And presumably other high rent areas.
Google tells me, in NYC, the average salary is $69k (seems low but that’s what it says). The same tells me that the average rent is ~3.7k/month.
After taxes insurance etc, net salary would be somewhere in the upper $40k range. Let’s say $49k for fun.
Average rent would be $44k over a year.
With other prices in NYC being what they are, how do people live on $5k? Even a few roommates deep this isn’t adding up to me.
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The problem you’re having is that you’re only looking at averages while also assuming everyone who works in NYC actually lives in NYC. If you can only afford $500 each month for rent, you can easily find a place with roommates outside of NYC in a place like Jersey City, or another suburb.
Averaging values can be almost meaningless. If you have one person making $1 and and another is making a million they average $500,000.50
One of them is homeless.
Median values would be more meaningful in this situation.
Median family income was $67,000 in 2020, individual was about $36k
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/realestate/manhattan-rent-nyc.html
Rent is about $5000 a month. So 60k$ for rent and not much left.
Because people make it work, and also the numbers you’re seeing are kind of misleading.
Suppose that 5% of the employees in NYC are earning minimum wage. I don’t know if that’s the real number, I just made it up. But let’s suppose it’s correct. At 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that’s just over $30,000 a year. How would somebody like that afford rent in New York City, when the average rent is so high?
Well, for one, because most of them are teenagers who live with their parents. Or they are young adults and they have a bunch of roommates. Or they live just outside of the city and they commute every day. Or because they live in the absolute cheapest place they can find, which is below the “average” rent cost.
But number-wise, you still have 5% of the salaries being minimum wage (or below, for waitresses their cash minimum is only $12.50 in NYC), which probably brings down the average pay a bit.
Yeah, it’s crazy expensive to live in a lot of these places. But people are obviously making it work, because otherwise they’d leave. If you work at McDonald’s in Manhattan, and you seriously *can’t afford* a place to live, why would you stay? They have McDonald’s in Tulsa.
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