Hacker News Reader

Comment by aioprisan | Hacker News Reader

This article is patently wrong in its data representation. And by the way, the data is from 2010. It cites a "citizen's budget report." Rent for a typical household in NYC is $14k? Where can you rent out an apartment in NYC for $1160/month for a "typical regional household"? This is completely absurd. Are these "regional households" different in family size across cities? Is that normalized for in these graphs? How is this "Total income for a typical household" computed? Is that an average or mean? Even then, with a $20k housing and transportation bill with only $62k of income, how is that doable? In NYC, a $62 income only takes home $42k, $20k of which will go to housing and transportation, if you only take public transportation and it is always available to you. Get real.

View on HN

> "Rent for a typical household in NYC is $14k? Where can you rent out an apartment in NYC for $1160/month for a "typical regional household"?"

NYC is bigger than Manhattan. The parts of Brooklyn and Queens that aren't filled with rich people (i.e. most of it), as well as the Bronx and Staten Island, are not nearly as expensive as what you might be used to.

Not to mention statistical sampling of rents is always going to skew lower than market because of rent stabilization and rent control - it measures how much people are paying, not how much they would be if they were on the market today.

NYC is 8.5 million people, only ~1 million of whom live in Manhattan.

I haven't looked at the data itself, but if their measure of NYC is the NYC Metro (rather than the city proper), rents will go down too, since now we're including most of North Jersey and a lot of Long Island.

Part of the issue here that is not measured is just how fan into Staten Island would you have to go to find a household for ~$1100 what what does that income to time spend on travel ratio look like? This study says nothing about how far away they would have to live to normalize for this, as different cities have different transportation systems access and the time spent on travel is a considerable component of your happiness, which is obviously not calculated here. Nowhere did I mention Manhattan, but even in Queens or Brooklyn you will be hard pressed to find apartments at those price points available. Since when is Jersey included in NYC housing statistics? Can you point to where that is stated in the linked article? Ridiculous.

I fully agree. And besides being outdated, this article totally matches the expression: "Torture numbers and they'll confess to anything".

Agreed, and where can I get a 2Br apartment in SF for $1950? (30% of a $78,000 salary)

I hate to stick my head up, but I pay less than that for a 2Br in the Mission (I moved in about a year ago). It's not luxurious, but it'll do.

The missing piece is that (relatively) cheap real estate is not advertised, you need to get it from a friend who's leaving SF. It can be frustrating sometimes that good apartments are allocated by seniority (how long you've lived here & who you know) rather then by the free market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com