Sticker shock
MANY New York City neighborhoods are unaffordable for renters, according to a new study.
Real-estate website RentHop compared median two-bedroom asking rents to median household income in about 90 ZIP codes across the five boroughs.
Its number-crunching presumes that spending 40 percent or less of your annual income on rent makes a neighborhood affordable, while shelling out anything more means it’s unaffordable.
Given those criteria, parts of East Harlem (10035 and 10029), the Lower East Side (10002) and Bed-Stuy (11206) end up being most unaffordable, with two-bedroom rents ($2,500 to $3,300) that are high when compared with those areas’ fairly low incomes (from $25,000 to $35,000 per year).
Remember, though, that these figures don’t take into account any subsidized housing that might push down the neighborhoods’ median rents. In addition, asking rents are often more than what renters end up paying when a lease is signed, thanks to negotiations and landlord concessions.
On the other end of the spectrum, according to RentHop’s data, Tribeca (10007) is the most affordable neighborhood, with area renters paying just 28.1 percent of their annual income toward housing. Researchers hasten to explain that surprising finding: Tribeca’s wage earners are so affluent — lucky ducks — that the area’s high housing costs are still affordable for them.
The study found the next most affordable neighborhoods are Hunters Point and Middle Village in Queens (with median two-bedrooms costing 31.6 percent and 31.9 percent of their renters’ annual median incomes, respectively), followed by the Upper East Side (at 32.3 percent).