The most recent drama in the fight for City Hall has centered on a question that might seem absurd in much of the rest of the country but is all too relevant in New York City, one of the most expensive places on the planet.
Is someone making $142,000 a year rich?
That’s the annual salary earned by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor — an amount that his chief rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, argues is too much to be living in a rent-stabilized apartment, as Mr. Mamdani does.
“You make $142,000 a year plus stipends, and your wife works too, meaning you together likely make well over $200,000,” Mr. Cuomo said on social media. “No matter which way you cut it: Zohran Mamdani is a rich person. You are actually very rich.”
Mr. Mamdani, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, has consistently said he considers himself privileged and financially comfortable. Aside from his salary as a state assemblyman, he owns land in Uganda, where he was born, valued at between $150,000 and $200,000. And he has said that he plans to move out of his apartment, which costs $2,300 a month.
Earlier this week, Mr. Mamdani joked that he is living “rent-free” in Mr. Cuomo’s head.
Mr. Cuomo, who moved into the city less than two years ago after years in Albany and Westchester County, pays about $8,000 a month for his rental in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan, and earned more than half a million dollars in consulting fees in 2024. His net worth is estimated at about $10 million.
Beyond political mudslinging, the debate over what salary makes a New Yorker wealthy has highlighted how warped the citywide conversation about money has become.
“You can be in the top 1 percent in other parts of the country and just solidly middle-class, or barely middle-class, in New York,” said Jonathan Bowles, who runs the think tank Center for an Urban Future. “The costs are just astronomically higher in New York City.”
Consider these statistics:
The average cost for an apartment rental in Manhattan was $5,450 in June, and $3,882 in northwest Queens, where Mr. Mamdani lives, according to report by Douglas Elliman.
Roughly 500,000 New York households spend at least half of their income on rent, though the federal government recommends that households spend no more than a third of their income on housing.
While the average cost for a studio apartment in New York City is $3,225, it is $1,075 in Phoenix, and $1,219 in Houston.
A family living in New York City would have to pull in more than $300,000 a year to meet the federal standard for affordability to pay for care for just one child, according to a New York Times analysis. Day care can cost $4,000 a month in wealthy neighborhoods, and $2,000 or more in low-income areas.
The cost of food grew nearly 9 percent between 2021 and 2022 in the city, the largest increase in four decades.
Roughly a third of families living in the city’s homeless shelters include at least one adult who works, and people making $50,000 a year or more are being priced out of the housing market and ending up homeless.
At some of the city’s private schools, families making half a million dollars a year, and in some cases more, can qualify for financial aid.
So what even counts as rich?
New Yorkers who make between $113,000 and $362,000 are considered high-wage earners by the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.
But Lauren Melodia, the center’s director of economic and fiscal policy, said Mr. Mamdani’s $142,000 salary “definitely does not make you a rich person in New York.”
Even though Mr. Mamdani fits into the high-wage category, there are so many New Yorkers making so much more than him, Ms. Melodia said, at companies that offer bonuses and other forms of compensation on top of annual salaries.
New York-based jobs in finance and insurance, for example, pay an average of $387,000, state data shows.
Plus, everything is more expensive here than in most parts of the country, Ms. Melodia said: child care, housing and food. The minimum wage, at $16.50 an hour, is among the highest in the country, too.
Still, Mr. Bowles said that $142,000 is “definitely a lot more than most New Yorkers are getting by with.” He noted that the city’s thousands of home health aides, for instance, typically make $35,000 or less a year.
Mr. Mamdani’s salary, not including his wife’s income as an illustrator, would land him in the 90th percentile of the city’s earners, according to an analysis by the city’s Independent Budget Office. (The city’s median household income is $77,000.)
But both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo’s personal finances look puny when compared with the stratospheric wealth in certain corners of the city.
There are more billionaires here than in any other city in the world, and they have honed creative ways to spend their fortunes.
Some of the private clubs that have proliferated across the city in recent years charge initiation fees of $100,000 or $200,000, to say nothing of annual dues. The billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin paid $238 million in 2019 for a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, and a nearby penthouse was recently listed at $110 million.
What counts as rich, poor and middle-class in New York is so divergent from the rest of America that city leaders have developed their own metrics to determine affordability.
A group of nonprofits and researchers have created a standard they call the true cost of living in New York City.
Their most recent report found that families across the city need to be making at least $100,000 to afford housing, food and transportation. That increases to $150,000 for families with two adults and two children in some of Manhattan’s wealthiest ZIP codes.
The study found that the “bare bones” salary required for a two-adult household in Queens to afford basic living essentials was about $67,000.
Measuring poverty, too, is more complicated here.
Robin Hood, a prominent New York City philanthropy, has been funding research on poverty in the city for over a decade.
The charity recently found that a quarter of New Yorkers are living below the poverty line, which researchers defined as a family of four making $47,190 or less.
It is the highest poverty rate the philanthropy has recorded.