In mid-May, Paula Sevilla and her roommates joined the many New Yorkers suffering from the city’s devastating housing crisis, which has sent rents skyrocketing amid the pandemic.
The tenants argued their landlord broke rules that required sufficient advance notice, but were ultimately told if they would have to pay an additional $800 a month if they wanted to stay in their Brooklyn apartment.
Seville and a roommate embarked on a grueling search for new housing in a market that has spawned countless housing-hunting horror stories over the past year.
After two months of searching, about 30 apartment viewings, and constant stress, they finally found a two-bedroom apartment for $3,000 a month.
Renting in New York has long been a struggle, but recently costs have skyrocketed, rising an average of 20.4 percent in the second quarter of this year alone, according to apartment-hunting website StreetEasy.
And the search for an apartment is taking longer and longer, queues of applicants are vying for space.
“Once we lost an apartment because we submitted an application four minutes late,” says Sevilla, a 26-year-old Spaniard.
– boiling point –
Draconian requirements for renting in New York are not new: income of 40 times the monthly rent, perfect credit, tax returns from the last two years and current bank balances.
And the city’s housing crisis has simmered for years, with housing unit construction lagging behind a growing population.
Now, as hundreds of thousands of people who fled the city in the early days of the pandemic are returning — along with the normal flow of transplants into America’s cultural and economic nexus — the situation is becoming untenable.
There are “too many customers and too few apartments,” said real estate agent Miguel Urbina.
In some cases, even arriving first or offering more than the asking price to the owners, which are often large corporations or mutual funds, is not enough, especially in Manhattan.
Seville earns $75,000 annually, slightly more than the average salary in New York — but it’s not enough to rent on its own.
In New York, renters are also often required to pay significant brokerage fees to rental agents, generally at least between one month and 15 percent of the annual rental cost.
Many people who stayed in town in 2020 and 2021 signed leases at a discount, but now many landlords are raising those rates again — crowding out more than a third of renters who can’t afford the increases, according to StreetEasy.
Even New Yorkers lucky enough to live in rent-stabilized housing — about a million units and two million renters, according to the city — aren’t immune to the increases.
These rents can only be increased based on a vote by the city’s Rent Policy Committee, whose members are appointed by the mayor.
For eight years under Bill de Blasio, the highest increases were 1.5 percent for one-year leases — but under the board appointed by new Mayor Eric Adams, rents will see the sharpest rise in nearly a decade.
In June, the board approved a 3.25 percent increase for one-year contracts and 5 percent for two-year contracts, which will hit many of the city’s resource-constrained residents and sparked outrage among housing advocates.
– “Amazing financial burden” –
Families in Manhattan spend about 55 percent of their income on rent, a figure that’s 43 percent in Queens and 60 percent in Brooklyn, according to StreetEasy data.
“Rent is becoming an enormous financial burden,” says a recent report by the online real estate portal.
Gia Elika, the owner of a real estate agency, says the average rent in Manhattan is about $5,000 a month — but in a city with severe class segregation, some agencies on Fifth Avenue offer monthly rents of $140,000.
The shocking price tags are driving more middle-class families and young people like Seville to seek housing in neighborhoods historically inhabited by immigrants, Latinos and African Americans, fueling unrelenting gentrification.
Elika told AFP that while there has “always been a shortage of housing” in New York, “it is now increasing with unprecedented prices.”
The New York metro area needed about 340,000 additional units in 2019, according to Washington-based policy research group Up For Growth.
Rising interest rates in the face of rampant inflation have exacerbated the crisis by urging potential buyers to rent in a market “handicapped by historically low inventories,” according to Lee’s report.
Decades-old zoning restrictions limiting building size in some areas are an obstacle, along with construction costs, limited public housing construction and legislative delay, which has left state and local politicians largely deferring resolution of an increasingly pressing problem.
And the outlook is bleak: Much of Manhattan’s skyscraper boom has been for luxury and commercial uses, and despite high-rise construction in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, realtors don’t expect prices to stop anytime soon are going to rise.
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