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New York City is the biggest city in the United States, and it has an equally massive real estate market.
Across the city, rents are climbing to historic rates, with an average Manhattan apartment costing more than $3,000 a month. Only San Francisco has a higher average rent than the Big Apple.
At the same time, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are being squeezed out of the housing market altogether and pushed onto the streets.
There are plenty of things about New York's housing market that would make you think twice about moving to the city.
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Here are nine facts that will make you glad you live somewhere else.
More New Yorkers pay rent than the number of people who live in city of Los Angeles
New York is the most populous city in the US, and the majority of residents are paying rent as opposed to owning their own places.
Nearly two-thirds of residents in New York live in rent-occupied units, according to the New York City Department of City Planning. The number of people renting housing units in New York alone is more than twice the national average. Two thirds of New York's 8.5 million residents is still larger than all the 4 million residents in Los Angeles, America's second biggest city.
Yankee Stadium couldn't hold all the New Yorkers who are living in homeless shelters
The average number of people staying in city shelters nightly peaked to a record of nearly 64,000 people in January 2019, according to a report by the Coalition for the Homeless.
That's 17,000 more than the capacity of Yankee Stadium, which can hold 47,309 people.
The coalition projects that the number of homeless people seeking shelter in the city will continue to climb to more than 65,000 by 2022.
Manhattan homes are currently left on the market for an average of four months
Although the New York real estate market can be notoriously competitive, Manhattan homes actually end up staying on the market longer than you might expect.
Across all five boroughs, New Yorkers trying to sell their homes are facing longer and longer wait times to reach final sales, according to StreetEasy Market Reports. Manhattan homes in particular spent an average of 117 days on the market, the highest figure the city has seen in seven years.
Even the cheapest Manhattan neighborhood has an average rent of more than $1,600
The least expensive rents in Manhattan can be found in the neighborhood of Inwood at the northern tip of the island. But even there, residents are still paying $1,623 a month, according to City Realty.
In nearby Washington Heights, renters can find a studio for an average of $1,669, making it the second cheapest neighborhood.
There was only one part of the city where rent actually decreased last year
That would be North Brooklyn, where a surplus of property remained empty as an impending shutdown of the local subway line approached. Rents in the market fell to $3,061, a mere drop of 0.5% from the previous quarter.
Those rents very well may go back up, now that city officials announced the subway shutdown would be partially averted.
Less than a quarter of housing units in Brooklyn are offering cuts on rent
With fewer people buying and more renting, New York landlords have the upper hand, and are less likely to offer markdowns to prospective tenants.
In Brooklyn, rent cuts are down 6.7% from last year, according to a 2019 StreetEasy report. The trend of shrinking rent cuts is true across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Rent cuts dropped to the smallest discount on record in Brooklyn and Queens, each at 3.4% and dipping close to an all-time low in Manhattan at 3.9%.
The percentage of homes for sale is up 11.7%
The total number of homes for sale in Manhattan increased 11.7% year-over-year, according to StreetEasy. Inventory grew across the borough, with Upper Manhattan gaining the largest relative share of new inventory at 18.4%.
More than 1 million New Yorkers are living below the poverty line
NY1 reported in 2017 that 1.5 million New Yorkers were living below the poverty level.
In New York's poorest neighborhoods, many of which are in the Bronx, the homeownership rate is dismal — just 8.8%, compared to 50% for the rest of the metro area.
