New York by the Numbers

Monthly Economic and Fiscal Outlook

A Message from the Comptroller

Dear New Yorkers,

As the New York State legislative session begins in Albany, housing affordability remains one of the biggest economic challenges facing the metro region.

Last year, the governor and the legislature failed to reach a deal on housing. I hope this year will be different. We need more housing production across income levels, stronger tenant protections to keep people in unregulated housing from being displaced, and more housing vouchers to help low-income and homeless New Yorkers afford to find their way home.

In this month’s Spotlight, we begin a multi-issue look at the housing market by reviewing the dynamics of the rental market since the beginning of the pandemic. Though median asking rents first dipped as people fled the city, they have since skyrocketed to their highest levels ever – with asking rents now at $3,500 per month citywide.

This has exacerbated the housing struggles of unregulated tenants facing rent increases; of New Yorkers looking to find new apartments (e.g. growing families who need more space, young people moving out on their own, homeless families seeking to leave shelter); and of those moving here for jobs and opportunities – from across the country or the continent.

And while economists continue to debate their overall impact, the data here strongly suggest that NYC’s rent regulation programs and large stock of subsidized housing allow us to retain a large number of low, moderate, and middle-income residents who would otherwise have been priced out of the city long ago.

In future Spotlights, we’ll take a look at the question of housing supply/development in recent decades, and its relationship to availability and affordability, and the for-sale/ownership market.

As usual, we also present this month’s economic data. While job growth in NYC has been relatively slow in recent months, the good news is that new unemployment claims have been low. The end of the film and TV industry strikes is a promising sign for 2024. And though much of the recent job growth has been concentrated in lower-wage industries, new data indicate that real output (GDP) for NYC’s higher-wage industries grew in each year of the pandemic, with cumulative growth of 11% over three years.

We’ll keep watching the numbers (even when the rent is too damn high),

Brad Lander

View the Full November Economic Newsletter

Spotlight:

NYC's Rental Housing Market

This month’s Spotlight zeroes in on New York City’s housing rental market, which is unique in many ways relative to other cities across the nation. More than two in three homes are renter-occupied, and about half of those are subject to regulation that caps rent levels. Still, we find that affordability is a widespread problem with more than half of renters seeing more than 30% of their income consumed by housing.

A cross-city comparison reveals that affordability is even more of a challenge in many major cities, suggesting that New York City’s situation could be even more daunting if not for rent regulation. One might have thought that the post-pandemic dip in the city’s population would at least alleviate the situation somewhat, but this does not seem to have been the case.