Why New York’s City Workers Are Quitting in Droves

New York City, the largest municipal employer in the country, is facing an exodus of city workers that has led to a surge in job vacancies and difficulties delivering basic municipal services.

The wave of departures has included health care workers, parks employees, police officers and child protective service workers. Some are high-ranking officials with decades of experience; others are younger employees, some of whom bypassed higher-paying private sector jobs because they wanted to make a difference.

The city’s overall job vacancy rate was 7.7 percent as of March — five times higher than in recent years, according to the most recent data from the Citizens Budget Commission.

The labor shortage has affected a wide array of city agencies. Nearly 25 percent of jobs at the Buildings Department remain empty. Resignations and retirements from the Police Department are the highest they have been in nearly two decades.

A critical New York City inspection team, which responds to violations and complaints about lead paint, mold, heat and hot water, has been hampered by a severe staffing shortage, with 140 positions waiting to be filled.

A similar labor shortfall has caused the team’s agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, to tell some multifamily homeowners seeking tax exemptions that it will take up to a year to have a project manager assigned to their application because of “limited staff capacity and a significant backlog of projects.”

Interviews with nearly 20 current and former city workers suggest several key reasons behind the city worker shortage: a bureaucratic and lethargic hiring process that makes it hard to quickly fill vacancies; a job market that, in many cases, offers more lucrative and more flexible private-sector options; a pandemic-era hiring freeze that was largely lifted by November, according to the state comptroller’s office; and, according to the city, a rule that an agency can only hire one worker after two have left.

Many also cited Mayor Eric Adams’s campaign to compel city workers to return to the office full time, a stance that was reinforced in late May. “While hybrid schedules have become more common in the private sector, the mayor firmly believes that the city needs its workers to report to work every day in person,” Frank Carone, the mayor’s chief of staff, wrote in a memo to staff.

Some turnover in the city work force is to be expected when a new mayor enters City Hall, as Mr. Adams did in January. But much of that change is typically seen at the highest levels of government, and not as widespread as it has been this year.

At the end of March, the city had 446 fewer municipal employees than it had at the start of the month, according to previously unreported data acquired via a Freedom of Information request. In the previous month, the city had a net loss of 581 employees.

The 7.7 percent staffing vacancy rate — the percent of budgeted positions that remain vacant — vastly exceeds the 1.5 percent figure in March 2019 and in March 2020, as well as the 1.2 percent in March 2014, three months after Bill de Blasio became mayor.

The staffing crisis is part of a national trend: As…