 residents, or 61 per 1,000 people
11109 — Long Island City: 1,460 move-ins, 1,866 move-outs — net loss of 406 residents, or 60 per 1,000 people
11102 — Astoria: 3,288 move-ins, 4,797 move-outs — net loss of 1,509 residents, or 27 per 1,000 people
11103 — Astoria: 3,411 move-ins, 4,965 move-outs — net loss of 1,554 residents, or 19 per 1,000 people
11105 — Astoria: 3,143 move-ins, 4,341 move-outs — net loss of 1,198 residents, or 18 per 1,000 people
11106 — Astoria: 3,220 move-ins, 4,820 move-outs — net loss of 1,600 residents, or 23 per 1,000 people

Over one-third of those who left specifically moved from ZIP codes 11101 and 11109 in Long Island City.

This exodus matches the study’s findings that most people who moved last year were affluent young adults who had no children and were able to work remotely — according to census data looking at demographics and economics by ZIP code a majority of the people living in those Long Island ZIP codes are between the ages of 25 and 44, and some earn a median family income of up to three-times the city-wide average.

The study concludes that this “outflow from urban areas likely will subside as normal life resumes and lower rents lure back some who had moved out,” which appears to be true of New York City: Manhattan rent prices, which fell precipitously during the pandemic exodus, have shown signs of rebounding in recent months, suggesting that demand for urban living has begun to rise again.