The Bronx is blooming, Brooklyn is hotter than ever and New York City continues to dominate New York State. That's the basic takeaway from new census data released today. Oh, and also? As Mayor Bloomberg pointed out this morning: "For the first time since 1950, more people are coming to New York City than leaving."

So let's just jump into the stats, shall we? According to the latest figures the city's population last July was 8,336,697, up 161,564 since 2010, which means the Big Apple now accounts for 42.6 percent of New York State's population. Oh did we mention that that population surge was about as much as the city gained over the aughts?

And the good news goes on! Brooklyn, the city's most populous borough, grew 2.4 percent to a population of 2,565,635 (nearly the population of Chicago!). Meanwhile Manhattan grew 2.1 percent to 1,619,090, Queens grew 1.9 percent to 2,272,771 and the Bronx grew 1.7 percent to 1,408,473. The only borough to see a decline was Staten Island, which lost .4 percent of its population and landed at 470,728.

While there are lots of things to celebrate in this new data dump (our 123,000 new foreign immigrants are more than LA and Miami got—combined) but arguably the most interesting is the rise in the oft-neglected Bronx. Especially as it isn't just the population that is growing in the mainland borough. A report earlier this week also found that the Bronx had the fastest growth in new business incorporations between 1991 and 2011, jumping 305 percent. Oh, and crime there keeps dropping. Put those stats together and we're heading into nearly uncharted territory. Or, as Joseph Salvo, director of the population division of the city’s Planning Department, put it to the Times: "You’ve got to go back to the postwar period in the 1940s when we had a surge of people moving into the Bronx."

As for the why of the city's growth? Professor Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire told the paper of record that the city "remained a migration magnet for '20-somethings because they weren’t tied down to houses' while older New Yorkers had been 'frozen in place by the recession.'" Which sounds about right.

