Good morning. It's Thursday. We'll look at why more than 1,400 millionaires left New York in 2021, continuing an exodus that heated up in the pandemic year of 2020. We'll also find out where New York's first offshore wind power farm is taking shape. Hint: Not in New York. |
 | | Karsten Moran for The New York Times |
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New state figures show that millionaire taxpayers continued to leave in 2021, although the numbers were down somewhat from 2020. Some 1,453 millionaire taxpayers packed up and said goodbye to New York in 2021, 520 fewer than departed in 2020. The 2020 total was nearly three times more than in 2019. And it represented roughly 5 percent of millionaire taxpayers, while only about 3 percent of all taxpayers moved away. |
The 1,453 departures in 2021 did not create a millionaire shortage. New York State still had more than 80,000 millionaire taxpayers in 2021, up from about 70,000 in 2020. |
Did that mean the rich were getting richer? |
"That's an understatement," said James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. "They're getting a lot richer." |
The number of millionaire tax filers jumped 21 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance, with 14,678 taxpayers falling into the tax millionaire category for the first time in 2021. |
The state figures indicated that the richest millionaires — those with incomes above $25 million — relocated at an increasing rate in 2021. Slightly more than 8 percent of them left New York, up from just under 6 percent in 2021. |
The exodus among the less-wealthy rich — millionaires making only $5 million to $25 million a year — dropped slightly from 2020 to 2022, to about 5.8 percent. |
New Yorkers who moved to another state were most likely to choose New Jersey, Internal Revenue Service data showed, according to the Taxation and Finance department. More than 80,000 New York taxpayers at all income levels moved there in 2019-20, while nearly 40,000 New Jerseyans changed their addresses to New York. Florida was second on the list of places New York taxpayers moved to, followed by Connecticut. |
The department said that millionaires tend to leave New York as they get older, especially between the ages of 45 and 64. Florida was the top destination for those who left between 65 and 84. |
Parrott said that some of his counterparts who analyze fiscal and economic trends maintain that the trend is not entirely new. The explanation sounds like the line from "New York, New York": "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere." |
"New York, and New York City in particular, attract a lot of ambitious people who come to make their fortunes," he said. "Those who do well stay until they're further along, not necessarily retirement age but when they're reached some level of success and have more options in life." But the pattern "looks elevated due to the pandemic," he said. |
He said that 2020 and 2021 had been "stupendous years for high earners," even as his own research showed that the pandemic had been "more polarizing than anything you could imagine." It hit hardest among workers who are paid by the hour and could not do their jobs in 2020 and 2021, while high-income employees in finance and technology could work from anywhere. They did well. The average bonus in the securities industry was a record $257,000 per employee in 2021, up 20 percent from 2020, according to the state comptroller's office. |
"The pandemic was in effect the test case for some people, whether you could live and work outside of New York," said Andrew Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit watchdog group. "That's why policymakers have to think, on the tax side, whether our nation-leading taxes are going to drive people out of the state or be a barrier for people coming to the state." |
Light rain is likely, mostly early, with temps near the upper 40s. The evening is mostly cloudy, with temps dropping to around the mid-30s. |
In effect until March 7 (Purim). |
 | | Johnny Milano for The New York Times |
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Where New York's first wind power farm is taking shape |
 | | James Estrin/The New York Times |
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New York's first offshore wind power farm, an array of turbines in the Atlantic Ocean to harness wind currents for electricity, is taking shape. |
Important pieces of the project — components for the huge turbines, along with a huge catamaran that will carry technicians out to install and maintain them off Long Island — are being built 150 miles away, in factories on the Rhode Island coast. |
Rhode Island had the manufacturing capacity after building what is so far the only offshore wind farm generating electricity for consumers in this country: the five-turbine, six-year-old Block Island Wind Farm. My colleague Patrick McGeehan writes that it is the model on which many larger hopes have been pinned. It can generate 30 megawatts of power. |
The wind farm for New York, South Fork Wind, is to produce about 132 megawatts, enough to power about 70,000 homes. It is scheduled to go into operation later this year. |
South Fork is a joint venture of Orsted, a Danish company that is one of the world's largest offshore wind-farm developers, and Eversource, a utility with more than 3.6 million customers in New England (none in Rhode Island). Orsted has set up operations on the Providence waterfront to make components for three proposed wind farms. |
The catamaran is being welded together about 13 miles away, in Warren, R.I. Other Rhode Island shipyards are busy building more boats to transfer crews to South Fork and other offshore sites. |
"There's really not enough qualified yards in New York and New Jersey" to build such craft, said Josh Diedrich, the managing director of WindServe Marine, the Staten Island-based wind division of Reinauer Transportation. |
Because space at deepwater ports along the East Coast is at a premium, the components for the South Fork turbines will be delivered to the State Pier in New London, Conn., where more than 150 workers are scrambling to finish a $255 million project for a final assembly site for the turbines, including blades more than 300 feet long. The facility is being paid for by Connecticut and the joint venture between Orsted and Eversource. |
Once the turbines have been put together, they will be lifted onto barges, hauled into the Atlantic and set up to generate high-voltage electricity that will be sent to New York through 60 miles of cables. |
I was eating ice cream with a friend in Washington Square Park on a nice summer day. The park was filled with people, and every bench in the shade was taken. |
After a while, we found a place to sit, and eventually the bench next to us opened up as well. |
A man holding a picnic basket approached us and asked whether he could sit on the empty bench. He said people were very protective of their personal space and that was why he was asking. |
We were confused but said yes and returned to our conversation. |
A few minutes later, I looked over. The man had opened the picnic basket and inside it was a pigeon! |
My friend and I just laughed and continued talking. |
In Tuesday's look at fires involving lithium-ion batteries, we mentioned that a 67-year-old woman had been trapped in a fire in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and was in critical condition. She died later that day, the Fire Department said on Wednesday. |
| Melissa Guerrero, Jay Root and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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