NYC Rents Rising Twice As Fast As Wages, Except for Wealthiest, Study Finds
(DNAINFO) Amy Zimmer | August 16, 2017 — Yes, New York City is way less affordable now than seven years ago.
Case in point: An apartment going for $2,000 a month for rent in 2010 would now get $2,657 a month, a report published Wednesday from real estate search engine StreetEasy reveals.
Compounding the city’s affordability crisis: rents in the city rose twice as fast as wages, according to the analysis, which compared the StreetEasy Rent Index with wage data from the city’s Department of Labor.
While median rents increased 3.9 percent a year since 2010, wages increased by 1.8 percent over the same period.
Those working in the city’s lowest wage jobs were hit hardest.
Low-wage earners — those in the bottom 20 percent of the workforce, which represent a little more than 800,000 of the roughly 4.1 million employed New Yorkers — saw the least amount of income growth overall. Those jobs such as home health aides and dental assistants or other healthcare support services actually saw their incomes fall 1.1 percent over the past seven years.
At the same time, rents in the lowest bracket of the market — those in the 20 percent least expensive tier — increased the most since 2010 at 4.9 percent a year, with a 3 percent increase this year alone.
Upper Manhattan, which includes areas like East Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights have seen among the biggest price increases, according to StreetEasy data.