Recently we went grasping for straws in the conversation around Brooklyn’s expensive rent and came out with this one: Brooklyn is only the second-most expensive U.S. city in which to raise a family. We’d go diving back in that rhetorical straw today, but screw it we’ll give it to you straight: a new map from the people at StreetEasy shows that you’d have to make over $20 per hour in order to afford paying the median rent by yourself in every single Brooklyn neighborhood.
So, will you ever live alone and be free of roommates who are in the bathroom just at the same time that you really need it? Well, that depends. If you make minimum wage, no, and according to the StreetEasy map, you probably can’t live here at all without a second job. If you make three times the minimum wage, than maybe you could kind of afford your own place. StreetEasy defined “affordable” rent as rent that will cost you 40% of your yearly income (which even then means you’re still technically rent burdened), and found a range of hourly wages you’d have to make to afford rent on your own around Brooklyn, all of them high.
You’d have to make $56.54/hour to afford DUMBO, $41.19/hour for Greenpoint, $23.31/hour for Bay Ridge and $24.07/hour for Sheepshead Bay, just to name a few examples picked at random. So sure on the one hand Brooklyn remains an unaffordable nightmare realm where you really wish that something like the Brokelyn Rent Book actually existed. On the other hand, a candy store selling gummy bears made with real Champagne is opening two locations in New York, so uh…well…some people are doing well we guess.