Brooklyn's Population Growth Equivalent Of Syracuse Moving In

BROOKLYN, NY — Brooklyn's population growth since 2010 is the equivalent of the entire city of Syracuse moving in, census figures show.

The U.S. Census Bureau's 2017 numbers show that 144,000 new people moved to the borough since 2010. Last year, 2,648,771 people called the borough home, according to the data. The number makes Kings County the eighth most populist in the country, ahead of places like Los Angeles and Chicago.

The city as a whole had a 5.5 percent increase in the population, with 448,000 new people. The Bronx had the highest population growth in the state with a 6.2 percent increase, according to an analysis of the numbers by the city's Department of City Planning.

The population boom since 2010 was largely caused by more people being born in the city than dying, though the numbers were lowered because a growing number of residents are moving away, according to city planning.

The majority of people leaving had lived in Brooklyn, followed by Manhattan and Queens. They moved to other parts of the country, city planning said. The New York Post reported last year that more than 1 million people moved out of the city since 2010 to cities with warmer climates, cheaper taxes and less corruption.

From 2016 to 2017, Brooklyn lost about 2,088 people according to the preliminary data, but experts warn those numbers can be misleading.

Lyman Stone, an advisor at Demographic Intelligence which provides birth and marriage forecasts, wrote that the Census' estimates between full counts often get revised and can have a large change in the numbers.

"It’s not actually as if they went out and knocked on doors or something," Stone wrote in December. "That only happens in Decennial Census years. So these estimates are a best guess, but do nonetheless have error rates.

"These revisions can be very large, especially in years where Census changes their estimation methodology in a meaningful way, as they did last year," he added.

Stone added that comparisons to the last full-count, 2010, were better to draw conclusions from.

The Department of City Planning said that while the city had a huge population growth since 2010, it has been slowing down every year.

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