Can You Actually Afford Your Rent?

OK so about this 30% of income thing: It used to be that it was 25%. And that was supposed to be a CEILING, not a FLOOR. The idea that we accept that people have to pay 50% or more of their income to rent is insane.

I live in central CA, both of our kids live in the Bay Area (San Francisco-Oakland). The rents are pretty outrageous the price of a house is nearly not do-able for most people, we are lucky we got in 15 years ago. But we have houses in the neighborhood that have 20-25-30 in them, the undocumented. Doesn't really help the property values or home sales when a little neighborhood has a couple house with 20 cars each attached to them. And what else doesn't help is 120,000 new people to house every month. People don't think when they want to just let them all in.

Glad to see 3 cities in Az made the most affordable list! Unfortunately Tucson has gotten very expensive and both my adult children complain about rent increases in the last 2 years. Tucson is becoming a playground for rich students and retirees and normal working people are getting pinched. Big tax breaks are given to rich investors who build mega student housing complexes for the U of A and it has decimated the downtown area with bars and overpriced restaurants AND out of this world rents. We who live downtown must pay huge taxes for the PRIVILEGE of living close to these fancy bars and complexes.

Quit complaining and make a change in your circumstances. Do not think you must accept a state of affairs that prevent you from building wealth and getting tranquility in your daily life.

Having lived in an up and coming expensive market (Denver), an expensive market (San Diego) and a fairly reasonable market (Fort Collins) it has been my personal impression that most people who don't own a home are paying more than 30% of their income in rent in all three places. It seems to be a natural tendency to challenge the basis of the comparison; "oh failing to take into account X, or Y income is actually higher," but this seems to be an easy way to avoid accepting the reality of the situation. According to Pew (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/19/more-u-s-households-are-renting-than-at-any-point-in-50-years/) 36.6% of US households were renters in 2017. Simultaneously, according to CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/most-americans-dont-have-the-savings-to-cover-a-1000-emergency.html) 60% of Americans don't have $1000 for an emergency. This degree of financial instability is easy for me to reconcile with the premise of this article: most people can't afford their rent.

Isn't comparing median income with average rent, rather than median-to-median or average-to-average, a pretty glaring and seemingly intentional error?

I can actually feel sorry for the folks who get a big promotion to NYC from a less costly city. I never met one person in 60 years who said the view was worth the cost even if they lived in NJ, CT or on LI.

As Yogi taught us, it's deja vu all over again. Back in the 1970 general period, rigid rent regulations, welfare almost destroyed NYC. Landlords left in droves. Now it is the opposite, landlords have become robber barons, tenants paying outrageous rents, regulated tenants harassed out etc. etc. The answer is to find the happy medium and not let the extremes take over.

I don't get the point of articles like this one, which could be written every day. Most people choose to live in these expensive cities and, with eyes wide open, make sacrifices to do it. Young people nearly always live above their means. If they wanted to be flush in Wichita they'd move there. More stories, please, about corrupt housing officials and wage workers who commute to their Manhattan McDonald's jobs from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Is it a news flash that if you want to be part of today's exalted Brooklyn it's going to cost you?

In 1980 I worked on an affordable housing initiate in California. The trend was clear: in most parts of the US the supply of rental housing was declining. In many areas the majority of people under 40 were paying close to 50% of their income toward their rent or mortgage! We came to the conclusion that the only viable strategy for addressing the crisis of affordable housing is the creation of limited-equity housing --both rental and mortgage based. In the last 40 years, there have been a very small number of such programs initiated. (Stanford University has created what is essentially a limited equity mortgage plan for new faculty who cannot afford to buy homes in the Palo Alto area.) The cost of housing is the major cause of financial insecurity for young couples. Many 20-something young workers ( your friendly coffeehouse baristas) are living at home because of high rents. There are countries in Scandinavia that have created successful limited-equity housing markets that function in parallel to the open, investment oriented housing markets. Unfortunately, this issue is not on the political radar in the United States (of Financial Insecurity).

I was a bit surprised to find Plano here. All to the good. I think Plano shows up for TWO important reasons. The city of 300,000 has built a lot of affordable rental housing over the past 15-20 years to keep pace with its excellent job growth and wage strength. Its city management and its property investors have delivered in tandem. That said, the restaurants have gotten expensive.

Portland, OR is no different. My rent is way under market for what it is and where it is, by virtue of the 2008 recession, and it is just a hair short of 50% of my take home pay. This is going on everywhere, not just NYC, or USA.

You forgot to include ONE BIG FIGURE - the Median Income for those areas If a couple earns $175,000 and lives in Manhattan, based on the 30% rule of thumb, they should be able to afford a $4375 apartment. I have no idea what numbers are being used here as a baseline for NYC? Having looked, there are plenty of 2BR apartments in Manhattan that are at or even below, this range. I suggest you edit the article and include the actual median income numbers to give people a clearer understanding of what these numbers really mean.

Well, let's be wary of the usual apples vs oranges problem. RentCafe blog appears to get rent data from an outfit called YardiMatrix, a commercial real-estate services firm specializing in 50+ unit apartment buildings, which probably excludes municipally-managed properties and thus (at least in Brooklyn) skews heavily to the larger, newer buildings in hotspot neighborhoods. So by comparing an average of "elite" rents with broader income averages from the census, the result is ... not actually useful at all.

I would be interested in seeing this analysis done in DC. I've paid over 30% of my income to live in a bedroom of a run-down house shared with 4 other people.

Is it any wonder so many young people need to move back home after finishing higher education! Makes me wonder how my grandchildren will manage.

What you can afford is only half the equation. What is available to rent at what you can afford is more important. Also, additional expenses like heating and commuting costs should be factored into the process as well as the cost of living in the locale.

Count Seattle on the list of unaffordable housing areas. My rent, which is "normal" for this market, is right around 50% of my income. My income is slightly below median, but "median" is skewed here by a lot of extremely wealthy people, due to tech and real estate.

When I see all the people staring at the listings in the windows of the real estate offices here in Brooklyn Heights, I always tell them, "If I didn't already live here, I couldn't afford to live here!"

No question NYC is an expensive town to live in. But, as others have noted, an across-the-board way of estimating income doesn't account for local variables. The cost of a car (payments, gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) compared to public transit, along with NYC's relatively low residential real estate tax, cheaper (and better!) produce, and a few other factors make NYC less formidable than many make it out to be.

If I had to buy my co-op now, I wouldn't be able to afford it. Luckily, I bought it 28 years ago, so my cost of living is far more reasonable than anything in this article.

As a former New Yorker, I am finding it much more expensive to live in Cincinnati OH than I ever did in my 15+ yrs in NYC. Poor public transportation means I must have a car, gas and maintenance (esp. given the lack of infrastructure attention that has turned many of the streets into a game of Dodge the Pothole), lower pay, higher property taxes, higher costs for entertainment, limited options that limit one´s abilities to shop around for the best bargains, whether on food, entertainment, etc. Sure, Cincinnati has its charms or else I'd have left it asap once the bills started rolling in, but articles like these don´t capture reality.

Hard to imagine living anywhere I can afford...

This doesn’t take into account transit costs. When I lived in NJ, I paid about $1,000 in rent and $750/month for a car (including depreciation and maintenance costs). In Manhattan, I pay $1550 in rent and about $100/month between subways and uber when I have to leave my neighborhood. Financially, it’s about a wash.

Would someone like to tell me how 8 million people live here ? According to this NYC should be a ghost town.

I cannot afford to sneeze in Manhattan!