The report by the Community Service Society (CSS) paints a picture of a city riven by increasing inequality. Drawing on data from 1996 to 2005, "Making the Rent: Who’s at Risk – Rent-Income Stresses and Housing Hardship among Low-Income New Yorkers" documents the perilous position of low-income renters in New York City. As of 2005, about one million of the city’s three million households were classified as low-income, earning no more than twice the federal poverty threshold (which comes to $35,200 a year for a family of three). The majority of them find their homes in the private, unsubsidized rental market. “If you look at the top income third,” said Victor Bach, CSS senior policy analyst for housing and one of the authors of the report, “over half of households own rather than rent, whereas if you look at the bottom third, nearly everybody rents.”
Over the period covered by the report, the median rent burden shouldered by all tenants—or what the report calls a "typical" fraction of income spent on rent—rose from 23.6 percent to 25.2 percent. So across the city, rent burdens are creeping ever closer to the 30 percent threshold, beyond which was deemed "unaffordable" in President Ronald Reagan's administration (until the Reagan era the threshold had stood at 25 percent).
But this is a median for all tenants. The loads borne by the poor, who live below the federal poverty threshold, and by the near-poor, with incomes up to twice that level, are in fact far heavier than this figure suggests. (For a chart showing the current federal poverty guidelines, click here.)
Echoing its annual poverty survey, The Unheard Third, this report—which draws on the city Housing Vacancy Survey as its primary source—divides renters by income into thirds, with the bottom third encompassing the poor and near-poor. While median rent burdens for all rentals (subsidized, regulated and unregulated) increased for each third, the median for renters in the top and middle thirds remained safely within the federal affordability threshold, at 16 and 27 percent, respectively. The median rent burden of the one million New York households in the bottom third, on the other hand, reached 44 percent of household income in 2005. Already well past the federal affordability threshold, the median rent burden faced by the poor and near-poor is now approaching the 50 percent mark. Thus the report delivers an alarming picture of what can only be called a crisis of affordability.
