The average Manhattan rent just hit a new record of $5,588 a month | Hacker News Reader

The average Manhattan rent just hit a new record of $5,588 a month

cnbc.com

65 pointsrntn81 comments

Couple things to note here:

* As the numbers here show, the high end of Manhattan rentals is very, very high. ~10%[0] of listed rentals at the moment are >$10k/mo. >$100k rentals are not unheard of. Looks like the highest market rental right now is asking $175k/mo.

* ~50%[1] of Manhattan's rental stock is rent stabilized, meaning the rent adjustment rates are set by the city. These units rent for considerably less than market-rate rentals.

* For a variety of reasons, rent-stabilized units often stay in the informal housing market (i.e. not on real estate listing services), which AFAIK these reports do not measure.

* There are a variety of cultural factors here that are a bit unusual for the US, including:

- It's fairly normal here for people with 'good' jobs to have roommates into their 30s+

- The informal housing market here is massive (e.g. I've lived here for 10+ years and have very few friends who've ended up in market-rate rentals)

- Manhattan builds very little new housing (e.g. zero units approved last month)

- It's Manhattan, so there's a LOT of money floating around here.

So yes, Manhattan is getting more expensive, but these market-rate rental reports are not the entire story.

[0] From Streeteasy, a local real estate listing service

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/services/rent-...

> >$100k rentals are not unheard of

these are not 'normal' rentals and imo should be excluded from stats, since they don't apply to typical families living year-to-year in nyc

a majority of those are short-term entire floor/home rentals, often rented out for less than a month at a time, to be used for production companies putting up A-listers for the length of a project, or even used as the set itself: sometimes the listing will say 'used for the filming of y reality show in 20xx!' like a selling point

> typical families

I think this depends on the indented audience in the metric or report.

If we are just talking numbers, include all of them.

If we want to focus on typical families, we need to define what that means.

> these are not 'normal' rentals and imo should be excluded from stats

At least, they should use the median rather than the average.

> It's fairly normal here for people with 'good' jobs to have roommates into their 30s+

I'm happy that folks are willing to do this, but sheesh I am glad I left NY long ago.

With a median rent of $4400 - you need to make ~$53k post-tax just for rent. That's basically ~$75k pre-tax just to afford rent.

Then you have a ~36% marginal tax rate, plus a ~10% sales tax (~46% total) on everything else you buy to thrive instead of just survive...

You need to make A LOT of money to live anywhere within reasonable commuting distance to Manhattan - unless you've been on rent control for 30 years or your parents bought you a flat or something.

How much space is that buying? Can 2 or 3 share that?

In Manhattan proper that is about a 1 bedroom unless you want a very crappy building. 2 can comfortably share one of those in a roommate situation (one gets the bedroom and the other walls off a part of the living room), but 3 people can live in one if at least 2 of them are willing to share a bed (ie a couple).

While it's not a perfect solution (or a likely option for most people on HN), there is such a thing as affordable housing in Manhattan and other boroughs.

Affordable housing units cost far less than what you've shown here, and I think it's a mistake not to include them. In particular, I think it invalidates your conclusion about the need to make a lot of money to rent in Manhattan.

This is a first. I got a couple of downvotes, and I don't know why. I think the parent comment is wrong about what they're saying and I'm only really stating facts in my comment.

Anyway, for the record, I stand by the above.

This is still “median rent” not “the lowest rent you can find.”

You can live in a prime location in Manhattan for about $1000 a month if you’re willing to live in a single room apartment with a shared bathroom and a kitchen that consists of a sink, mini fridge, and microwave.

There’s also the reality that people get roommates or otherwise share the cost of rent.

And you also don’t have to be in prime Manhattan to have a reasonable commuting distance. If you take the subway from The Bronx to Penn Station you can do it in 40 minutes. NYC also has the country’s best commuter rail situation meaning that a whole bunch of people take commuter rail from suburban locations like New Jersey and Long Island.

> You can live in a prime location in Manhattan for about $1000 a month if you’re willing to live in a single room apartment with a shared bathroom and a kitchen that consists of a sink, mini fridge, and microwave

Is this an apartment, or just a room with a locked door?

It’s definitely not glamorous or anything.

I recommend the YouTube channel “Cash Jordan” if you’d like to check out various NYC real estate at all sorts of price points (along with some vlog-ish content).

I live in NYC, and I think this is a weak argument, because these coping mechanisms are not viable for people with families. NYC has the long-standing problem where people can scrape by if they are a single person with a good job and no dependencies, but as soon as that person wants to form a family, their options are to be very rich, or to move out of the city. In my case we moved to Queens, which we like well enough, but even here the Rent Is Too Damn High.

It's not good for the health of a city to be continually pushing out all but the richest families.

I also don't understand why everyone in NYC insists on comparing apples to oranges.

If median rent basically everywhere else in the US outside of a select few neighborhoods gets you at least a decent sized one-bedroom apartment - then comparing it to a 200 sqft room you share with another person without a kitchen or a bathroom is strange.

I don't need a lot to be happy - but I think I want at least 600 sqft with a decent floor plan, good natural light, my own bathroom and kitchen, and a tiny outdoor space big enough to sit a couple people comfortably.

That's A LOT of money in Manhattan - probably more than ~$4400 on average. It's not a lot of money almost everywhere in the world.

I was surprised to see how high the NYC income tax is on top of the state income tax. 1099’s pay even more, I got ~47% on $75K. The federal, state, and city income tax is progressive so the effective tax rate is a bit lower.

NYC housing isn't the only place where the grifters have figured out the market rate. They have basically done that on taxation, too.

Many people who can afford to are very careful to spend 180 days or less in New York city or state.

It's astonishing to think of the fact that NYC's total population is down from 8.8 million in 2020 to 8.3 million. That's a steep drop.

With merely 48 percent of office space occupied, and desks in the so-called occupied offices partially empty due to people working from home a few days every week, it's not hard to imagine that the service sector is hurting: restaurants, cleaners, shop owners etc. Many of the people employed in these jobs lived in the other NYC boroughs.

It's not unlikely that the NYC population will decline further in the coming years.

As someone also from another densely populated city (Mumbai), such things feel like absolute bubbles. Housing is only as valuable as the demand outstrips the (limited) supply.

In the past builders in Mumbai would hold off selling flats at lower prices (apartments in US English I think) until the market caved in. They were almost always successful.

NYC landlords do the same thing. Number of apartments rented has cratered while prices are rising, which means they are doing it now.

How is rent setting record highs, in spite of the population drop?

If the population is dropping because lower income workers are leaving, average rents will go up as occupancy goes down.

Think of it this way - you probably won’t move to a cheaper house just because one becomes available- but you might move to a nicer one of the financials worked.

Working class people are also more likely to have multiple roommates. So if one roommate leaves, maybe the others can no longer afford the full rent so they move too, now the landlord white washes the walls and jacks rent and it goes to a single high income individual who can afford three bedrooms themselves in manhattan.

> Brokers say the lack of apartments for sale, due to higher interest rates, have forced many would-be buyers to rent

Also, rents numbers are usually not given after adjusting for inflation. It makes breaking record a phenomenon you’d expect, similarly how Hollywood keeps constantly breaking its blockbuster records.

In addition to the other comments: high vacancy and landlords who'd rather hold out for prices to come back up. They should be taxed into oblivion.

Not unprecedented. The city didn't surpass their 1940 population until 2000. The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910.

What is so interesting is that back then, you needed to live on Manhattan or very near Manhattan if you worked there. Subways, trains, new suburbs, bridges and tunnels, and cars, enabled people employed by Manhattan businesses to live further away, like further out in the boroughs and towns on Long Island, upstate New York, and New Jersey. Now, the Internet and acceptance of remote work enables people employed by Manhattan companies to live even further away.

The nature of the businesses also changed dramatically, and a lot of that working class work from the late 1800s and early 1900s simply doesn’t exist anymore in manhattan. The highline exists because the industry that brought that elevated freight rail line into the city in the first place no longer exists. It would probably be very worthwhile to redesign the entire transit system today, considering the bulk of it was designed 100 years ago to serve a working population that no longer exists on their commute to jobs that also no longer exist.

NYC's main issue is that transit transfers between services are painful. Transfers between PATH, LIRR, NYC Ferry, MTA & the Air-Train can add a lot of unnecessary precious minutes. The MTA's newly minted OMNY payment system does not work on any of these either. The NYC transit system is expansive, but people stick to a select few locations because the transfers are so painful. Fixing this would be the easiest & cheapest solution to release some pressure from the housing market.

Then there is NYC's generosity which follows (Blue city?) America's quintessential 'spend a lot, but never address the problem' approach. Between 50k-100k illegal migrants are being housed in NYC hotels right now ! Really ? The world's most expensive real-estate is the best place for housing illegal-migrants in country with the world's most hospitable area ? About 100k people are in homeless shelters in similarly prime real-estate.

Same issue with rent control. In NYC, Roughly 1,006,000 rent-stabilized homes make up about 28 percent of the overall housing stock and 44 percent of all rentals. That's insane! Rent stabilized/controlled apartments face inevitable dilapidation while heavily limiting new housing supply in a city. Rent control is one of the best-studied : 'methods that do not work'. (In NYC rent stabilization is more common, but effectively follows the same patterns as rent control) Afaik, this does not include 500,000 housing projects residents, a lot of whom live in prime residential space in NYC.

Social welfare & housing assistance are all well & good. But, no one should be entitled to a zip-code. NY's expansive rail network means that you can live 30 miles out of town, and still be within 30 minutes of your workplace. Let the location of housing assistance get decided by the free market. You can have your rent controlled apartment or NYCHA assistance. But, you aren't entitled to live walking distance from the WTC just because you're poor or have been renting since 1970.

I agree that sustainable urbanism & dignified living should be central parts of 1st world city policy. But, blue cities in the US seem to be hellbent on looking at issues from the worst possible lens. Their solutions always answer the question : "What is the best way for us to maximize spend, minimize guilt and somehow lead to everyone being worse of ?". I had long thought that this pathology was limited to west coast cities, but the infection appears to have spread to the North East as well.

Asking users who live in New York. How much does this matter? Is the commute from Brooklyn or Queens reasonable? If so how are the prices? The Bronx has a bad reputation (as a foreigner) but is that even true?

Prices pretty much reflect the commute. Live near a subway line or closer on that line to Manhattan: it’s in the price.

NYC real estate is pretty shockingly efficient. If you think you found a great deal, you are almost certainly in for a bad time.

Parts of each of the Boroughs are pretty sketchy. Again, the parts that are not: priced in!

This is how it is. To get a “good deal” you have to change yourself. Perhaps you’re like Gaston and the size of a barge so sketchy doesn’t bother you - savings! Maybe you’re a dwarf who lives underground - savings!

Depends on where you’re going but neither are that bad, depends on where you live specifically in either of those places.

The Bronx has higher crime for sure.

Subway is filthy and unsafe. No one I know would use it late at night. Most of the worthy cultural events are happening around Central Park and downtown. So, if you want the good parts of New York experience without a slight risk of being stabbed by a crazy person, you better live in a walking distance to one of these locations or commute on a car all the time.

This is so disingenuous I don’t even know where to start.

Conservative news circles have had this latent anti-NYC thing going on since Trump admonished it as a liberal mecca during his presidency.

Then when the pandemic hit and NYC was devastated, they were practically holding group orgy parties to get each other off about the fall of the city.

Then when the city started bouncing back it became "Well no, it's bouncing back as a dangerous crime ridden hell hole."

The "NYC is dangerous" thing is literally just conservative cope for the failed collapse during the pandemic.

hating on NYC has been a thing since well before trump. even before george W

Seriously. The whole "Ford to NYC: Drop Dead" thing was in 1975...

This pretty much describes the New York living experience of someone making a few million or with a trust fund, so it's an all-too-common perspective in Manhattan.

This is nonsense. Did you just move to NYC or something?

I suspect OP has never lived in New York...

This describes a very sheltered experience of NYC. There are a ton of cultural events in other boroughs. I don’t know anyone who is afraid to ride the subway and wouldn’t consider it dirty by transit standards. I’ve been in NYC for nine years.

I question your standards if you don't think that the NYC subway is dirty. I've ridden public transit in several cities across three continents, lived in three NA cities including NYC, and it does not come close. Smelling urine inside a train station is not normal.

I’ve ridden dozens of transit systems across four continents (I happen to collect transit means of payment as a weird hobby). Smelling urine is not a regular occurrence for me on the L or 4/5/6. Which lines do you usually ride? There are a lot of them and I know the experience varies.

I rode the A and the 2/3/4 lines usually. Try standing near the edge of the track. You'll get a whiff. It's not just that either, there's also a ton of litter and way more homeless people in the system than I've seen anywhere else. It's unhygienic to the point that it's a joke to New Yorkers not to get on a train car that's empty. Never seen that elsewhere.

Of course the state of the subway is a reflection of the city as a whole rather than an isolated issue, and that's true everywhere in my experience.

If you ride the Bart seeing urine is quite normal, along with the producer sitting in the middle of the puddle.

Agree with you on the cultural events, but the NYC subway is definitely dirty compared to the systems of the two other cities I've lived in (Toronto and London).

I was mostly in LIC and Manhattan though. Maybe it's not so dirty in the other boroughs?

> No one I know would use it late at night.

This does vary depending on the train and the station (I might recommend a tourist to avoid some stations on the J train at 3 am), but overwhelmingly most of the subway is safe at night, and more comfortable than during the day since you can actually get a seat. I ride it late at night, and so do many people I know.

worthy cultural events.. what? You are missing out on like all of NYC

Oh my, this isn't true in reality. Yes, there are crazy people on the subway but the vast majority of people encounter them without incident.

It's very common to see small groups of kids traveling on the subway alone to get to school and they are perfectly safe.

Cultural events in New York city span all 5 boroughs, by the way. Central Park and "downtown" are by no means the cultural heart of the city. Have you even lived in New York???

We lived in midtown Manhattan for 5 years. To get to the interesting (non tourist trap) 'cultural events' usually took a subway, or for underserved areas, took taxi (via hail, and pay with Curb app) to a borough off Manhattan island. Return to midtown took Lyft/Uber. Commuting by car is an extraordinary waste of time with high opportunity cost unless you use a driver.

Yes, the mega events are at Lincoln Center, Broadway, the Met, but that's very much like saying cultural TV is only on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

> without a slight risk of being stabbed by a crazy person

So you've never been to Port Authority...

South Bronx crime is back in full swing.

OK, so don’t move to the South Bronx.

Everyone I knew when I lived in New York lived in a Borough or up near Harlem. Neighborhoods like Long Island City in Queens or Greenpoint/Williamsburg/Bushwick in Brooklyn are just a couple stops away from Manhattan. And they are also FAR more desirable places to live in my opinion. Quieter and more like actual neighborhoods.

You could go further out to Long Island but rent isn't cheap here either and you end up trading time for money if you like visiting NYC. From about the middle of Long Island it's a 90 minute train ride that costs $28.50 round trip during off-peak hours. Driving really isn't any cheaper due to tolls, parking fees and new policies being put in place to tax driving through popular areas of Manhattan[0].

The allure to going out this far is there's a lot of suburbs, parks, bodies of water, etc. but at the same time it's not a huge ordeal to visit NYC for day trips.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-12/nyc-conge...

I presume at this point people are also considering places like pennsylvania. You can get the same exact woodsy eastern township suburia experience in long island as you could all over the east coast, but in the vicinity of philadelphia or even baltimore you can also still take day trips to nyc on a train, and are saving money hand over fist over anything in long island to boot so you could take even more of them. I think its a matter of time before these regions explode, if they aren’t already, just from the outflow from the nyc region.

People have been saying this for over 20 years; it hasn't materialized yet. A large part of NYC and the immediate surrounding area's appeal is that you don't have to do day trips: everything is 30 minutes away, or less.

Isn’t the more suburban part of long island more like 90 minutes from the city? 30 minutes from the city I imagine limits your geography severely to these uber expensive parts of the area where space is a premium.

It matters, but there are still plenty of affordable parts of NYC with an easy commute to Manhattan’s office districts. Living in Manhattan has meant $4000 shoebox apartment for years now; you can find nice, spacious apartments in Brooklyn, right on the subway, for a whole lot less than the Manhattan median.

The subway is pretty fast, it runs 24 hours a day, and it gets you anywhere you’d want to go within the city. Bikeshare deals with the corner cases where a trip between two nearby-ish neighborhoods doesn’t have a good subway connection. The only reason I’d ever drive in New York is if I got a U-Haul for moving.

Or NJ? It's not that far off.

Commute from BK or Queens is still feasible, they are BIG boroughs so it differs on which part. Prices are lower but climbing, especially in neighborhoods very close to Manhattan.

Bronx still has a high crime rate; depends on where. Tremont and Highbridge are pretty rough. Lots of the Bronx is still as safe or safer than, say, East Harlem (in Manhattan).

NYC is a large city; there are parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have very reasonable commutes into Manhattan (particularly lower Manhattan), and other parts with extremely long/essentially impossible commutes.

The part of Brooklyn that I live in is somewhat cheap, and it takes me about 35 minutes on average to get to Lower Manhattan. I pay about $1600 a month in rent, sharing a 2 floor 3BR with a roommate. The people I know in the area pay similar amounts.

I went to high school in the Bronx; it has good and bad areas like everywhere else in the city, but I think its bad reputation is largely undeserved. My guess is that we’re going to see a lot of “rebranding” of Bronx neighborhoods to make them more palatable over the next decade.

(And note: all boroughs in NYC are both residential and commercial, so lots of people don’t commute into Manhattan at all.)

Because of the way inflation works the rent in any given city will always be at “record highs” unless there’s some kind of economic turmoil.

The average house hold income in Manhattan based on a quick Google is also about $150k.

Making the annual rent of $60k about 40% of one's household income.

In urban planning I heard that a fair rent refers to onee spending 30% of their income on rent.

So I guess it isn't that bad.

Average without median is a recipe for misperception[1]. CNBC should know better. But if it's supposed to be clickbait then great job!

[1] For example, this type of article headline feeds the belief that the little guy/gal is being priced out of the market. However, the increases could be at the upper end, which also moves the average up. In fact, in theory, the middle and bottom can fall, and the average can still go up is the upper and top increase more than that fall.

I wish more people would understand this about averages.

I guess only above average people do.

No, only people above the median :-)

Could I make a pun joke on HN or would that be too mean?

It seems to be the mode in this thread at least.

> Average without median is a recipe for misperception

> The average monthly rent in July was $5,588, up 9% over last year and marking a new record. Median rent, at $4,400 per month, also hit a new record, along with price per square foot of $84.74, according to a report from Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman.

It’s the second line in the article.

Ah good thing we dodged the psy-op where they were trying to convince us that Manhattan was out of the reach of the little guy.

It's not clear what the $84.74 price per square foot represents as it divides out to a totally unreasonable size into either of the other figures. It would be odd for an American publication but it's probably pretty close if it were square meters (so you end up at an average of 500 sq. ft. which seems about right). Or it may be for something that isn't directly related to the other two numbers.

There's a annoyingly large community of hall monitor types here who in every thread jump to point out every bit of nuance to a topic that didn't happen to fit in the headline. Whether it was present in the article body or not.

The witch hunt against clickbait has become far more annoying than the practice itself. So many people litter these comments with context that they're absolutely sure is over everyone's head but theirs.

It got shared. It should not - in the form - have gotten shared. Evidently someone didn't realize that (i.e., "average" in the title === clickbait). So pointing out the stupidity of average is on me? God bless you. The irony of your comment is also entertaining.

And the headline decided to say what? Of the two measurements, the headline picks the one that offers the most deception and manipulation. The headline is what most see and absorb.

I find it funny (read: sad) that you're doing so well playing the HN Police on me, but CNBC get a free pass.

Yeah, I'm the problem. And The Media is the embodiment of legit journalism.

Have a nice day.

Or just read the article before you comment?

but the median ($4400) is literally right in the article.

And what is in the headline? What are most people going to read and immediately draw a conclusion? A conclusion that once is in place gets more and more difficult to move (read: correct)?

Journalism, real journalism, doesn't trade in such tactics.

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