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NYC Renters’ Problem – Blog 8 // Sheena Chin
March 16, 2015 | Leave a Comment
For blog post classification sake, this WordPress entry is written in response to the Furman Center piece that informs about New York City’s Housing Problems as of late. To begin with and drawing from my own experiences, I honestly have not been on this Earth long enough to truly have to deal with housing prices or rising rents, and have blissfully left those problems to my parents. From reading this article, I was able to learn a lot about the Renters of New York City who struggle with the burden of rising rents. I remember my parents talking about this issue once when I was younger, and I had overheard them say how relieved they were to have bought ownership of the apartment we live in now, which had fundamentally shielded my family from rising rents. To learn that this was probably not always the case for other families was very eye opening when I went over the statistics.
The most interesting thing I had learned was that “we consider households to be rent burdened if they pay 30 percent or more of their income on rent, and severely rent burdened if they pay 50 percent or more of their income on rent.” Before this article, I had never really considered measuring rent burden based upon income. In another point of view, it was very surprising to learn that some people use half, or even more than half, of their incomes to pay for rent. In the charts at the bottom, Figure 3.5 illustrates that approximately half of the lower income New Yorkers are severely burdened by rising rents, and that number is still growing.
If rents are rising, and if we’re adjusting for inflation, why is it that it continues to rise when incomes have become relatively stagnant? In Figure 3.4, the line graph depicts one solid purple line indicating rising rents that continue to trend upwards, while the solid grey line representing household incomes drops drastically at around the Great Recession of the late 2000. From that point on, rent continues to peak forward, but household incomes still have a long way to catch up. This concerning pattern clearly illustrates why more and more families in New York become impacted due to rent burdens.
Another concern that the article highlights is the fact that the current trend of the construction industry is to build larger than life, and more luxurious than imagination apartment and condominium complexes that most, and I mean MOST, New Yorkers simply cannot afford nor even dream about life in one of those chic, ultra-modern, marble apartments. Referencing the video we watched in class the other day about some of these Manhattan elite vertical mansions, these projects take away the time and resources that could have been devoted to developing more affordable housing in New York’s Five Boroughs.
From this article, I learned that New York City’s renters are facing now, or are about to face, critical rent affordability problems that may drive New Yorkers from their own homes here in NYC. In order to serve the high demand for affordable housing, it makes the best sense to build less skyscrapers, and more homes.
