For decades, New York sold itself with a jingle. These days, the more common refrain may be a moving truck backing out of a driveway.
Writing in American Thinker, Silvio Canto, Jr. points to a new Empire Center for Public Policy survey of 600 New York state residents that found 33% are considering leaving the state, while another 30% say they know someone who might. The numbers, he argues, mark a shift in how people talk about New York β from a place you move to, to a place you move away from.
It’s not a fringe sentiment. Roughly one in three respondents is actively weighing an exit, and the reasons they give are strikingly practical.
Taxes First, Cost of Living Second
Asked what is driving them out, 30% of respondents named taxes as the single biggest factor. The cost of living came in second at 25%. Together, those two answers account for more than half of the pushback against staying.
Politics and governance drew 15%, followed by safety at 6% and housing affordability at 6%. The ranking is notable for what it puts first: not crime, not weather, not any single quality-of-life grievance, but the tax burden and the price of simply living there.
Canto, who writes from Texas, frames the survey as confirmation of what he hears from transplants. Former New Yorkers, he says, describe the state as “unaffordable” and tell him they don’t regret leaving β a message he says arrives not just from retirees but from young people looking for a future and from families moved by their employers.
Nearly a Million Gone Since 2021
The survey numbers land against a longer trend. According to Canto, New York state has lost close to a million residents since Governor Kathy Hochul took office in 2021, with critics pointing to her tax and spending policies as a driver of the outflow.
New York City’s own numbers reinforce the pattern. Gotham lost 114,000 residents in 2025, and a Redfin analysis cited by Canto found that Gen Zers are leaving the city faster than any other metro area in the country. The people heading for the exits, in other words, aren’t only those at the end of their careers β they’re the ones the state would need to replace them.
Canto’s read is that the departures are already compounding. People want out, he writes, and many are already out.
The Texas Contrast
Canto’s vantage point is instructive. He lives in Texas, a state that has become a landing spot for people leaving higher-tax states, and he describes hearing the same story over and over from both New Yorkers and Californians.
The common thread, as he tells it, is a state that taxes heavily and regulates broadly, until businesses can’t absorb the fees and families can’t justify the math. He recalls a conversation with a man who moved from Los Angeles to Texas and showed him a California pay stub β the bottom line, Canto says, was simply bigger in Texas.
That comparison is the crux of his argument: the decision to leave is rarely ideological in the moment. It’s arithmetic.
Still, Canto doesn’t treat the influx as an uncomplicated win. He says he is glad to see new taxpayers and job creators arrive in Texas, but the larger picture saddens him. States that once drew people in, he writes, have become inhospitable places to live, raise a family, or start a business β a development he attributes to what he calls excessive liberalism.
An Exit That Feeds Itself
There is a self-reinforcing quality to the problem the survey describes. When high earners leave, the remaining tax base has to carry more, and the pressure that pushed people out in the first place can intensify for those who stay. Housing affordability, cited by 6% as a leading concern, sits downstream of a long supply crunch β and it is already competing with groceries and taxes for a place in household budgets.
The survey also hints at a second-order effect that is harder to measure. Three in ten respondents know someone considering a move, which means the calculation isn’t confined to the people filling out the questionnaire. It is a conversation happening at kitchen tables, in break rooms, and in group chats β the kind of thing that can turn individual decisions into a broader pattern.
Canto’s prescription is blunt: fix New York and keep your productive people home. He offers no policy blueprint, but the survey data suggests where the pressure points are. Taxes and the cost of living dominate the list of grievances by a wide margin, while governance, safety, and housing trail well behind. Any serious response would have to start there.
For now, the state’s challenge is less about marketing than about math. The old campaign sold New York on love. The new numbers suggest that for a third of residents, affection is losing out to the cost of staying.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/i-left-new-york-is-the-new-refrain/