New York City remains one of the world’s wealthiest cities, consistently ranking at the top for its concentration of millionaires. It maintains top global rankings with 384,500 millionaires and many billionaires, according to the latest report by Henley & Partners and New World Wealth. The San Francisco Bay Area, which encompasses Silicon Valley, ranked second on the list with 342,000 millionaires. When it comes to housing, New York City’s average monthly rent is around $5,236, and the median home price is approximately $1.67 million. A single adult needs to earn roughly $137,000 annually to live comfortably in the city. These are prohibitive numbers and make New York City almost completely unaffordable for many young people trying to find places to live. As buyers and renters look for places to live, many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs that were once working- and lower-middle-class become more expensive and gentrified.
One can just look at the rising rents and house prices in neighborhoods of Queens like Astoria. Once a flourishing Greek neighborhood, immigrants from a variety of backgrounds began to move in as the Greeks became mobile and headed for Bayside, Little Neck, and Long Island suburbs. Those who replaced the Greek communities were mostly Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, South and East Asians, and Eastern Europeans. On one major street, Steinway, North African immigrants opened hookah bars, halal restaurants, and various other businesses that serve their fellow immigrants. Another change in Astoria’s population has occurred as young people from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Midwest have moved in. They are attracted by the neighborhood’s cheaper rent, easy and quick access to Manhattan, safety, nightlife, and diversity. As they arrive, the cost of living in Astoria rises, and the rents of apartments increased about 10 to 20 percent. Astoria is on its way toward being unaffordable for an immigrant and working-class population.
Brooklyn is the borough most profoundly affected by rising real estate prices and gentrification. Upscale stores have replaced long-standing ethnic and neighborhood stores, and many new co-op apartment and condominium buildings have gone up. Williamsburg is one neighborhood that has undergone rapid gentrification with real estate prices for 2025 projected to continue rising. But that is also true for Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights. Other inexpensive neighborhoods will soon undergo a transformation and begin the gentrification process, putting more pressure on those seeking affordable places to live.
Yes, the wealth of the city is vast in certain neighborhoods (e.g., Tribeca, the Upper East Side) and growing in others. However, while continued economic growth and declining unemployment typically reduce poverty levels, a report from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy finds that the increased cost of living has plunged an additional 100,000 New Yorkers into poverty. As a result, the city’s poverty rate has hit 25 percent—up from 23 per cent last year and nearly double the national poverty rate of 13 percent. Many of these residents cannot afford essentials like housing, food, and healthcare. Another statistic from the same report on New York City poverty makes even clearer the problem: 420,000 kids (26 percent of the city’s children) live in poverty. In addition, New York City is a high-cost city, where a family of four needs to make at least $50,000 just to survive. The city must resist any efforts to cut or eliminate the federal safety net programs on which these families rely, but that is hard to do in the Trumpian era when draconian cuts to social programs have become the rule.
When I write of low-income residents, I am writing mostly about those who are employed or are actively seeking work but still struggle for food and rent costs (not the homeless or those struggling with drug addiction). I see those workers in my Greenwich Village neighborhood delivering food, working behind counters, driving cabs, and working for New York University as guards, cleaners, and skilled workers. Not all of them scuffle economically, but many do, and the substance of their lives is generally invisible to me and others who live in neighborhoods like my own that I often write about. Gentrification abounds in New York City, but the fact is that the city’s persistently high-poverty neighborhoods are tightly clustered and often remain unseen. Roughly half of them lie in the Bronx, which contains only two neighborhoods that are shifting from poverty-ridden to low poverty. The number of high-poverty neighborhoods in the Bronx increased from 148 in 1980 to 156 in 2018. As of 2018, 48 percent of all neighborhoods in the Bronx were high poverty. The median household income in New York City’s high-poverty neighborhoods is less than half that of all other neighborhoods. One-third of individuals 25 and older living in these high-poverty neighborhoods lack a high school diploma. It is clear in New York there are two very different worlds co-existing, and there is little chance that the gulf will be bridged. As John Dos Passos wrote despairingly in his novel “The Big Money” (1936): “All right we are two nations.”