New York has long had an issue with foreclosure, and recent skyrocketing prices have only increased the problem. Notice a lot of empty homes in your neighborhood? This may be a bit hard to believe with the housing market so hot right now. But not all these homes are falling apart. Other factors, such as a house remaining on the market for an extended period, or its being used as a vacation home are other things to consider.

So, how many vacant homes are there in New York state?

The Data

LendingTree used the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau to come up with the numbers. Places with higher vacancy rates are not always less expensive, as many of us know living here in New York. According to the study, Florida has the highest vacancy rate in the country at 1,680,844.

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Empty House Across New York

According to LendingTree, New York state has 955,437 empty homes.

This makes it 4th in the nation for vacancies, only behind Florida, California, and Texas. However, if you look at New York's overall vacancy rate, which divides the number of vacant households by the total number of households in a state, the figures weren't quite as jarring. New York ranked 28th in the country, with a vacancy rate of 11.31%. The state has 7,488,719 currently occupied units, according to these figures.

The national average is around 11.66%, which places New York slightly below. Vermont had the highest rate at 22.86%.

Are People Still Fleeing New York?

We've known that residents have been moving away from New York state for some time. Everything from poor job growth outside of New York City, to high taxes, to the cold winters have been blamed in the past. But now add a global pandemic and it appears that even more residents are fleeing. New York was especially hard hit by COVID-19 in the early months of 2020, and it looks like it's taken its toll.

According to numbers released by the US Census Bureau in late 2021, the Empire State lost 319,020 people from July 2020 to July 2021. That's quite a significant number that outnumbers the combined population drop in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, Louisiana, the District of Columbia, Michigan, and Ohio. That's big.

What Does This Mean?

That's quite a jump since even just last year. Estimates from the Census Bureau say 126,355 residents left New York between July 2019 and July 2020. Spectrum News says that New York will lose a congressional seat in 2022 in the House of Representatives. Some former New York residents who have worked from home since the early days of COVID chose to move to smaller areas in New England or other surrounding states. Now, with a spike in COVID cases brought on by the Omicron variant across New York, we could see the population continue to drop in the next year or so.

New York's population has been steadily dropping since 2010. According to the numbers from the Empire Center for Public Policy, the state has lost 1,379,210 residents between 2010 and 2019, and that's not even figuring in the latest numbers. One can only imagine what those numbers will look like in a few more years.

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