If you're considering leaving New York City for a less populated area, but don't want to move too far away from the Big Apple, there are plenty of other cities in New York State that are a great place to move to after the novel coronavirus pandemic.
We recently created an overall ranking of best US cities to live in after the pandemic based on several measures that may influence someone's decision about where to move to next. These measures include the pre-coronavirus unemployment rate, ability to work from home, population density, housing affordability, monthly housing costs, cost of living, average travel time to work, total elementary- and secondary-school spending per student, and share of residents age 25 and over who have at least a bachelor's degree.
We included the share of residents who have at least a bachelor's degree and a metro area's population density because recent research by Moody's Analytics found that less densely populated places with a larger share of jobs requiring more education may recover earlier than other cities from the economic impact of the pandemic.
After collecting our metrics, each measure was rescaled to a uniform z-score so that we could add the values together to get a final overall index for each metro area.
You can read more about our method and sources here.
In our overall list, many of the cities at the top of the list are in the Midwest, so we decided to take a more regional focus and look at cities located in the Northeast region of the US as defined by the Census Bureau. In this smaller list, the top three cities were all in New York State.
It's worth noting that some of these cities are home to big colleges and universities, and their economies have been negatively impacted from schools moving to remote learning and temporarily closing their campuses.
For instance, Ithaca placed second on our list of Northeastern cities, but its nature as a college town could hamper its economy because of a lack of students and visitors during the outbreak. Using 2017-2018 fiscal year data from the labor-market analytics company EMSI, The Wall Street Journal found that Cornell University in Ithaca generates $1.8 billion from university operations, $60 million from student spending, and $50 million from visitor spending.
Read on to find out the 21 best cities in the Northeast of the US to move to after the coronavirus: