Average one-bedroom now requires income that presupposes multiple overlapping careers
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Numbers
NEW YORK — Average rents for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan have reached a level that requires annual income, according to the standard 30 percent of gross income guideline, of approximately $180,000 — a threshold that is satisfied by approximately 18 percent of Manhattan residents, a figure that does not immediately suggest how the other 82 percent are managing.
The answer is that they are not following the guideline. New York City’s housing market operates in consistent violation of the conventional wisdom about what constitutes affordable, a wisdom that was developed elsewhere and that New York treats as a charming regional custom, like calling soda pop or caring about high school football. The guideline says 30 percent. New York says sure and rents to whoever has the most impressive application regardless.
According to the fictional but appropriately-named Manhattan Institute for Cost of Living Acceptance, the average renter in New York City spends approximately 45 percent of gross income on housing, operates on a roommate arrangement that housing economists describe as density-efficient and renters describe as you have to knock before using the bathroom at 7 a.m., and has developed a psychological relationship to their apartment’s size that researchers describe as spatial recalibration and the renters describe as it’s actually fine and cozy and I’ve learned to not have things.
How People Actually Live
The strategies New Yorkers employ to manage housing costs are varied, creative, and entirely rational given the market they are navigating. Roommates are standard at ages that would be considered post-roommate age in other cities. The outer boroughs — Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island — absorb the residents who cannot sustain Manhattan costs, with Brooklyn having completed a full cycle of being affordable, becoming desirable, becoming expensive, and now exporting its own displaced residents to neighborhoods in Queens that are currently in the being-desirable phase.
The outer reaches of the city — areas that require 45 minutes on the subway and where the bodegas have not yet become artisanal — remain genuinely affordable by New York standards, which is to say expensive by the standards of everywhere else. New York’s definition of affordable housing — which is priced at 30 to 60 percent of Area Median Income — produces apartments that residents of Omaha would recognize as market-rate and residents of San Francisco would consider reasonable and residents of Manhattan would consider aspirational.
Gothamist covers the housing market with the appropriate combination of data and outrage. The City NYC has documented the policy failures that have produced the current situation: the underbuilding of housing for decades, the loss of affordable units to luxury conversion, the inadequacy of rent stabilization as the market outpaced it.
The Policy Landscape
New York City’s housing policy is an ongoing and contentious negotiation between development, preservation, affordability, and community. The city needs more housing. Building more housing in the places where people most want to live requires changing zoning rules that have been in place for decades and that existing residents have strong opinions about. Those opinions are sincere and sometimes reflect genuine concerns about neighborhood character and infrastructure capacity and sometimes reflect the simpler interest of people whose housing values benefit from scarcity. Sorting these motivations is politically difficult. Building the housing anyway is politically costly. Not building the housing is financially costly for everyone who needs somewhere to live, which is everyone.
The math, as noted in the headline, does not apply. This is the correct conclusion. New York housing operates in a dimension where the normal rules are suspended and replaced by a set of local customs that everyone navigates and nobody endorses and nothing quite resolves. This is, arguably, a metaphor for New York generally. The city functions despite the math, or possibly because of it, or possibly the math is just different here, like the pizza.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
Also absurd: The Daily Mash | Cracked
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com