ABSTRACT
Data on population, employment, income, poverty, and housing are used to highlight the severe problems experienced by all the major north-eastern urban areas. Population grew at both the metropolitan and central city levels in the 1980s, but the 1990 US Census found New York City with a population of 7.32 million, which is 572,000 fewer than its population in 1970. Employment in the metropolitan area increased by 13.7 percent in the 1980s as population increased by only 3.3 percent. The economic transformation of metropolitan New York involved a sharp reduction in employment in manufacturing, rapid increase in the demand for health care and other professional services, and a large shift to financial and business services. The two decades from 1970 to 1990 were a time of slow population growth in most of the northern urban areas and population loss in the central cities.
