New York is expensive, we all know that. But to live comfortably in the Empire State, you need to earn more than $135,000, according to Moody’s. In 2019, the required income was around $111,000, an increase of around 22% in just five years.
Paying a comfortable rent means spending no more than 30% of your income on housing. And that’s becoming increasingly difficult across the country because rents are high and incomes don’t always keep up. In Massachusetts, for example, you have to earn more than $113,000 to afford rent. But the “median household income in New York and Massachusetts states is not enough to live comfortably in an average-priced apartment,” according to a Moody’s analysis.
In California, you need to earn around $95,000 to pay your rent without getting into rent-burden territory, and surprisingly, the median income in the state is a bit higher. But even so, renters struggle—according to the Public Policy Housing Institute of California, California renters spend more than half their income on rent than renters in all but two other states.
The remaining most expensive areas are: New Jersey, Washington, DC, Hawaii, Washington, Connecticut, Illinois, Florida and Virginia, where the income required to comfortably rent ranges from about $88,000 to around $69,000.
So here’s the thing: Rents have risen dramatically during the pandemic. In 2022, half of all renter households were considered cost-burdened, a total of 22.4 million renters, the highest number ever. And the number of severely cost-burdened renter households reached an all-time high of 12.1 million that same year. “While rents have been rising faster than incomes for decades, the increase in rents during the pandemic created an unprecedented affordability crisis,” said an earlier report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
But the first half of this year saw a reversal – rents fell while incomes rose. Incomes rose in all metro areas (in fact, in San Francisco they rose by more than 5% due to “a higher than average number of well-paying jobs in the technology sector,” according to Moody’s). Rents, on the other hand, fell in 45% of metro areas. That’s not to say that things are going well in the rental world – they’re not. The rent-to-income ratio has eased somewhat nationwide. But it’s still higher than it’s been in the last two decades. So there are several metro areas that still suffer from astronomically high rents.
In the New York metropolitan area, the rent-to-income ratio is nearly 58%; in Miami, it’s nearly 37%; and in Los Angeles, it’s about 32%. The list goes on: Northern New Jersey, Flagstaff, Naples, Boston, Westchester, and Palm Beach are all above that 30% threshold.
“Housing shortages and the attractiveness of the densely populated city center caused the average rent in the New York metropolis to rise by almost 2% over the course of the year,” the analysis says, to an all-time high of almost $4,200. However, incomes rose by 1.4%, “the slowest increase of any major metropolis.”
What’s next? Moody’s says, “Nominal income will continue to grow faster than rents, improving the rent-to-income ratio over the next few years.” That’s great, but there’s a shortage of millions of homes, and the recent housing boom has peaked. Multifamily housing is declining, and while demand has also cooled, people will always need a place to live, and there’s not much affordable housing – in New York, only about 11% of housing is affordable.
