We like to talk about our high rent here in New York City, it’s our favorite pasttime behind eating pizza, glaring at that lousy teen holding the subway doors open and loudly letting other cities know that they’re bullshit cities. Still, before we get TOO wrapped up in our problems with the rent, let’s take a moment to be thankful that, per this Citizens Budget Commission report, we don’t have the highest rent or highest rent burden in the country. Let’s all have a party, we guess.
Not that big of a party, because the CBC report contains plenty of bad news, in that our rent is still really high and so is our number of rent burdened people. New York City’s median rent, at $1196/month, is somehow only 6th in the country though, behind San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Washington DC and Boston. Also, our percentage of rental units that are less than $1000 is only the fourth worst in the country, at 37%. We also slipped to 9th place in percentage of households spending more than 30% of their income on rent (51%).
Beyond being not much to celebrate other than not being the worst, there’s one piece of indisputable bad news. New York City also only saw a 5.8% increase in housing stock from 2000 to 2012, which was a growth rate higher only than Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago. Well, we guess it’s disputable whether that’s bad news or not, but since people keep moving here, for now, that’s bad news. Anyway, uh, at least we’re doing better than Philly on that last one.