Rents in New York City have been rising rapidly even as tens of thousands of people are millions of dollars behind on rent, a new report finds.
On Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, New York’s new governor, said she would move to bolster the state’s beleaguered effort to distribute pandemic rent relief, underlining the plight of struggling New Yorkers who are facing the risk of being evicted.
However, on the same day, Zumper, which is an apartment rental site, published a report showing a very different trend.
Following a market rebound, New York City had surpassed San Francisco, becoming the most expensive place to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the nation.
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Meanwhile, data from July from the listing site Zillow, while still naming San Francisco the more expensive place to rent, showed no gap between the two cities since March 2020 with New York City is only about 4 percent behind.
Rising rents and continuing, the widespread economic pain is symptomatic of New York City’s longstanding issues with inequality and of how the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic has, somewhat, been uneven.
The increases in rents have been caused in part by the return of people to more expensive neighborhoods in New York City, and specifically, Manhattan, where rents had fallen during the pandemic, according to analysts.
However, the desperate need for rent relief is most severe among lower-income residents in the city in parts of the South Bronx or Queens.
“It really is a tale of two cities when it comes to New York City — when we talk about rent rising rapidly, we’re really talking about some of the most expensive areas like Manhattan,” said Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy, which is owned by Zillow.
According to an analysis of census data from late June and early July, more than 830,000 households in New York State, the majority in New York City, we’re behind on rent, with a total estimated debt of over $3.2 billion.
The analysis by the National Equity Atlas, which is a research group associated with the University of Southern California, also showed that almost half of the renters in those households were out of work, and over three-quarters earned less than $50,000 a year.
At the same time, the rollout of New York’s rent relief effort has been slow and full of errors.
