A statistical snapshot of the Lower Manhattan economy, prepared by the Downtown Alliance for Community Board 1 (CB1), paints a picture of a thriving local nexus of commerce and culture.
The Alliance report notes that the Lower Manhattan population of approximately 61,000 inhabits 33,000 households, which translates to the average dwelling serving as home to 1.85 residents.
These people are prodigious earners, with an average household income of $218,000, and an average individual income (for private-sector employees) of $145,000. These wages, coupled with the 242,000 private-sector jobs in Lower Manhattan (plus countless tens of thousands more in the government sector), translated into a local Gross Domestic Product of $62.3 billion in 2013. That means that the economy of the square mile of Lower Manhattan below Chambers Street is roughly equivalent to that of the entire nation of Panama. The knock-on effect of that economic activity yielded a net contribution of $2.4 billion in New York City tax revenues in 2014.
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The humming local economy draws in hundreds of thousands of employees from around New York City, with an average of 3,400 people from each of the neighborhoods around the City’s five boroughs reporting to a job in Lower Manhattan each day.
And the area continues to exert a gravitational tug on people who neither live nor work here, according to a separate report from the Downtown Alliance, released last May. That analysis showed that tourism statistics, which began to look like an invasion more than a decade ago, have now begun to resemble an occupation. The 14.8 million tourists who visited Lower Manhattan in 2016 represented a five percent increase from the previous record, set in 2015. This means, roughly, that the equivalent of 4.6 percent of the population of the United States (or one out of every 22 Americans) walked the streets of Lower Manhattan at some point in 2016. The new report additionally document that Downtown is now home 32 hotels, with 7,000 guest rooms.