It's gone from 78.8 to 78.5 for males over the last few years, most people think due primarily to the opioid epidemic. And the population of NYC is barely growing, maybe a percent or two a year. These factors you mention aren't even in the same neighborhood as being large enough to explain the data you're reacting to.
The proportion of the NY population that is over 60 looks like it generally trends higher as time passes. I would imagine a greater proportion are near death as time proceeds because of this.
So, this is an anti-pattern in conversation, where you come up with an alternate hypothesis to explain something, and then someone tells you your hypothesis is wrong, and then you just jump to another one, and make them work to disprove that as well. What do you have against the obvious explanation?
If you have another hypothesis, it would be better to at least do the napkin math and show that you've put in a tiny amount of work, rather than just tossing out random far-fetched stuff. For example, this new hypothesis of yours is even more absurd than the last one, because the relative demographics of New York have not changed much in the past year. It could not explain a large spike in deaths this year.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA