#The NYC exodus that de Blasio refuses to see

Mayor de Blasio released his new, bigger-than-ever city budget this week pretending that federal aid would make up for City Hall’s losses thanks to the pandemic. And, worse than that delusion, he still hasn’t faced up to how his policies had New York shrinking long before the pandemic even began.

That’s right: The mass exodus from the city dates to at least 2018; the flight since then is just adding to New York’s woes.

The Health Department’s 2018 Vital Statistics report on health outcomes showed that the Big Apple’s population dropped by 223,950 residents, or 2.6 percent, between 2017 and 2018 — the city’s biggest one-year population decline since the 1970s.

That’s before the 2020 crime spike and the pandemic. Hard numbers on how many have left since then won’t be available for a long time, but we do know that high-end employers are looking to move even more jobs out of New York, while some significant share of the millions of jobs that have gone “temporarily” remote will wind up permanently gone.

Count it all as one more reason New York’s next mayor needs to abandon de Blasio policies across the board, or Gotham’s future will be grim indeed.