Most NYers make less than what's needed to rent in NYC: report

You are probably all too familiar with this NYC landlord requirement: tenants are required to make at least 40 times the monthly rent to secure that apartment. But for how many New Yorkers is this actually an attainable criteria? Not many, argues StreetEasy in a new study based on median income and rent in various neighborhoods across the city.

StreetEasy looked at median rents in various neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, and then compared it with the median income in each borough respectively, to determine how affordable that quintessential NYC landlord tenet really is.

One of the most startling discoveries from the study was that in 21 neighborhoods in those three boroughs, you’d have to make more than 100 percent of the borough-wide median income to afford an apartment.

Among the three boroughs, Manhattan was the most and least expensive based on StreetEasy’s metric. In the Central Park South area, residents would have to make $274,000 annually to afford an apartment, that’s 253 percent above the borough’s median household income of $77,559. Yes, it’s true that Central Park South is a bastion of wealth, so it’s probably not an issue for the residents who already live there, but it certainly closes it off to a vast number of New Yorkers.

Inwood is the most affordable by this metric. The median rent here is $1,825/month, which puts you at a requirement of $73,000 annually—almost six percent less than the borough-wide median income.

Overall, StreetEasy found that there were just 11 neighborhoods in these three boroughs where the required median income to rent a place was within 15 percent of the borough’s actual median income. Here now is a breakdown of the top three most expensive and least expensive neighborhoods in each of the three boroughs StreetEasy studied.

Also a map of StreetEasy’s study:

• Income Required for NYC Apts Far Exceeds What Most Earn [SE]