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New York City’s Housing Inequality-Class #13-Gerald Lizzo
March 11, 2015 | Leave a Comment
I grew up out on Long Island and currently still live there. I commute to school everyday and thus have no experience living in an apartment in the city. However, I always did know that it is very expensive even if you find a way to share an apartment with friends. But this report really brought to light for me just exactly how expensive renting can be. In class we had discussed how wage growth has been very slow or more accurately, just about stagnant. So, I was particularly surprised to learn that median household income had actually dropped so significantly after the financial crisis in 2008. The median household income dropped around $10,000 from 2008 to 2011 while median gross rent increased by the same amount during the same period.
But what I found to be most surprising was the resulting rise in houses burdened by rent expense. In 2012, more than half the residents of rental households in the city were burdened by the rent they had to pay. More shockingly, over half of them are severely rent burdened. That means more than a quarter of rental households in the city are spending more than half of their entire income on a place to stay. In all honesty, those sorts of expenses make me wonder why some of these individuals do not move somewhere else.
Then the article mentioned vacancy rates. Less than four percent of rental apartments were vacated in 2012. This means despite such high rent expense and significantly lower income growth, all apartments are still being filled. The reality is, if so many are struggling to get by and maintain a place to live, they have no ability to save money or time to spend looking for somewhere else to live. Furthermore, I still believe many are attracted to the city because they see it as a birthplace of opportunity, opportunities they believe they simply will not find anywhere else. In that sense it is ironic because they continue to live in a worse way in the hope for a much better future.
Finally, the report touched on one last point that I think is extremely important and that is the very real and prominent issue of gentrification. The report itself mentions how the median rent for apartments built since 2000 is significantly higher that the median rent for the entire city. Moreover, only twenty-six percent of those apartments were rented for less than $1,000. This is a significant issue that plagues the entire city as a whole. And although the state has tried to stop it by subsidizing low-income housing, once those subsidies end, the units price stabilize at much higher rates relative to the high market. Ultimately, New York City is an area with vast amounts of wealth and opportunity. Thus, it attracts a large number of people to its locale, but only so many people can fit. Only naturally the price of living is going to skyrocket, but in doing so, it is really hurting many of the city’s low-income individuals. Heck, even some individuals who are not comparatively poor by national standards, have a tough time in the city.
The amount of people struggling as a result of the income gap in New York City is increasing and it has become a real issue for the city but what can we do about it? The low-income housing we discussed in our previous class and saw in our previous readings is clearly the result of the wealthy individuals coming up with a “solution” to the problem. In other words, it is very discriminatory and, in my opinion, kind of mocks the poorer individuals in the city. But who is going to fix this and how are they going to do it?
