Demographic history of New York City

Based on Wikipedia: Demographic history of New York City

The City That Reinvented Itself

In 1900, more than ninety-seven percent of Manhattan's residents were white. By 2020, that figure had dropped to about thirty-four percent across all five boroughs. This is not a story of decline. It's the story of how one city became the most demographically complex place on Earth—a transformation that happened faster and more dramatically than almost anywhere else in human history.

New York City has always been a city of immigrants. But the immigrants kept changing.

The European Century

Before the Second World War, being an immigrant in New York City almost always meant being European. The Irish arrived first in massive waves during the Great Famine of the 1840s, fleeing a catastrophe that would kill roughly one million people and drive another million to emigrate. They crowded into tenements in lower Manhattan, took jobs building the city's infrastructure, and faced discrimination that seems almost quaint today—signs reading "No Irish Need Apply" in shop windows, accusations that their Catholic faith made them loyal to a foreign pope rather than to American democracy.

Then came the Germans. Then the Italians. Then the Jews, fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe.

By 1890, forty-two percent of the city's population had been born in another country. The city was so skeptical of federal census figures that year that it conducted its own police census, which found nearly two hundred thousand more residents than Washington had counted. New York has always believed itself to be bigger and more important than official statistics suggest.

The foreign-born percentage would remain extraordinarily high—above forty percent—until the 1920s brought immigration restrictions. Congress passed quota laws designed explicitly to favor Northern and Western Europeans over everyone else. The laws worked exactly as intended. Immigration slowed to a trickle. By 1970, only eighteen percent of New Yorkers had been born abroad, the lowest point in the city's modern history.

The Great Migration North

While European immigration was being throttled, another demographic transformation was already underway. Black Americans from the South were moving north in unprecedented numbers, part of what historians call the Great Migration—one of the largest internal movements of people in American history.

Between roughly 1910 and 1970, six million Black Americans left the rural South for cities in the North, Midwest, and West. They were fleeing Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and the constant threat of racial violence. They were seeking factory jobs, the right to vote, and something approaching human dignity.

New York City was a primary destination. The Black population that had been a tiny fraction of the city—less than three percent before the First World War—began concentrating in Harlem, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan that had been built for a white middle class that never fully materialized.

What happened next was remarkable. Between the end of World War One and the Great Depression, Harlem became the capital of Black America—the center of a cultural explosion that would reshape American literature, music, and art. The Harlem Renaissance brought us Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. It created a model of urban Black culture that would influence everything from jazz to hip-hop. And it all happened because a real estate boom went bust at exactly the right moment, opening up quality housing to Black renters who had been excluded from most of the city.

By the 1950s, the Black population of New York City had grown to nearly ten percent. It would continue rising, reaching about a quarter of the city by 1980.

The Law That Changed Everything

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act. It abolished the national origins quota system that had favored Europeans for four decades. Johnson, signing the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, declared that it was "not a revolutionary bill" and would "not reshape the structure of our daily lives."

He was spectacularly wrong.

The law took effect in 1968. Within a generation, it had transformed New York City more profoundly than anything since the Irish famine. Immigrants began arriving from places that had previously sent almost no one—from China and Korea, from the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, from India and Pakistan, from Nigeria and Ghana. The city's Asian population, which had been barely measurable in 1900, increased by more than one hundred fifty times over the twentieth century. The Hispanic population grew by a factor of twenty between 1940 and 2010.

Meanwhile, white New Yorkers were leaving. Some moved to the suburbs, part of the postwar exodus that emptied American cities across the country. Others died without replacement as birth rates fell. Between 1950 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white population of New York City dropped by more than sixty percent.

By 2000, immigrants were back to thirty-six percent of the city's population, nearly matching the pre-restriction highs. Today, roughly three million of New York State's immigrants live in the five boroughs. Queens alone is home to residents from more than one hundred different countries.

Five Boroughs, Five Histories

New York City is not one place. It's five counties—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—each with its own demographic trajectory.

Brooklyn, the most populous borough, tells perhaps the most dramatic story. In 1900, more than ninety-eight percent of its residents were white. The Black population was barely one and a half percent. Through the early decades of the century, these numbers barely budged. Even in 1930, more than ninety-seven percent of Brooklyn was white.

Then the dam broke. By 1970, the white population had fallen to seventy-three percent. By 1980, it was fifty-six percent. Today, no racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority in Brooklyn. It's roughly one-third Black, one-third white, one-fifth Hispanic, and one-tenth Asian—a distribution that would have been unimaginable to someone living there in 1920.

Manhattan followed a similar but not identical path. Its white percentage fell from nearly ninety-eight percent in 1900 to around fifty-eight percent by 2010—a smaller relative decline than Brooklyn's, partly because gentrification in recent decades has brought affluent white residents back to neighborhoods that had become predominantly Black or Hispanic.

The Bronx became the primary destination for Hispanic migrants to New York, particularly Puerto Ricans in the mid-twentieth century and later arrivals from the Dominican Republic. It also experienced some of the most severe urban decay in American history during the 1970s, when entire neighborhoods were abandoned and burned. The phrase "the Bronx is burning" entered the American lexicon during the 1977 World Series, when ABC cameras captured buildings on fire near Yankee Stadium.

Queens became the most ethnically diverse urban area in the country, possibly the world. It's where Asian immigrants have concentrated most heavily, creating neighborhoods like Flushing that are essentially Chinese cities transplanted to American soil, complete with dim sum restaurants and traditional medicine shops.

Staten Island remained an outlier. The most suburban and isolated of the boroughs—reachable from Manhattan only by ferry until the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964—it was the only borough to retain a non-Hispanic white majority through the 1980s and beyond. Even today, it remains whiter than the other four boroughs, though it too has diversified considerably.

The Counterintuitive Borough

Manhattan presents a puzzle. In 1900, it had nearly two million residents. In 2010, it had about one and a half million. It's the only borough that actually shrank over the century.

How does the most famous urban center in America lose population while the city around it more than doubles in size?

The answer involves the automobile, the elevator, and changing ideas about how people should live. As transportation improved, New Yorkers who could afford to moved outward—first to Brooklyn and the Bronx, then to Queens, then to the suburbs beyond the city limits entirely. The tenements that had packed dozens of families into single buildings were torn down and replaced with lower-density housing or commercial space. Office towers rose where apartment buildings had stood.

Manhattan became less residential, more commercial. Fewer people lived there, but more people worked there. The island became a place you commuted to rather than a place you stayed. Only in recent decades has residential population begun to recover, driven by luxury high-rises and the gentrification of formerly industrial neighborhoods.

The Numbers Behind the Narrative

Let's pause on some specific figures, because they help crystallize just how dramatic these changes have been.

In 1900, New York City's Black population was roughly two percent of the total. By 2010, it had grown to about twenty-five percent—an increase of roughly thirty-five times in absolute numbers.

The Asian population grew even faster in relative terms. From essentially zero in 1900 to nearly sixteen percent by 2020—an increase of more than one hundred fifty times.

The Hispanic category didn't exist in early census data, but from 1940 to 2010, that population increased by a factor of twenty. Today, nearly thirty percent of New York City identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

Meanwhile, the white population fell from more than ninety percent to about thirty-four percent. In absolute numbers, there are roughly two million fewer white New Yorkers today than there were in 1950.

These are not gradual shifts. They represent one of the most rapid demographic transformations any major city has ever experienced.

What Immigration Looks Like Today

The modern immigration pattern bears almost no resemblance to the European waves of a century ago. The top sending countries to New York City now include the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, India, and Bangladesh. The largest immigrant communities speak Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Yiddish, Bengali, Haitian Creole, and Korean.

This diversity creates neighborhoods that function almost as separate cities within the city. Jackson Heights in Queens is predominantly South Asian. Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is so heavily Russian and Ukrainian that it's sometimes called "Little Odessa." Washington Heights in Manhattan is a Dominican enclave. Sunset Park in Brooklyn has large Chinese and Mexican populations living in close proximity.

The foreign-born population has stabilized at around thirty-seven percent—nearly as high as it was at the turn of the twentieth century, but composed of entirely different populations. A time traveler from 1910 would recognize almost nothing about who immigrants are today or where they come from.

The Harlem Parallel

The Harlem Renaissance offers an interesting lesson in how demographic concentration can produce cultural explosion. When Black Americans moved to New York in large numbers, they didn't spread evenly across the city. They concentrated in specific neighborhoods, particularly Harlem, creating communities with enough critical mass to support institutions—newspapers, theaters, jazz clubs, literary societies, churches—that wouldn't have been viable if the population had been dispersed.

Something similar has happened with later immigrant waves. Chinatown wasn't just a place where Chinese people happened to live—it was an ecosystem that supported Chinese restaurants, Chinese newspapers, Chinese social clubs, and Chinese-owned businesses that could exist only because enough Chinese customers lived nearby. The same logic applies to Korean churches in Flushing, Dominican bodegas in the Bronx, and Russian bookstores in Brighton Beach.

Demographic concentration enables cultural preservation and innovation simultaneously. It lets immigrant communities maintain their traditions while also creating something new—something distinctly Chinese-American or Dominican-American or Russian-American that exists nowhere else.

The Meaning of Majority-Minority

New York City crossed an important threshold sometime in the 1980s. It became a "majority-minority" city—a place where non-Hispanic whites no longer constituted a majority of the population. The term is somewhat misleading, because it implies that minorities collectively form a coherent group, which they don't. Black, Hispanic, and Asian New Yorkers have different histories, different politics, different economic circumstances, and different relationships with each other and with white residents.

But the term captures something real about how the city has changed. For most of its history, New York was a place where one ethnic group—European Americans of various origins—dominated numerically, economically, and politically. That's no longer true. No single group dominates. Every major ethnic and racial category is a minority.

This creates a different kind of politics than what exists in cities where a clear majority confronts a clear minority. Coalition-building becomes essential. No group can win elections or shape policy alone. Alliances form and dissolve across racial lines depending on the issue. A Black candidate might win with strong support from white liberals and face opposition from Hispanic voters; a white candidate might win with a multiracial coalition that excludes most white voters.

The demographics force pluralism. There's no alternative.

The Persistence of Change

Will these trends continue? Almost certainly, though the specific directions are unpredictable.

The white population will likely continue to shrink as a percentage of the total, simply because white birth rates are lower than other groups' and white residents are older on average. The Asian population seems likely to keep growing, driven by continued immigration from China, India, and other Asian countries. The Hispanic population may grow more slowly than in recent decades, as immigration from Latin America has declined and birth rates among second-generation Hispanics have fallen toward the national average.

But prediction is hazardous. A century ago, no one anticipated the Immigration Act of 1965. No one predicted the Harlem Renaissance. No one foresaw that Brooklyn would go from ninety-eight percent white to majority-minority in less than a century.

What we can say with confidence is that New York City will continue to be shaped by whoever chooses to come there. It always has been. The Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lenape people. The English took it from the Dutch. The Irish and Germans and Italians and Jews transformed it into something the English would barely recognize. Black migrants from the South remade it again. Immigrants from every corner of the globe are remaking it still.

The only constant in New York's demographic history is change itself.

A City of Choices

People sometimes speak of demographic change as something that happens to cities—a natural force like weather or erosion. But New York's transformation resulted from millions of individual choices. Someone in Ireland decided to board a ship. Someone in Alabama decided to buy a train ticket north. Someone in the Dominican Republic decided to apply for a visa.

And millions of other people decided to stay where they were, or to go somewhere else, or to leave New York after arriving. The city's demographics reflect not just who came but who stayed and who left. White New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs in the 1960s were making choices as consequential as immigrants arriving from Asia in the 1980s.

The result is a city that, for all its problems—its inequality, its segregation, its impossible costs—remains the most successful experiment in human diversity ever attempted. More than eight million people speaking hundreds of languages, practicing dozens of religions, tracing their ancestry to every inhabited continent, somehow managing to share subways and sidewalks and schools.

It shouldn't work. By many measures, it doesn't work particularly well. But it keeps going. It keeps changing. And it keeps attracting people who could go anywhere but choose to go there.

That choice, repeated millions of times across four centuries, is the demographic history of New York City.