New York, You’re Squeezing Out the Young and Ambitious
The city is poised to lose residents to metros where construction boomed during the pandemic years and rents are now declining.
NYC dreams don’t come cheap.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North AmericaSomething in New York’s rental market is fundamentally broken. This isn’t news to anyone struggling to find affordable shelter in a city where the vacancy rate has fallen to the lowest in more than five decades. It didn’t have to be like this.
The state of the rental market today is a report card on how responsive local economies were to changes during the pandemic. Surging rents and historically low borrowing costs in the first half of 2021 spurred apartment construction in much of the country, particularly rapidly growing metros including Austin, Phoenix and Nashville. Not so in New York.