This is The Housing Crunch, a five-part series on New York City’s affordable housing crisis.
For more and more people in New York City, the rent is so high that there is hardly any money left for food, child care and transportation, much less anything fun. Want to move to a cheaper apartment? Good luck finding one.
New York City does not have enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, and what it does have is increasingly unaffordable for the average person.
Consider:
The median New York City renter household earns around $70,000 a year, which can reasonably cover a monthly rent of $1,750, according to government guidelines. But the median rent on a new lease in Manhattan and Brooklyn, for example, is more than double that.
About 500,000 households — more than twice the number in the entire city of Miami — spend at least half of their income on rent. That’s roughly a quarter of all New York City households that don’t live in public housing or rely on a housing voucher.
Only 1.4 percent of New York City apartments were available to rent last year, according to a key city survey. Many people cram into thousands of illegal apartments in basements and cellars, which can be at risk of fires and flooding.
Lower- and middle-income earners, including college graduates, are leaving the city in droves. Black families, who often trail white families in income and homeownership, are also fleeing.
Some of the most popular neighborhoods are affordable to only the wealthiest people, creating an economic divide that often tracks along racial lines, too. New York City and the metro region are among the nation’s most segregated places.
Over the next few weeks, I have an ambitious goal for the Housing Crunch series: to not just explain why New York City’s housing crisis is so difficult to solve but also explore what people are doing and want to see done about it.
How we got here
In the 1970s, as an economic crisis gripped the city, hundreds of thousands of residents moved away. Scores of buildings were abandoned and in states of disrepair. Today, the city has a different problem, as demand to live in New York City is overwhelming its housing stock, leading to soaring rents and gentrification. How did we get here?