New York, New York. So nice they say it twice. But it’s apparently not nice enough anymore for people to want to stick around. The NY Post highlights some recent population figures which indicate that a growing number of Gotham residents (that would be rapidly growing) either don’t want to live there anymore or simply can’t afford to. In either case, there’s a bit of an exodus going on and the Big Apple is losing residents faster than any other major metropolitan area in the country.

More people are leaving the New York region than any other major metropolitan area in the country.

More than 1 million people moved out of the New York area to other parts of the country since 2010, a rate of 4.4 percent — the highest negative net migration rate among the nation’s large population centers, US Census records show.

The number of people leaving the region — which includes parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, the lower Hudson Valley and Long Island — in one year swelled from 187,034 in 2015 to 223,423 in 2016, while the number of international immigrants settling in the tristate area dwindled from 181,551 to 160,324 over the same period, records show.

More than a million people in six years is not normal ebb and flow. To be fair, we should emphasize the fact that this isn’t just New York City… it includes the outlying areas of New Jersey and the inner reach of Long Island. It also doesn’t include the rest of New York State. (You know… the unfashionable, more rural upstate region where I live.)

Part of it is certainly the cost of living and that’s what the Post article focuses on primarily. When the economy improves, rent and mortgage costs skyrocket faster in that town than almost anywhere else and it’s already one of the most expensive places in the country to live. According to Fortune Magazine last December, the average price of an apartment in the Big Apple is now over two million dollars. Yes, you read that correctly… that’s for an apartment. By contrast, a bit more than five hours away to the northwest, a three bedroom colonial with a fenced in yard a couple of blocks down the hill from me sold for $85K this winter. If you could plunk that property down in the middle of Manhattan it would probably cost at least $25M.

But that’s not the only factor. Another cost of continuing to elect Democrats for generations is that New York State is one of the most heavily taxed states in the nation and the city is even worse. Progressive policies have led to some of the most invasive regulations and childish rules imaginable. (Though that’s something the true, diehard liberal progressives shouldn’t be complaining about.) All in all, if you want to live in New York City you’d better like a lot of government in your life and be prepared to fund it out of your paycheck every week at a steep clip.

In any event, you can add all of those factors up and it’s no wonder that people are fleeing. At this point we can only hope that the trend continues until the upstate population outnumbers them and we can get the state government back under control. Well… we can dream, anyway.