Money Migration:

Incomes, Migration, and Gentrification in the Hudson Valley during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The movement of households throughout the State of New York during the Covid-19 pandemic also shifted the geographic distribution of incomes in the Hudson Valley.

Relatively high-earning households from the New York City metropolitan area brought more than $1 billion in gross incomes as they moved into communities north of Interstate 84, accelerating gentrification in rural towns and small cities. At the same time, counties in the lower Hudson Valley lost more gross income to migration than they gained, as people sought less expensive places to live.

Some of these trends were well established for years, but the frenzy of movement during the pandemic changed the pace and scale of migration and its effects on the Hudson Valley. For several of our counties – Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Sullivan and Ulster – the annual amount of income that moved into their communities increased by as much as tenfold compared to the pre-pandemic baseline.

Pattern’s analysis in this report, Money Migration, is based on five years of data published by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The data utilize tax returns to measure the movement of people and their adjusted gross incomes (AGI) county to county, and state to state. Pattern used these data previously to report on the number of people who moved into and out of the Hudson Valley during the pandemic, including a net gain of approximately 60,000 people from New York City who moved north into our region