I've worked at hedge funds for over 10 years, I make FAANG money... and yet, I lived in a 1 bedroom rental without washer/dryer into my mid 30s. Unit hadn't been renovated since the 80s.
My boss did similar until he nearly lost his mind WFH with a working spouse and toddler all running around the room.
Meanwhile my current team is remote and my 24 year old coworker in Miami rents a 2 bedroom with his non-working wife. This is, I cannot stress this enough.. completely unheard of in NYC.
Absolutely. I know plenty of people in their 20s doing this. Living room converted into bedroom, 4 people (including couples), still paying some 2K in rent a month, but hey its manhattan
I mean also roommates, the classic way to cut costs. I think it's interesting because most New Yorkers I know have roommates into their 30s, 90% all of my SF friends don't.
NYC housing quality is, absolutely, dollar for dollar, garbage value. With or without discounting car costs.
My (now) wife & I both got well paying jobs at banks out of college almost 20 years ago. Our entire signing bonuses went to apartment fees & deposits.
We were each in a situation where 1 paycheck per month went to the rent.
Neither of us had a dishwasher, let alone a washer/dryer, central air, any aircon.. etc.
Our buildings had bugs&rats, and walls thin enough to hear neighbors phone calls.
Marrying and moving up to nicer places, we still had no washer/dryer across the next 2 apartments.
Finally when we felt like we had "made it" in our mid-30s, we bought a new condo and finally have a washer/dryer. It cost more than my parents, in-laws, and sister's homes combined.. and then multiplied by two. It has only 2 beds (not 3 like the aforementioned homes). My kitchen has a stove the size of a fisher price play kit, and the oven doesn't fit standard sized baking trays. I have only 1 zone AC which can't manage to keep the different rooms within +/-5F of each other.
I could live like a proverbial king in 95% of the rest of the country on this budget.
If you’re at a FAANG, especially at a $300k+ total compensation, NYC is very livable. In unit washer/dryer might be a stretch, but you can comfortably get a 1BR luxury apartment without much effort in a nice part of Manhattan.
And, frankly, it's nothing new. It was a cliche at least back to the 80s that newly minted grads in finance would deal with tiny rat-infested crap apartments with roommates in Manhattan rather than get something decent in Queens for half the price. Because they couldn't imagine not being in the middle of the action (and most of their friends were the same).
Lots of wall street people rent. Renting is actually a good experience if you're rich and nothing is for sale in Manhattan anyway so there's not much of a choice.
It may be almost unthinkable in high cost of living areas but it's pretty common for even fairly young people to rent a 2BR and use the spare room as an office/hobby room/etc. I know I did after grad school.
It's another problem with this type of comparison though. What's a "typical" apartment for a young professional to rent in a relatively low cost suburb or small city is likely going to be very different from what the same young professional would rent in Manhattan--even if they're paid more in the latter.
I live New York. 5/7 years I’ve been here I haven’t had a wash.
In my experience, an apartment with in-unit goes for 10% more than one without. My rent is 1850/mo and my local friendly laundromat does wash-and-fold for $0.90/lb. The math works out that an in-unit wash just isn’t worth it to me.
Even if you’re lucky enough to afford rent in New York you probably can only afford one or two luxuries. For me I‘ve chosen living alone and windows that get sunlight over things like square footage, location, or a wash.
My daughter has lived in Brooklyn since she graduated from an Ivy, class of 2011. She has a liberal arts degree. She found a job where she started in the mid 30’s. After two and a half years she’s broken 40 but not by much. She works about 60 hours a week. Her last review made her a manager so she gets no overtime. She works in an industry that caters to luxury so the company is setting income records. The money is all flowing to the top. It’s an employers market and the starting salary the company now offers is lower then it was when she started because there are so many college graduates looking for anything resembling a job.
She lived in Park Slope for the first two years, sharing a two bedroom, fifth floor walkup, attic apartment. The entire apartment was maybe 20 x 20 ft with a good part of it of limited use due to the slant of the roof. Rent was $1,500 a month including utilities. It was a great neighborhood though and she really enjoyed her time there.
The apartment building was sold to a luxury developer and the rent was raised to $2,300 a month. The new owners really just wanted the building empty so they could gut it and change it to luxury apartments. We walked by there this past weekend and the place was boarded up.
Her new apartment is a legitimate two bedroom in a clean but very old building on the edges of Boerum Hill. The neighborhood is okay but you need to be aware that two blocks away it starts get dodgy very quickly. The rent is $2,200 + utilities. Her and her apartment mate looked for two months to find the apartment. It was the only thing they could find that was affordable but wasn’t a filthy dump. The leases on the old and new places overlapped by a month and a half but they had to look early because the inventory is so limited.
Real estate in NYC has gone crazy. Manhattan prices are driven by international buyers looking for a place that’s safe. One bedroom apartments in Manhattan for less than a million are becoming scarce according to the NYT. Brooklyn is priced at what Manhattan was a couple of years ago. The downtown area of Brooklyn has been very popular because of the availability of mass transit to get people into their jobs in Manhattan. As you move out from downtown Brooklyn the commute time increases quickly as subway lines spread out and express trains make less frequent stops. Two to three hours a day on a subway commute becomes old very quickly.
NYC is a great place but unless you have some equity in the place you work you’re very likely not going to be able to afford to have the life you think is waiting for you there.
I'm curious about the median income in NYC for those on rent control and those without it. You need to remember that most tech entrepreneurs in the city probably moved there within the last few years and therefore don't have the benefit of 10-20 year old rental rates.
But think about the long run: Roommates are great until you hit age 30 or so and settle down and get married and maybe have kids (no pressure here Sean!). At that point Manhattan becomes painful unless you are married into money. Now you could move out to Brooklyn or your startup can avoid older employees (which is illegal), but if you grow your company to over ten people you can hit those issues pretty quickly. Also it's a spectrum -- Manhattan on $60 can work while being in NYC on $25k is a nightmare.
Living in NYC isn't cheap, and unlike other cities, the housing quality is old and terrible.
For a tiny studio in a shabby 100 year old prewar walkup tenement building in Manhattan, you're looking at a minimum of $2,000/month. Most people pay $1,400+/month to live in old converted apartments (ie. putting up a wall to turn the living room into another bedroom) with roommates, and often the bedrooms are too small to even have room for a desk, and the window faces directly into another building (if there even is a window). In these buildings you're not going to have AC (meaning you need to buy a window AC unit), a dishwasher, trash compactor, elevator, and all the other luxuries we take for granted anywhere else in the modern world. I spent 3 years in one of these buildings, and the apartment was perpetually too hot (even in the winter), and there was nothing I could do because heat in the unit was not controllable. Apparently this is fairly normal in these buildings.
If you want to live anywhere nice and somewhat modern that isn't a dump, you're looking at a minimum of $3,000/month for a studio, $4,000/month for a 1BR, etc.
And want to buy a place? You're looking at a minimum of $500k for any studio that isn't a total piece of crap, and they're going to want a 20% down payment. And who wants to raise a family in a studio?
Lived in Manhattan for 6 years 2011-2017 in The East Village. Made about half that. 1 roommate. 2 bedroom. Occasionally worked a side job (tutoring) but was for extra cash more than necessity. I was working in the live music industry so I had free access to a lot of live shows around town which allowed me to save money but still do the things that make living in NYC Great.
It’s very possible.
Was kind to my landlord, and tried to fix whatever I could rather than calling her when I needed something. The goal was to have her forget I existed. Rent was raised $50 every other year which was completely manageable.
these are not 'normal' rentals and imo should be excluded from stats, since they don't apply to typical families living year-to-year in nyc
a majority of those are short-term entire floor/home rentals, often rented out for less than a month at a time, to be used for production companies putting up A-listers for the length of a project, or even used as the set itself: sometimes the listing will say 'used for the filming of y reality show in 20xx!' like a selling point
The block in brooklyn where my grandmother used to rent a studio for $700 a month 15 years ago now has a bunch of closet sized apartments listed for $1-2mil with the cheapest apartments renting for $3,500. It's not hard to imagine why people making a few 100K in big cities don't feel rich.
And yet NYC still has some of the highest rent in the country. For someone making 60k or less it doesn't matter much if the rent is 2k or 3k a month, it's all totally unaffordable anyway and those people are either pushed further out from where they work, or if they're young they split the rent amongst 2-4 people.
My first job in NYC as a junior engineer a decade ago was 110k plus equity.
I rented a single long hallway-like room basement studio in Chelsea for 2k/month. Good neighborhood if you are a gay man or like art galleries. Recently got the elevated railway turned park going through it as an added benefit.
My girlfriend had a nicer basement studio in the East Village for $2.5k/month. Nice for the younger NYU crowd that likes to go out to bars and clubs like Webster Hall.
Basements are the worst. Your view is bad, your lighting is bad, you smell the garbage all night on garbage days, piled up on the street, and you have bug attacks like ants and termites all summer - that's why they are cheap.
A friend with a studio above ground near City Hall Park in a doorman building with a pool in the basement is paying $5k/month. I know someone paying $8k for a really nice 1 bedroom on a high floor with glass walls in the theatre district.
We were all on the subway in Manhattan, though. The really poor people have to bus over from NJ, or live an hour subway ride away like north of central park like Washington Heights. Those people are just suffering with a long, poor commute to save money, though.
I live in a coop in Manhattan and I would guess at least 30% of the building doesn't live here full time or they are just holding on to the property until we surpass 2008 real estate values (from checking streeteasy and the previous sale price/ask price today). Also this isn't a super luxury place.
My boss did similar until he nearly lost his mind WFH with a working spouse and toddler all running around the room.
Meanwhile my current team is remote and my 24 year old coworker in Miami rents a 2 bedroom with his non-working wife. This is, I cannot stress this enough.. completely unheard of in NYC.
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