Can You Afford to Live in NYC? This List Shows the Only Affordable Apartments

Written by

Ana Luisa Suarez
Ana Luisa Suarez
Writer, editor, passionate cat and dog collector."Did I just spend $300 in Target without blinking?" – Phrase most likely to be quoted on my tombstone
published Apr 29, 2018
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(Image credit: littleny)

Living in the city is not cheap. Any adult who has even glanced at the numbers knows this. You don’t have to crunch data to understand spending $900-1,800 a month to share an apartment is kind of insane. Still, when there’s a plan in place for affordable housing in New York, we should expect it, right? Maybe not.

Mayor Bill de Blasio created the Housing New York plan, which has to goal to build or preserve 200,000 affordable units in the five boroughs – Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. It was created as a five-borough, 10-year plan and apparently, it is expected to finish 2 years early.

The folks over at Curbed NY did the data to see which units are actually affordable and who they’re affordable for. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) recently released an interactive map that shows every building with units that count toward the Housing New York plan.

According to Curbed NY, “For example, a family of three needs to earn between $65,250 and $97,920 to apply for a moderate-income unit, when a family of five must earn between $78,300 and $117,480, according to 2016 metrics from HUD.”

The results they found were that 30% of affordable units were not affordable to a 2-person household, 24% were not affordable to a 3-person home, and 28% were not feasible for a 5-person family. To give more perspective, to even qualify for these units, a 2-person household needs an income of above $36,250.

See every single building in Manhattan mapped with this new tool.https://t.co/A2pVZIELod pic.twitter.com/CViWAIG7Sx

— Curbed NY (@CurbedNY) April 28, 2018

Anyone trying to move out on their own who isn’t making the salary of a 2-income household simply cannot afford this type of housing.

Another result found by Curbed NY based on the data is:

Despite the city’s focus on low-income neighborhoods, only 15 percent of Housing New York units—13,276 units to date—serve the extremely low-income band; citywide, 516,000 of those households are rent burdened.