NYC families need over $125k in income to live in any borough
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's actually kind of painful to be barely above 100% AGI and not be able to get secure 'quality' housing up here. Everything that's being rehabilitated is focusing on low income (sub-80% AGI) limits, and everything else up here is... dire to rent. We have no real protections or anything in place up here, let alone an attempt to register rental properties that can go through without landlord revolt.
And tax credits - that was amazing when I filed my taxes through NY's direct file during the IRS pilot. I was given a "great news!" screen where it boasted that I qualified for exactly $0 for every single tax credit on offer because I couldn't own property or have a family.
You have to cut on almost everything to keep most of that money every month. Might be fine for those without families, but for a typical family of 2 or 3 would need double that salary and employers will look at that cost and will scrutinize that and ask:
"How do we get that 'cost' (you) significantly reduced?"
That is even before talking about "AGI" which is actually an excuse for layoffs (and reposting old jobs at a lower salary and off shoring those jobs) in disguise.
So it is more like the middle-class and especially families are getting squeezed the most in NYC and have no choice but to leave the US.
That stresses me out just to think about it.
It maths fine, it's just that the assumptions being input are wrong.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
Sometimes politicians think they have them by their noses and can turn up reaction to fix ineptitude, corruption or both but sadly for the politicians people and businesses can vote with their feet.
This is prisoner's dilemma 101.
Or, less cynically, cities compete in a free market where they try to compete for a limited amount of capital investment; there's nothing wrong with a city offering more attractive terms to be more business friendly, if they so wish.
Perhaps we should pull our heads out of the Fox News punch bowl to take a breath.
Y’all act like democratic socialist policy can’t work even though we’ve spent the last entire history of our country trying the exact opposite strategy only to have it not work out at all. The current status quo which is obviously not satisfactory didn’t come from socialists or leftists running the country.
Cue the “This is the world under communism” memes that are literally pictures of the current world under unfettered under-regulated capitalism.
The boogeyman of “the businesses will move out of NYC” is hilariously out of touch. Where will all these companies get the employees they depend on if they move operations to Kansas? NYC contains nearly the entire population of Ohio within its boroughs. Where do you propose these companies find employees if they all leave NYC?
You’re making the classic business bootlicking mistake of flipping the needs pyramid upside down. We don’t need to beg for businesses to stick around, businesses literally depend on regular working class people to survive. They are worthless without our labor and our dollars as customers.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
It didn't experience population drops because NYC scared away the businesses and billionaires/millionaires with left-leaning policy. That population loss happened because of macroeconomic trends that were already in motion, as well as local factors that really had very little to do with who was mayor at the time.
Detroit didn't have a population collapse because of who was mayor or what the tax rate on the local businesses was.
Anyway many fortune 500s left the city from the late 70s to late 80s. NYC sucked.
- Koch balanced the city’s budget by 1981 so we can’t really say the city being broke was a root cause for the next 10-15 years
- Taxes can’t really explain this at all. New Jersey to this day still has almost double the corporate tax rate of NYC, just as an example. Why was NYC able to recover and thrive while still maintaining one of the highest overall tax rates in the country? There’s no data correlation.
- NYC wasn’t the only city to have a declining urban core population in the same time period by a long shot. Again, nationwide macroeconomics of the 1980s.
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/opinion/with-the-rich-already-...
[2] https://capwolf.com/why-millionaires-are-fleeing-new-york-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row
Your first link is an opinion article from the NY Post, I would not consider that to be unbiased reporting (really, we should not be using the opinion section of any newspaper for any of this).
Second link is a financial industry-oriented source, one I've never heard of in any journalistic capacity, and I am not so sure about their motivations to write an article like that.
For example:
> Quality of Life: Rising crime and strained infrastructure.
Rising crime is factually untrue, and NYC is one of the safest cities of any size in the country. Just one example: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR006/nypd-fewest-murders...
I would also make the argument that primary residence and income tax optimization tricks mean that many of these people with very high incomes still spend a lot of time if not most of their time in NYC. If you're making $1+ million a year in W2 income you most definitely own more than one property and are probably important enough in your work to be able to restructure your income to keep it out of NY State income tax collection. Get paid in stock options, or send your paycheck down to your Florida condo and totally live there 6 months out of the year.
It literally is. Unlike SF, you can actually buy a home within an hour commute of NYC around the national median. Transit is infinitely better as well.
The people who are making below the median make things work by living in public or rent controlled housing, getting a heck of a lot of roommates, or living in single room apartments with shared bathrooms.
The common example given is how Walmart is the largest employer of people on SNAP in the USA, which equates to corporate welfare. Walmart is directly receiving taxpayer dollars since they don't need to pay employees a living wage.
But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t say “to live alone” or “to live without government assistance.” It just says “to live.”
I don’t think having roommates or a rent-controlled apartment is so terrible that it wouldn’t qualify as “living.” It doesn’t have to be completely literal. If it meant not being homeless, I could work with that. But a number that’s more than 50% higher than the median? I don’t know what the heck it means “to live” in that case. It clearly means something well beyond what the average New Yorker actually has, but I don’t know what and I don’t know why you’d call that “living.”
"New York families need six-figure incomes to live without government assistance in all five boroughs of New York City, according to two new reports."
Anyway, I don't trust media summaries of reports. The bit of the article I can see mentions two new reports, but I can only see a link to one, which is three years old.
That report says it's based on something called the "NYC True Cost of Living" which does actually have a 2026 edition: https://www.fcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/NYC2026_TCL_...
That report lists a $125,814/year "cost of meeting basic needs" for the lowest amount of any borough, which fits the headline. But that figure is also based on having one preschool child, which according to the report costs $33,000 for child care. Lots of families don't, so their figure would be substantially less. The report says that 46% of working-age NYC households fall below the True Cost of Living, which certainly doesn't fit with that cost being so much higher than the median income, even considering the "working-age" qualifier.
The 2023 edition of the report has a lot more details: https://selfsufficiencystandard.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/.... If I'm reading that right, they're calculating housing costs at the 40th percentile in a given area, which doesn't make any sense when calculating the minimum needed. In this case, the areas are entire boroughs, or borough halves for Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I see this kind of nonsense all over the place. Random example: https://www.investopedia.com/minimum-wage-earners-can-not-co.... "There are no major American cities that hold an average monthly rental cost which is 30% of a minimum wage earner's gross income." OK, why would we compare the minimum wage with the average rent? If you want to find out what people can afford, you need to look at the lowest available cost, not the average.
So, I remain skeptical of the claim made by this article.
You really don’t believe it? You have access to Zillow.com right? You work at Meta HQ in Manhattan now as a contracted facilities worker cleaning the building. The highest pay I see on Indeed in Manhattan is around $21/hour for custodians, let’s be generous and call it $25/hour. Find an apartment for within a 1 hour commute for the suggested 1/3 gross income ($1444/month). Now imagine your spouse doesn’t work a full time job because you can’t afford child care and you have two kids. How is this working out exactly?
It’s not even that much better if you have a college degrees, like I see RN jobs in Manhattan at under $40/hour - and those folks are probably in student loan debt.
Basic-ass math demonstrates the situation. Stop focusing on the little nitpicks you have with these journalistic outlets.
The claim is $125k/year. That's over $60/hour. If that's true then you can't live on, say, $50/hour. 1/3rd gross income would then be a bit under $3,000/month. Zillow finds me plenty of 3-bedroom apartments in NYC for $2,800 or less.
It seems to me like you're engaging in "It doesn't matter if it's correct as long as it gives the correct feeling." Why are you talking about a $21/hour job? I'm not arguing that people making that little are anything but struggling. I'm arguing that putting the floor at far over the median income is nonsensical. NYC was doing alright last time I was there and I don't think it would be if the vast majority of the population didn't make enough money to live.
You don't have to argue for broken math just because you like the conclusion. You're allowed to say, lots of people are struggling, but this claim about their struggle doesn't add up.
I plugged this filter into Zillow and got 130 rentals in the entire city, including all 5 boroughs.
Listings all have the disclaimer “fees may apply.”
About 25 results within about an hour train ride to Manhattan.
I imagine 100% of them are rent controlled [1] but I also imagine that 130 results are not “plenty” in a city of 8 million.
It’s hard for me to side with you because this demonstrates your perception of the situation being rather off-base.
[1] Whether you agree with the policy of rent control or not, its existence is a demonstration of the failure of the market economy. It is a manifestation of the basic concept that the market does not self-regulate to achieve the goal of most people being able to afford decent housing.
Note that I was being generous in filtering by 3 bedrooms. The study allows for two children to share a room, and looks at a family of four, so a two bedroom apartment would suffice. Zillow has over a thousand listings under $2,800/month with two bedrooms. Many of those would be within an hour train ride of Meta HQ or whatever fancy destination we're looking at. I'll also note that we've excluded everything outside NYC proper even though there are places in NJ and non-City NY that are within that range as well.
I don't see anything in the above links about rent control or stabilization. I'm sure that affects things significantly, but it's irrelevant to my point if the number that I'm casting doubt upon isn't intended to reflect some sort of ideal free rental market.
Let me be clear about what that point is: I don't think that NYC families actually need over $125k in income "to live." I think the criteria on which that is determined is way too pessimistic, in particular assuming that all families need $30,000+/year in child care, and that all families will pay at least 40th percentile rent. More broadly, given that a great majority of the city's households make less than the figure given, it just can't be correct.
I don't know what you think is off base about my perception of those things. You seem to think that my perception about other things is off base. Which it may well be. But that doesn't affect my point.
We seem to just be talking past each other. You're arguing some broader thing about struggling families in NYC. I'm arguing about one specific number and how it's described. If you want to argue that it's not possible for a family to survive without assistance on a single custodian job at Meta HQ, or that rent control distorts the market, I already believe it. But if you want to argue that the $125k figure is correct because $21/hour is not enough and rent control exists, that's just a non sequitur.
"Move somewhere cheaper" ignores the reality that most good jobs are in cities nowadays, not rural or cheaper areas. It also ignores decades of calculus of the "city to save, suburbs to live" mentality that's been gradually eroded away over decades of housing mismanagement, not to mention serves as a giant middle-finger for folks who, for one reason or another, MUST live in a major city (healthcare, job prospects, career field, etc). Even if someone were to move somewhere cheaper, they'd forfeit their higher salary in the process - which would likely make the newer, cheaper location just as, if not more unaffordable than their city life was; hell, some of us were trying to move somewhere cheaper in the era of remote work, and look how that turned out. Half the planet lives in cities by UN estimates, and "moving somewhere cheaper" is the most cowardly rebuttal of the problem one could muster.
I'm also shrugging off the uninformed whinging about "welfare kings/queens". Reagan couldn't prove it, two Bushes couldn't prove it, Clinton couldn't prove it, Obama couldn't prove it, two Trumps and a Biden couldn't prove it, because they don't actually exist. Talk to people actually on benefits rather than swallow naked pro-austerity propaganda by rich people angry that their tax dollars help the working poor they themselves created in the first place, and they'll tell you how impossibly difficult it is to get benefits in the first place, nevermind keeping them. There's a vastly more evidence supporting the harms of means-testing than any WFA coming from it.
At the end of the day, NYC is not alone in these problems - but is unique in having an openly Democratic Socialist as Mayor, meaning Capital has a vested interest in pinning all the ills to him and astroturfing the same austerity bullshit that worked with Reagan et al to try and defend the problems they caused in the first place. America cannot roll back to an era where six-figure salaries meant you were "rich" and five-figures were the norm, so we need to build an America where said salaries at least cover essentials again and where median incomes can afford median housing.