“I can pay $1,200 on a mortgage on a condo in Philly. That’s not even close to how much I currently pay in rent on my studio in Williamsburg.”
My people, it’s not that I wasn’t aware of the rising rent costs in New York City. I was keenly aware of such a shift when I was in my old, and first, apartment in the swanky Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn in 2006. Perched next to a dirt lot that was prepping for a 15-story high rise with all the amenities one would expect from a state-of-the art 15-story high rise, and a stone’s throw away from a bigger dirt lot on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues prepping for the Barclays Center, my landlord gave me a heads up six months into my residence—on a two-year lease—that he wanted to raise the rent on me from $1,100 to $1,250. Trust me, when you’re making well under $50,000 a year, which means you’re taking home a little over $1,200 after taxes bi-weekly, that $150 increase can prove as taxing on your pockets as a 5-foot woman with DDs going under the knife to sport a brand new set of H-cup rib cushions. So, when my colleague told me about her grandiose plan to escape NYC for cost-friendly pastures, I didn’t even bat an eye. I wished her luck and made a pact that I’d crash on her couch if I ever become destitute.
The reality is simple: the rent is too damn high—word to Jimmy McMillan. The Big Apple is proving to be so unlivable that in order to survive with just enough left to hopefully buy Ramen Noodles and Chicken of the Sea for a week, you’d have to, a, start an underworld drug cartel to supplement income or, b, take on multiple jobs that would make you a living breathing member of the “Hey Mon” sketch on In Living Color. And if you choose either path, it probably still won’t be enough to afford that lovely 600-square foot studio apartment, complete with a toilet in the bathtub (this really does exist) in a neighborhood that has been revamped and rebooted not only by area, but also by name (ahem, East Williamsburg is Bushwick, damnit!) like it’s the putrid Fantastic Four franchise.
That’s why when amNewYork (you know, the free city newspaper that you still won’t take from hawkers by train station entrances) reported that “the poorest New Yorkers, those making minimum wage can’t afford the median rent in any city neighborhood,” and that making anywhere between a whopping $44 to 21.26 per hour would be enough to pay for the median rent, I didn’t even bother to spit out my morning cup of Tanqueray and OJ in amazement. And yet, even though Albany finally decided to raise minimum wages for fast-food employees from $8.75 to $15 per hour, by the time that fully kicks in, in 2018, you could very well have the fries cook, with seared forearms from the three-day old grease those tasty morsels with no expiration date stew in, living out the back seat of their car. Which is what some city workers are doing, as the New York Post recently reported. It’s a sad state of affairs when the men and women, who are essentially the lifeblood of this beautiful city, can’t afford to live comfortably off of their paltry $30,000 salary in their native hometown that has a median rent of $2,690 a month.
And the surging rent prices aren’t just affecting the lower class and the scorched earth known as the middle class. Even 20-year-old millennial millionaires aren’t down for the bullshit.
“You can live in a nice, three-bedroom condo with all that in Dallas for like two-thousand bucks. Three-bedroom, three-bathroom in New York, you’re paying eight grand. It’s ridiculous.”—Rondae Hollis-Jefferson
Rondae Hollis-Jefferson was selected 23rd overall in the last spring’s NBA Draft, by the Portland Trailblazers only to be traded minutes later to the Brooklyn Nets. Being drafted that low means that the Chester, Pennsylvania native has a rookie salary of $1.33 million (the number one pick, Karl Anthony Towns will make $4.7. How that for disparity?). For those math majors out there, RHJ is making roughly $625 an hour to dribble a ball up and down the Nets’ Herringbone court, and still he says he needed to enlist two roommates so his bank account doesn’t take a nosedive like Jeb Bush’s standing in the Republican polls.
So, what’s the solution? Sadly, there is none. As the allure of being a New Yorker continues to grow—thanks to the glamorization of being such through media, crappy television (that Sex and the City spinoff, The Carrie Diaries??? GTFOH!) and all things social media—landowners will continue to have eyes bigger than their stomach. Which only means a ridiculously high rent price will be set, just because your food-chain neighbors of a Starbucks, a Chipotle and an organic food store where you can buy artisanal butter will all be under construction on one city block. I have friends who are homeowners-slash-landlords, and even I give them the side-eye when they tell me how much they charge for rent. Capitalism! I get it. And if I were ever in their shoes, I would probably do the same. Because…Money! But if living costs consistently increases at breakneck speed but job wages remain to exhibit quicksand-like behavior, no amount of organic cream cheese will prevent native New Yorkers—who wax poetic about when a two-bedroom apartment would fetch for only $700 in 1995—and transplants, too, from being phased out from the only home that they know and the home they’ve adopted.
Time to look for greener…cost-friendly pastures.
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