[HN Gopher] NYC Families Need over $125,000 in Income to Live in...
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NYC Families Need over $125,000 in Income to Live in Any Borough
Author : boh
Score : 30 points
Date : 2026-04-06 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| oldnetguy wrote:
| I know people making less than that but they are getting
| subsidies. It's people who are not poor enough for subsidies and
| not affluent that is getting squeezed
| minhaz23 wrote:
| Hard agree. Cant even qualify for housing connect, medicaid, or
| food stamps - income tax credits if single / no kids - which
| are significant help to quality of life.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I'm outside of NYC, still in NY. As a single person, the 80%
| AGI limit is $49,000 here.
|
| It's actually kind of painful to be barely above 100% AGI and
| not be able to get secure 'quality' housing up here.
| Everything that's being rehabilitated is focusing on low
| income (sub-80% AGI) limits, and everything else up here
| is... dire to rent. We have no real protections or anything
| in place up here, let alone an attempt to register rental
| properties that can go through without landlord revolt.
|
| And tax credits - that was amazing when I filed my taxes
| through NY's direct file during the IRS pilot. I was given a
| "great news!" screen where it boasted that I qualified for
| exactly $0 for every single tax credit on offer because I
| couldn't own property or have a family.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. People in the middle are always squeezed the hardest, and
| $125k is just the baseline and is below survival in NYC.
|
| You have to cut on almost everything to keep most of that money
| every month. Might be fine for those without families, but for
| a typical family of 2 or 3 would need double that salary and
| employers will look at that cost and will scrutinize that and
| ask:
|
| _" How do we get that 'cost' (you) significantly reduced?"_
|
| That is even before talking about "AGI" which is actually an
| excuse for layoffs (and reposting old jobs at a lower salary
| and off shoring those jobs) in disguise.
|
| So it is more like the middle-class and especially families are
| getting squeezed the most in NYC and have no choice but to
| leave the US.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Or like. Don't live in the 2nd most expensive city in the
| country? Lot of daylight between NYC and having to leave the
| country.
|
| Waves from the middle of Indiana
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Or like. Don't live in the 2nd most expensive city in the
| country?
|
| Well... multiple things here.
|
| If you're in, say, finance, you can't just go and move to
| some flyover state and work remotely. You need to be around
| NYC (US), LON (UK) or FRA (EU).
|
| If you work some service job, say you work retail, okay.
| But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people
| doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move
| away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and
| feces!
|
| It is vitally important for _any_ city to have enough
| adequate housing for _all_ levels of income, otherwise it
| falls apart.
| torben-friis wrote:
| I can assure you there are finance jobs in more than
| three cities in the western world.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| If you're in finance, you earn enough to live in NYC
|
| > imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing
| the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move
| away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and
| feces!
|
| That's not a "the poor middle class folks in NYC need
| help" story, that's a "the rich folks of NYC need folks
| to serve them" story. They're welcome to strategize
| however they like to incentivize people working there.
| Manipulative heartstring tug are not welcome however.
| rainsford wrote:
| I can't find the reference, but I saw a comment recently
| along the lines of, "If you live in a city where the
| people who provide you with services can't also afford to
| live in that city, you don't live in a city, you live in
| an amusement park."
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Many working-class families in NYC have several "welfare
| kings/queens" who have little or no income, claiming huge
| benefits packages from the city, and a few people with
| $150-300k/year union jobs who buy the luxury goods for the
| whole clan. The necessities for the high-earners are generally
| also covered by those benefits packages in the form of shared
| meals and housing. As a result, everyone in the group lives a
| pretty middle-class life despite most of the clan being poor on
| paper. As far as I can tell, this is how a lot of the New York
| working class survives.
| batty_alex wrote:
| You have no idea what you're talking about
| postflopclarity wrote:
| take your asshole misinformation talking points back to 2005
| please. they're not relevant or welcomed here
| henry2023 wrote:
| Not even an LLM could hallucinate this.
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| sounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >"sounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay"
|
| It literally is. Unlike SF, you can actually buy a home within
| an hour commute of NYC around the national median. Transit is
| infinitely better as well.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| Don't worry, just today the mayor has announced a plan to fix it:
|
| https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
| mc32 wrote:
| I worry it may end up like the '70s when poor policy started to
| device large companies to seek greener pastures for their HQ
| and operations elsewhere.
|
| Sometimes politicians think they have them by their noses and
| can turn up reaction to fix ineptitude, corruption or both but
| sadly for the politicians people and businesses can vote with
| their feet.
| collabs wrote:
| This only works if we the people let them. For example, I
| hear about the example of Kansas City -- kcmo vs kcks -- and
| I can't help but wonder, why do we allow companies to do
| this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and
| Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to
| the bottom.
| wat10000 wrote:
| John Nash won a Nobel Prize for exploring that sort of
| question. It's hard.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > why do we allow companies to do this? It should be
| trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come
| together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
|
| This is prisoner's dilemma 101.
|
| Or, less cynically, cities compete in a free market where
| they try to compete for a limited amount of capital
| investment; there's nothing wrong with a city offering more
| attractive terms to be more business friendly, if they so
| wish.
| dangus wrote:
| I love how this thread is talking about bad policy without
| even discussing any aspect of the policy that is bad.
|
| Perhaps we should pull our heads out of the Fox News punch
| bowl to take a breath.
|
| Y'all act like democratic socialist policy can't work even
| though we've spent the last entire history of our country
| trying the exact opposite strategy. Cue the "This is the
| world under communism" memes that are literally pictures of
| the current world under unfettered under-regulated
| capitalism.
|
| The boogeyman of "the businesses will move out of NYC" is
| hilariously out of touch. Where will all these companies get
| the employees they depend on if they move operations to
| Kansas? NYC contains nearly the entire population of Ohio
| within its boroughs. Where do you propose these companies
| find employees if they all leave NYC?
|
| You're making the classic business bootlicking mistake of
| flipping the needs pyramid upside down. We don't need to beg
| for businesses to stick around, businesses literally need
| regular working class people to survive. They are worthless
| without our labor and our dollars as customers.
| guywithahat wrote:
| "With this new program we will be able to measure the problem
| more closely than ever before!" - a NYC bureaucrat somewhere,
| probably
| wat10000 wrote:
| And yet the median household income is only about $87,000. I'm
| skeptical.
| dangus wrote:
| What's there to be skeptical about? It's well known and data-
| confirmed that wealth has been transferred out of the middle
| and lower classes in the last half century or so.
|
| The people who are making below the median make things work by
| living in public or rent controlled housing, getting a heck of
| a lot of roommates, or living in single room apartments with
| shared bathrooms.
| sethev wrote:
| I don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look
| at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median
| household income is $87k, which means that the majority of
| households are well below the income level it takes to live
| there.
|
| That stresses me out just to think about it.
| dangus wrote:
| This is pedantic but mathematically that is not what that
| means. The word "majority" is not correct in your statement.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Huh? 87k is the median, not mean, so majority would be
| perfectly accurate....?
| kritiko wrote:
| Majority is correct if you go by the $125k figure (which is
| skewed by public listing data, I'm sure)
| api wrote:
| This baffles me too. I don't understand how "normal" people let
| alone lower income people live in places like SF/SV, NYC, etc.
| The math doesn't math.
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