8 ms·
NYC families need over $125k in income to live in any borough
- oldnetguy 5mo agoI know people making less than that but they are getting subsidies. It's people who are not poor enough for subsidies and not affluent that is getting squeezed
- minhaz23 5mo agoHard agree. Cant even qualify for housing connect, medicaid, or food stamps - income tax credits (single / no kids / no property) - which are significant help to quality of life.
- kotaKat 5mo agoI'm outside of NYC, still in NY. As a single person, the 80% AGI limit is $49,000 here. 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.
- rvz 5mo agoYes. People in the middle are always squeezed the hardest, and $125k is just the baseline and is below survival in NYC. 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.
- brianwawok 5mo ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 5mo ago> Or like. Don’t live in the 2nd most expensive city in the country? Well... multiple things here. If you're in, say, finance, you can't just go and move to some flyover state and work remotely. You need to be around NYC (US), LON (UK) or FRA (EU). If you work some service job, say you work retail, okay. But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces! It is vitally important for any city to have enough adequate housing for all levels of income, otherwise it falls apart.
- torben-friis 5mo agoI can assure you there are finance jobs in more than three cities in the western world.
- ZainRiz 5mo agoIf you're in finance, you earn enough to live in NYC > imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces! That's not a "the poor middle class folks in NYC need help" story, that's a "the rich folks of NYC need folks to serve them" story. They're welcome to strategize however they like to incentivize people working there. Manipulative heartstring tug are not welcome however.
- rainsford 5mo agoI can't find the reference, but I saw a comment recently along the lines of, "If you live in a city where the people who provide you with services can't also afford to live in that city, you don't live in a city, you live in an amusement park."
- fhdkweig 5mo ago
- pclmulqdq 5mo ago[flagged]
- batty_alex 5mo ago[flagged]
- pclmulqdq 5mo agoI dated someone in one of these families for a very long time, so I'm pretty sure I do know how that family system and the surrounding community operates. This sort of "family commune" living arrangement is very common in lower-income communities with family-oriented cultures (eg working-class hispanic, italian, african american communities), and the tax code amplifies its effectiveness.
- postflopclarity 5mo ago[flagged]
- henry2023 5mo ago[flagged]
- kelsey98765431 5mo agosounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay
- ramesh31 5mo ago>"sounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay" 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.
- tacostakohashi 5mo agoDon't worry, just today the mayor has announced a plan to fix it: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-releases-preliminary-citywide-racial-equity-plan-a https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
- mc32 5mo agoI worry it may end up like the ‘70s when poor policy started to device large companies to seek greener pastures for their HQ and operations elsewhere. 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.
- collabs 5mo agoThis only works if we the people let them. For example, I hear about the example of Kansas City — kcmo vs kcks — and I can't help but wonder, why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
- wat10000 5mo agoJohn Nash won a Nobel Prize for exploring that sort of question. It’s hard.
- KK7NIL 5mo ago> why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom. 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.
- mc32 5mo ago
- wat10000 5mo agoAnd yet the median household income is only about $87,000. I’m skeptical.
- dangus 5mo agoWhat’s there to be skeptical about? It’s well known and data-confirmed that wealth has been transferred out of the middle and lower classes in the last half century or so. 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.
- wat10000 5mo agoYou obviously don’t need that much to live if well over half the city makes less.
- dangus 5mo agoUnless the lower half is getting by via overcrowding (living in a small apartment with a large number of roommates or extended family), supplemental nutrition assistance, rent control, etc. 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.
- wat10000 5mo agoI’m extremely skeptical that well over half of NYC households are in such dire straits. 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.”
- sethev 5mo agoI don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median household income is $87k, which means that the majority of households are well below the income level it takes to live there. That stresses me out just to think about it.
- nine_zeros 5mo ago[dead]
- dangus 5mo agoOops I read this wrong.
- nixosbestos 5mo agoHuh? 87k is the median, not mean, so majority would be perfectly accurate....?
- kritiko 5mo agoMajority is correct if you go by the $125k figure (which is skewed by public listing data, I’m sure)
- api 5mo ago
- stego-tech 5mo agoI'd argue they need significantly more than that, if they're expected to also pay for childcare, healthcare, save for emergencies, etc. This is a polycrisis we absolutely need to take seriously lest cities become cesspools again. "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.