NYC Housing Wealth Exodus Only In Headlines and Hearsay

November 4, 2025

Time to read [7 minutes]

Takeways

  • High-profile articles shamelessly exaggerated outbound migration of wealthy New Yorkers by misinterpreting polls
  • The claimed impact of Mamdani’s election is not based on existing empirical evidence but on viral, anecdotal broker stories.
  • Actual market indicators and past experience, such as sales and rental trends, do not support predictions of a post-mayoral-election mass exodus.

The false narrative about the wealthy fleeing New York City for the suburbs and Florida after Mamdani, the highly polarizing candidate, is elected mayor today is all so dumb. A vetted answer rests with the abundance of housing-related data. The narrative has been an unforced error in journalism or institutions pretending to represent journalism. As Warren Buffett once said, “Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.” Why is all the “evidence” on the “fleeing the city” narratives based on anecdotal conversations with real estate agents in submarkets where the New York City wealthy might move, when there is actual data? So far, all the real estate articles on the NYC exodus start with something like, “Our phones have been ringing off the hook!” The “fleeing the city” narrative all began with a poll…

And The Poll Wasn’t The Issue – It Was The Interpretation

I have long been a fan of Philip Bump, a former Washington Post columnist—especially his past visualization column, “how to read this chart.” Here’s his take on the poll and the pollsters is incredibly clarifying: No, 1 in 11 New Yorkers will not move if Mamdani wins. Here are a couple of tidbits:

  • J.L. Partners, a B/C rated pollster, conducted a 1,000-person poll, an adequate sample size
  • 1/5 of Staten Islanders said they would leave NYC!

Right now, politics, whether from NYC or Washington, DC, is almost entirely fear-based. But when you really sit down and think about it, will 20% actually move out of Staten Island? Will those 20% sell their homes, pack up, and move to Florida? Wouldn’t we expect prices to collapse because someone has to buy those homes if the seller is “fleeing.” Doesn’t that seem a little extreme? If you hate the likely mayoral winner (I’m not a resident and therefore can’t vote in this particular election), and you’re just answering a poll, isn’t it really easy to just exclaim “I’m leaving!” than physically move somewhere else? I’m supplementing existing real estate data with logic and common sense.

Bump breaks the polling data down further: The “nearly a million” is actually nearly 765,000 citizens (which is a heck of a rounding up!) or 9 percent of the city’s population. “That means that about 90 people told J.L. Partners they would absolutely, no-question move if Mamdani wins and that became “nearly a million” in New-York-Postese.” And that became screaming headlines everywhere, with real estate brokers in Florida and the NYC suburbs shouting, “The phones are ringing off the hook!!!”

With a city of 8.4 million people, the idea of 1 million people physically moving out of NYC because of the new mayor would be devastating. Housing prices should already be collapsing since Mamdani became a household name back in July, and listing inventory should be soaring! Rents should be plummeting! Yet the opposite is occurring.

The wealthy are definitely more mobile. Let’s look at the last exodus – COVID 2020:

Source: New York Times

Back during the COVID lockdown, 420,000 NYC residents moved to the suburbs or outside the region because there was a tangible fear that their lives were in danger – remember those refrigeration units holding corpses? Our data during that period showed that housing sales plummeted by approximately 50% in Manhattan, and much of the exodus was comprised of renters or wealthy buyers buying second homes in the East End of Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Would a Mamdani election cause twice as much migration as the global pandemic? Good grief.

Articles That Relied On The J.L. Partners Poll

These are the only large media outlets that I found that relied on the JL Partners poll or the original Daily Mail article that relied on the poll:

We’ve Seen This Before

Remember this headline back in 2020? New York City is dead forever. The article went viral and was written by a comedy club owner and former hedge-fund manager. The city housing market subsequently boomed. Apparently we love to be stressed out for no reason.

Crains Believes In Evidence-Based Research

This publication is especially near and dear to my heart since they used empirical evidence – housing data – to make their point.

The Real Deal Used It For Marketing

I appreciate, subscribe to, and respect The Real Deal and its staff, which has always been an essential go-to publication in the real estate industry during my career in NYC. I was surprised to see the “fleeing the city” narrative appear in a recent event Florida marketing effort. Of course, marketing is different than journalism.

Final Thoughts

This analysis is not me taking a position on the incoming mayor. It is a condemnation of an anecdotal-based narrative claiming that wealthy New Yorkers will flee to the NYC suburbs and Florida if Mamdani is elected mayor. The narrative ignores substantial housing-related data, such as rising sales, prices, and rents, including the high-end. The narrative also ignores a couple of years of Wall Street record or near-record compensation, which skews towards the wealthy end of housing demand. The narrative also ignores the existing performance of US high-end housing markets and the use of cash and alternative financing, which has been well-documented, even though housing is in a recession. But instead, the narrative relies on sensationalist interpretation of polling numbers and fear-based politicking. The data from actual moments of crisis, such as COVID, bear little resemblance to the current alarmist panic, and we are currently in a data blackout due to the government shutdown. Shouldn’t we inherently crave actual data even more?

This is all so dumb.

The Actual Final Thought – How this moment is best explained.

Home Value Lock, Powered By StreetMatrix

The StreetMatrix housing index platform that we have created powers the Home Value Lock product that Josh Altman talked about today. We are fortunate to have Josh join our team.

StreetMatrix Arrives In California

Here’s the latest newsletter with links to all our resources. More specifics on this effort to come!

[Podcast] What It Means With Jonathan Miller

The How Retail Follows, Not Fuels, Housing episode is just a click away. The podcast feeds can be found here:

Apple (Douglas Elliman feed)   Soundcloud  Youtube

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