Rent Gobbles Up NYer's Paychecks More Than Nearly All U.S. Cities

NEW YORK CITY — The bite taken out of Big Apple paychecks by rent is more than in nearly all major U.S. cities, a new study found.

Manhattan ranks 187th out of 189 cities analyzed by RentCafe for income-to-rent ratio, a measure of how far paychecks stretch, according to data provided to Patch.

Indeed, the study — "Top Renting Sweet Spots in the U.S.: Where Your Income Goes the Furthest" — had decidedly sour findings for New York City renters in measure after measure.

The depressing results dovetail with the dire findings of New York City's latest housing and vacancy survey, said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney for The Legal Aid Society.

"None of this is a surprise to me," she said. "People in New York City are rent burdened."

Burden after burden

New York City renters likely already know that rent gobbles up an obscene amount of their paychecks.

The amount of income households pay for rent has gone up nearly every year since 2002, according to the recently released housing and vacancy survey.

The only year it didn't was 2023, and even then New Yorkers paid 29.5 percent of their household income on household costs.

Housing is generally considerable affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of renter income, experts say.

And the burden in New York City is much higher among renters who earn less than $70,000, where they typically spent 54 percent of their income on rent, the survey found.

"Said another way, the typical renter household in 2023 was severely rent burdened or paying more than half of their household income toward housing costs," the survey states.

The 50 percent mark is deemed a "severe rent burden," according to the survey.

How these burdens are shouldered by New Yorkers is provided in more detail by the RentCafe study and associated data, drawn from Yardi Matrix, U.S. Census Bureau and the Council for Community and Economic Research.

New Yorkers are left with a disposable income that's 28 percent lower than the national average after paying rent, despite garnering paychecks that are far more generous than the national median, according to data provided to Patch.

Manhattan, perhaps unsurprisingly, is where renters have the worst pay-to-rent balance, the data shows.

Borough dwellers typically make $77,720 in income, but their rent — measured at $4,744 in the study — is nearly three times the national average, according to the data.

The combination drove Manhattan to the third-lowest income-to rent average in the nation, data shows.

Brooklyn isn't much better — it's 176th to Manhattan's 178th on the ranking.

Costs of basic foods such as break, milk and eggs take a similar big bite — roughly $80 — out of Brooklyn and Manhattan paychecks, and they respectively rank 164th and 165th nationally for the worst shares, the study's data shows.

Brooklynites are doubly dinged on health care and utilities costs, according to the data. The borough is the worst for health care-to-income costs, and renters can only four times the cost of phone and energy bills after rent, data shows.

Queens renters have more money for expenses after rent than their borough neighbors, according to the study.

Alarm bells

The city's housing crisis has reached a fever pitch in recent years, with both Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul proposing a suite of solutions.

Much of their proposals focus on actually building housing, such as the Adams' "moonshot" of constructing 500,000 new homes in the next decade through an ambitious spate of reforms.

But the rhetorical urgency hasn't translated to many actual homes.

Just 11,000 new homes were built by fall 2023, well below the 30,000 originally expected.

Davidson, the Legal Aid attorney, contended that a combination of building new housing and enacting reforms such as "Good Cause Eviction" to protect tenants is needed.

"The problem with only focusing on building housing, because in order to build out of this crisis, even if a pro-building bill is passed and a zoning change is made… we're looking at 10 years before we're out of a housing shortage," she said.

"I do think that we need to do something about the people who are struggling while we are waiting for building to happen."

One major issue facing New York City is that its suburbs lack housing compared to other similar U.S. cities, Davidson said.

Hochul's original housing push in part failed in the face of intense opposition from Long Island and Westchester, which would have had to expand their housing stocks by 3 percent every three years.

The failure will only make both New York City's and the region's wider housing problem worse, Davidson said.

"The alarm bells have been going off for so long, and I think people feel like, 'It's New York, it's supposed to be hard,'" she said. "But they should be demanding more from their elected officials."