I know people making less than that but they are getting subsidies. It's people who are not poor enough for subsidies and not affluent that is getting squeezed
Hard agree. Cant even qualify for housing connect, medicaid, or food stamps - income tax credits (single / no kids / no property) - which are significant help to quality of life.
I'm outside of NYC, still in NY. As a single person, the 80% AGI limit is $49,000 here.
It's actually kind of painful to be barely above 100% AGI and not be able to get secure 'quality' housing up here. Everything that's being rehabilitated is focusing on low income (sub-80% AGI) limits, and everything else up here is... dire to rent. We have no real protections or anything in place up here, let alone an attempt to register rental properties that can go through without landlord revolt.
And tax credits - that was amazing when I filed my taxes through NY's direct file during the IRS pilot. I was given a "great news!" screen where it boasted that I qualified for exactly $0 for every single tax credit on offer because I couldn't own property or have a family.
Yes. People in the middle are always squeezed the hardest, and $125k is just the baseline and is below survival in NYC.
You have to cut on almost everything to keep most of that money every month. Might be fine for those without families, but for a typical family of 2 or 3 would need double that salary and employers will look at that cost and will scrutinize that and ask:
"How do we get that 'cost' (you) significantly reduced?"
That is even before talking about "AGI" which is actually an excuse for layoffs (and reposting old jobs at a lower salary and off shoring those jobs) in disguise.
So it is more like the middle-class and especially families are getting squeezed the most in NYC and have no choice but to leave the US.
Sure, there are lots of other places to live in the US that are cheaper. But if you want to live in a true major urban city, the US has managed to produce exactly one of those, with maybe an argument for Chicago followed by a few very distant also rans, despite our size and wealth and the obvious appeal to many people.
As a result, NYC like living is basically out of reach for the majority of the people who might otherwise want it. Nothing against Indiana, but if what you're looking for is bustling megalopolis living, I don't think Indianapolis is going to cut it. And your choices in the US aside from NYC are very limited.
> Or like. Don’t live in the 2nd most expensive city in the country?
Well... multiple things here.
If you're in, say, finance, you can't just go and move to some flyover state and work remotely. You need to be around NYC (US), LON (UK) or FRA (EU).
If you work some service job, say you work retail, okay. But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
It is vitally important for any city to have enough adequate housing for all levels of income, otherwise it falls apart.
I can't find the reference, but I saw a comment recently along the lines of, "If you live in a city where the people who provide you with services can't also afford to live in that city, you don't live in a city, you live in an amusement park."
If you're in finance, you earn enough to live in NYC
> imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
That's not a "the poor middle class folks in NYC need help" story, that's a "the rich folks of NYC need folks to serve them" story. They're welcome to strategize however they like to incentivize people working there. Manipulative heartstring tug are not welcome however.
> But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
Maybe after they have to look at piles of trash everywhere, the employers (I'm guessing that would be the city) will learn to pay them what they are worth.
Many working-class families in NYC have several "welfare kings/queens" who have little or no income, claiming huge benefits packages from the city, and a few people with $150-300k/year union jobs who buy the luxury goods for the whole clan. The necessities for the high-earners are generally also covered by those benefits packages in the form of shared meals and housing. As a result, everyone in the group lives a pretty middle-class life despite most of the clan being poor on paper. As far as I can tell, this is how a lot of the New York working class survives.
I dated someone in one of these families for a very long time, so I'm pretty sure I do know how that family system and the surrounding community operates. This sort of "family commune" living arrangement is very common in lower-income communities with family-oriented cultures (eg working-class hispanic, italian, african american communities), and the tax code amplifies its effectiveness.
I don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median household income is $87k, which means that the majority of households are well below the income level it takes to live there.
This baffles me too. I don’t understand how “normal” people let alone lower income people live in places like SF/SV, NYC, etc. The math doesn’t math. Yet these cities have these people and could not function without them.
People making $80-90K can live a similar lifestyle to the people making $125K+, they just aren't saving any money. I know people that do this, live their whole life with less than $5k in the bank.
I worry it may end up like the ‘70s when poor policy started to device large companies to seek greener pastures for their HQ and operations elsewhere.
Sometimes politicians think they have them by their noses and can turn up reaction to fix ineptitude, corruption or both but sadly for the politicians people and businesses can vote with their feet.
This only works if we the people let them. For example, I hear about the example of Kansas City — kcmo vs kcks — and I can't help but wonder, why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
> why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
This is prisoner's dilemma 101.
Or, less cynically, cities compete in a free market where they try to compete for a limited amount of capital investment; there's nothing wrong with a city offering more attractive terms to be more business friendly, if they so wish.
Some cities can offer perks like an educated workforce, educational institutions of renown, etc to compensate for a heavier tax burden but everyone and every company has a breaking point after which they decide to pull up stakes.
I love how this thread is talking about bad policy without even discussing any aspect of the policy that is bad.
Perhaps we should pull our heads out of the Fox News punch bowl to take a breath.
Y’all act like democratic socialist policy can’t work even though we’ve spent the last entire history of our country trying the exact opposite strategy only to have it not work out at all. The current status quo which is obviously not satisfactory didn’t come from socialists or leftists running the country.
Cue the “This is the world under communism” memes that are literally pictures of the current world under unfettered under-regulated capitalism.
The boogeyman of “the businesses will move out of NYC” is hilariously out of touch. Where will all these companies get the employees they depend on if they move operations to Kansas? NYC contains nearly the entire population of Ohio within its boroughs. Where do you propose these companies find employees if they all leave NYC?
You’re making the classic business bootlicking mistake of flipping the needs pyramid upside down. We don’t need to beg for businesses to stick around, businesses literally depend on regular working class people to survive. They are worthless without our labor and our dollars as customers.
Apparently the rich have already been moving out of NYC: from 2010 to 2022 the percent of people in the US with $1+ million in federal taxable income dropped from 6% to 4% [1]. A whole bunch left during the pandemic (unsurprisingly), according to [2], but it did not say if they came back afterwards. These aren't great articles, just the first that DDG gave me, but it suggests that there may actually be a trend.
People did move out of NYC and companies did move HQs out to NJ and elsewhere.
NYC lots pop during the eighties and didn’t not recover its population till 2000. It was an 8% decline in pop. They went from 125 F500 cos based in NYC down to 61 by 1986. Maybe that’s okay with you if it were to repeat but that’s a lot of a tax base leaving for better pastures.
It literally is. Unlike SF, you can actually buy a home within an hour commute of NYC around the national median. Transit is infinitely better as well.
What’s there to be skeptical about? It’s well known and data-confirmed that wealth has been transferred out of the middle and lower classes in the last half century or so.
The people who are making below the median make things work by living in public or rent controlled housing, getting a heck of a lot of roommates, or living in single room apartments with shared bathrooms.
I'd argue they need significantly more than that, if they're expected to also pay for childcare, healthcare, save for emergencies, etc. This is a polycrisis we absolutely need to take seriously lest cities become cesspools again.
"Move somewhere cheaper" ignores the reality that most good jobs are in cities nowadays, not rural or cheaper areas. It also ignores decades of calculus of the "city to save, suburbs to live" mentality that's been gradually eroded away over decades of housing mismanagement, not to mention serves as a giant middle-finger for folks who, for one reason or another, MUST live in a major city (healthcare, job prospects, career field, etc). Even if someone were to move somewhere cheaper, they'd forfeit their higher salary in the process - which would likely make the newer, cheaper location just as, if not more unaffordable than their city life was; hell, some of us were trying to move somewhere cheaper in the era of remote work, and look how that turned out. Half the planet lives in cities by UN estimates, and "moving somewhere cheaper" is the most cowardly rebuttal of the problem one could muster.
I'm also shrugging off the uninformed whinging about "welfare kings/queens". Reagan couldn't prove it, two Bushes couldn't prove it, Clinton couldn't prove it, Obama couldn't prove it, two Trumps and a Biden couldn't prove it, because they don't actually exist. Talk to people actually on benefits rather than swallow naked pro-austerity propaganda by rich people angry that their tax dollars help the working poor they themselves created in the first place, and they'll tell you how impossibly difficult it is to get benefits in the first place, nevermind keeping them. There's a vastly more evidence supporting the harms of means-testing than any WFA coming from it.
At the end of the day, NYC is not alone in these problems - but is unique in having an openly Democratic Socialist as Mayor, meaning Capital has a vested interest in pinning all the ills to him and astroturfing the same austerity bullshit that worked with Reagan et al to try and defend the problems they caused in the first place. America cannot roll back to an era where six-figure salaries meant you were "rich" and five-figures were the norm, so we need to build an America where said salaries at least cover essentials again and where median incomes can afford median housing.
I know people making less than that but they are getting subsidies. It's people who are not poor enough for subsidies and not affluent that is getting squeezed
Hard agree. Cant even qualify for housing connect, medicaid, or food stamps - income tax credits (single / no kids / no property) - which are significant help to quality of life.
I'm outside of NYC, still in NY. As a single person, the 80% AGI limit is $49,000 here.
It's actually kind of painful to be barely above 100% AGI and not be able to get secure 'quality' housing up here. Everything that's being rehabilitated is focusing on low income (sub-80% AGI) limits, and everything else up here is... dire to rent. We have no real protections or anything in place up here, let alone an attempt to register rental properties that can go through without landlord revolt.
And tax credits - that was amazing when I filed my taxes through NY's direct file during the IRS pilot. I was given a "great news!" screen where it boasted that I qualified for exactly $0 for every single tax credit on offer because I couldn't own property or have a family.
Yes. People in the middle are always squeezed the hardest, and $125k is just the baseline and is below survival in NYC.
You have to cut on almost everything to keep most of that money every month. Might be fine for those without families, but for a typical family of 2 or 3 would need double that salary and employers will look at that cost and will scrutinize that and ask:
"How do we get that 'cost' (you) significantly reduced?"
That is even before talking about "AGI" which is actually an excuse for layoffs (and reposting old jobs at a lower salary and off shoring those jobs) in disguise.
So it is more like the middle-class and especially families are getting squeezed the most in NYC and have no choice but to leave the US.
[flagged]
Sure, there are lots of other places to live in the US that are cheaper. But if you want to live in a true major urban city, the US has managed to produce exactly one of those, with maybe an argument for Chicago followed by a few very distant also rans, despite our size and wealth and the obvious appeal to many people.
As a result, NYC like living is basically out of reach for the majority of the people who might otherwise want it. Nothing against Indiana, but if what you're looking for is bustling megalopolis living, I don't think Indianapolis is going to cut it. And your choices in the US aside from NYC are very limited.
> Or like. Don’t live in the 2nd most expensive city in the country?
Well... multiple things here.
If you're in, say, finance, you can't just go and move to some flyover state and work remotely. You need to be around NYC (US), LON (UK) or FRA (EU).
If you work some service job, say you work retail, okay. But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
It is vitally important for any city to have enough adequate housing for all levels of income, otherwise it falls apart.
I can't find the reference, but I saw a comment recently along the lines of, "If you live in a city where the people who provide you with services can't also afford to live in that city, you don't live in a city, you live in an amusement park."
If you're in finance, you earn enough to live in NYC
> imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
That's not a "the poor middle class folks in NYC need help" story, that's a "the rich folks of NYC need folks to serve them" story. They're welcome to strategize however they like to incentivize people working there. Manipulative heartstring tug are not welcome however.
> But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!
Maybe after they have to look at piles of trash everywhere, the employers (I'm guessing that would be the city) will learn to pay them what they are worth.
I can assure you there are finance jobs in more than three cities in the western world.
Many working-class families in NYC have several "welfare kings/queens" who have little or no income, claiming huge benefits packages from the city, and a few people with $150-300k/year union jobs who buy the luxury goods for the whole clan. The necessities for the high-earners are generally also covered by those benefits packages in the form of shared meals and housing. As a result, everyone in the group lives a pretty middle-class life despite most of the clan being poor on paper. As far as I can tell, this is how a lot of the New York working class survives.
Not even an LLM could hallucinate this.
take your asshole misinformation talking points back to 2005 please. they're not relevant or welcomed here
You have no idea what you're talking about
I dated someone in one of these families for a very long time, so I'm pretty sure I do know how that family system and the surrounding community operates. This sort of "family commune" living arrangement is very common in lower-income communities with family-oriented cultures (eg working-class hispanic, italian, african american communities), and the tax code amplifies its effectiveness.
I don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median household income is $87k, which means that the majority of households are well below the income level it takes to live there.
That stresses me out just to think about it.
This baffles me too. I don’t understand how “normal” people let alone lower income people live in places like SF/SV, NYC, etc. The math doesn’t math. Yet these cities have these people and could not function without them.
> The math doesn’t math.
It maths fine, it's just that the assumptions being input are wrong.
People making $80-90K can live a similar lifestyle to the people making $125K+, they just aren't saving any money. I know people that do this, live their whole life with less than $5k in the bank.
[dead]
Oops I read this wrong.
Majority is correct if you go by the $125k figure (which is skewed by public listing data, I’m sure)
Huh? 87k is the median, not mean, so majority would be perfectly accurate....?
Even 87k is a huge number, is it due to some selection bias?
Oops I read this wrong.
and 87k is quite a bit below 125k.
Don't worry, just today the mayor has announced a plan to fix it:
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
"With this new program we will be able to measure the problem more closely than ever before!" - a NYC bureaucrat somewhere, probably
I worry it may end up like the ‘70s when poor policy started to device large companies to seek greener pastures for their HQ and operations elsewhere.
Sometimes politicians think they have them by their noses and can turn up reaction to fix ineptitude, corruption or both but sadly for the politicians people and businesses can vote with their feet.
This only works if we the people let them. For example, I hear about the example of Kansas City — kcmo vs kcks — and I can't help but wonder, why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
> why do we allow companies to do this? It should be trivial for the people of Kansas and Missouri to come together and say we won't allow a race to the bottom.
This is prisoner's dilemma 101.
Or, less cynically, cities compete in a free market where they try to compete for a limited amount of capital investment; there's nothing wrong with a city offering more attractive terms to be more business friendly, if they so wish.
Some cities can offer perks like an educated workforce, educational institutions of renown, etc to compensate for a heavier tax burden but everyone and every company has a breaking point after which they decide to pull up stakes.
John Nash won a Nobel Prize for exploring that sort of question. It’s hard.
I love how this thread is talking about bad policy without even discussing any aspect of the policy that is bad.
Perhaps we should pull our heads out of the Fox News punch bowl to take a breath.
Y’all act like democratic socialist policy can’t work even though we’ve spent the last entire history of our country trying the exact opposite strategy only to have it not work out at all. The current status quo which is obviously not satisfactory didn’t come from socialists or leftists running the country.
Cue the “This is the world under communism” memes that are literally pictures of the current world under unfettered under-regulated capitalism.
The boogeyman of “the businesses will move out of NYC” is hilariously out of touch. Where will all these companies get the employees they depend on if they move operations to Kansas? NYC contains nearly the entire population of Ohio within its boroughs. Where do you propose these companies find employees if they all leave NYC?
You’re making the classic business bootlicking mistake of flipping the needs pyramid upside down. We don’t need to beg for businesses to stick around, businesses literally depend on regular working class people to survive. They are worthless without our labor and our dollars as customers.
Apparently the rich have already been moving out of NYC: from 2010 to 2022 the percent of people in the US with $1+ million in federal taxable income dropped from 6% to 4% [1]. A whole bunch left during the pandemic (unsurprisingly), according to [2], but it did not say if they came back afterwards. These aren't great articles, just the first that DDG gave me, but it suggests that there may actually be a trend.
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/opinion/with-the-rich-already-...
[2] https://capwolf.com/why-millionaires-are-fleeing-new-york-in...
People did move out of NYC and companies did move HQs out to NJ and elsewhere. NYC lots pop during the eighties and didn’t not recover its population till 2000. It was an 8% decline in pop. They went from 125 F500 cos based in NYC down to 61 by 1986. Maybe that’s okay with you if it were to repeat but that’s a lot of a tax base leaving for better pastures.
sounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay
>"sounds cheap and affordable coming from sf bay"
It literally is. Unlike SF, you can actually buy a home within an hour commute of NYC around the national median. Transit is infinitely better as well.
And yet the median household income is only about $87,000. I’m skeptical.
What’s there to be skeptical about? It’s well known and data-confirmed that wealth has been transferred out of the middle and lower classes in the last half century or so.
The people who are making below the median make things work by living in public or rent controlled housing, getting a heck of a lot of roommates, or living in single room apartments with shared bathrooms.
I'd argue they need significantly more than that, if they're expected to also pay for childcare, healthcare, save for emergencies, etc. This is a polycrisis we absolutely need to take seriously lest cities become cesspools again.
"Move somewhere cheaper" ignores the reality that most good jobs are in cities nowadays, not rural or cheaper areas. It also ignores decades of calculus of the "city to save, suburbs to live" mentality that's been gradually eroded away over decades of housing mismanagement, not to mention serves as a giant middle-finger for folks who, for one reason or another, MUST live in a major city (healthcare, job prospects, career field, etc). Even if someone were to move somewhere cheaper, they'd forfeit their higher salary in the process - which would likely make the newer, cheaper location just as, if not more unaffordable than their city life was; hell, some of us were trying to move somewhere cheaper in the era of remote work, and look how that turned out. Half the planet lives in cities by UN estimates, and "moving somewhere cheaper" is the most cowardly rebuttal of the problem one could muster.
I'm also shrugging off the uninformed whinging about "welfare kings/queens". Reagan couldn't prove it, two Bushes couldn't prove it, Clinton couldn't prove it, Obama couldn't prove it, two Trumps and a Biden couldn't prove it, because they don't actually exist. Talk to people actually on benefits rather than swallow naked pro-austerity propaganda by rich people angry that their tax dollars help the working poor they themselves created in the first place, and they'll tell you how impossibly difficult it is to get benefits in the first place, nevermind keeping them. There's a vastly more evidence supporting the harms of means-testing than any WFA coming from it.
At the end of the day, NYC is not alone in these problems - but is unique in having an openly Democratic Socialist as Mayor, meaning Capital has a vested interest in pinning all the ills to him and astroturfing the same austerity bullshit that worked with Reagan et al to try and defend the problems they caused in the first place. America cannot roll back to an era where six-figure salaries meant you were "rich" and five-figures were the norm, so we need to build an America where said salaries at least cover essentials again and where median incomes can afford median housing.