For a tiny studio in a shabby 100 year old prewar walkup tenement building in Manhattan, you're looking at a minimum of $2,000/month. Most people pay $1,400+/month to live in old converted apartments (ie. putting up a wall to turn the living room into another bedroom) with roommates, and often the bedrooms are too small to even have room for a desk, and the window faces directly into another building (if there even is a window). In these buildings you're not going to have AC (meaning you need to buy a window AC unit), a dishwasher, trash compactor, elevator, and all the other luxuries we take for granted anywhere else in the modern world. I spent 3 years in one of these buildings, and the apartment was perpetually too hot (even in the winter), and there was nothing I could do because heat in the unit was not controllable. Apparently this is fairly normal in these buildings.
If you want to live anywhere nice and somewhat modern that isn't a dump, you're looking at a minimum of $3,000/month for a studio, $4,000/month for a 1BR, etc.
And want to buy a place? You're looking at a minimum of $500k for any studio that isn't a total piece of crap, and they're going to want a 20% down payment. And who wants to raise a family in a studio?