The city gained about 910,000 people between the 1970 and 2020 censuses. This map shows where they crowded in, decade by decade, across the 59 community districts — and where the emptying-out of the 1970s has never been made back. Press play, switch to the change view to compare every decade against 1970, or try experienced density — the census-tract density the typical resident lives at, available for 2000 through 2020.
The Bronx burned out first and deepest. Hunts Point and Longwood held 99,493 people in 1970 and 34,399 in 1980 — a loss of two-thirds of the district in one decade. Morrisania and Crotona Park East fell from 150,636 to 53,635 over the same ten years. Both have been refilling ever since, and both remain far below where they started: Hunts Point–Longwood was still 45% less dense in 2020 than in 1970.
Harlem and Brownsville followed the same arc. Central Harlem lost more than a third of its people between 1970 and 1990, then regained ground for three straight decades. It was still 18% less dense in 2020 than in 1970.
The densest district in the 50-year record is today's Upper East Side. The Upper East Side reached 117,130 people per square mile in 2020 — higher than any district in any census year in the series.
Density fell in brownstone Brooklyn even as demand soared. Park Slope and Carroll Gardens hold 18% fewer people per square mile than in 1970 — the same townhouses, occupied by smaller households.
The typical resident lives at about twice the citywide density. The New York University Furman Center's "experienced density" is the median census-tract density among a city's residents — for every person, take the density of their own tract, then find the middle. Because parks, industrial land and commercial blocks drag district-wide averages down, the typical New Yorker's tract runs far denser than the citywide figure: about 58,500 people per square mile in 2020, against a raw citywide density of about 29,000. The Furman Center found this measure fell from 57,900 in 1970 to 53,400 in 2010; this map's computation puts 2020 back at roughly the 1970 level. Hunts Point–Longwood is the sharpest local case: 24,561 people per square mile district-wide in 2020, but the median resident's tract holds 72,878.
The biggest gains came in Lower Manhattan and on Staten Island's South Shore. Lower Manhattan grew tenfold, from 7,706 people in 1970 to 78,390 in 2020, much of it on land that did not exist in 1970 (Battery Park City is landfill). South Staten Island's Tottenville–Great Kills district more than doubled, from 3,381 to 7,649 people per square mile — suburban tract building, not towers.
Source: New York City Population By Community Districts (Department of City Planning, via NYC Open Data), decennial censuses 1970–2010; DCP 2020 Census core geographies workbook, community district tabulations, 2020 census; Community Districts boundaries (water areas excluded, NYC Open Data). All accessed Aug. 28, 2026. Density uses each district's present-day land area, including parks inside district lines; gray areas are parks and airports that belong to no community district. The experienced-density view applies the definition in the NYU Furman Center's "Focus on Density in New York City" (2015) to tract populations from the census and DCP and tract land areas from Census Bureau gazetteer files. Address search uses the Department of City Planning's GeoSearch geocoder. Full methodology, including what this series can and cannot say.