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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That stresses me out just to think about it.
It maths fine, it's just that the assumptions being input are wrong.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
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 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.
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.
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/opinion/with-the-rich-already-...
[2] https://capwolf.com/why-millionaires-are-fleeing-new-york-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row
Your first link is an opinion article from the NY Post, I would not consider that to be unbiased reporting (really, we should not be using the opinion section of any newspaper for any of this).
Second link is a financial industry-oriented source, one I've never heard of in any journalistic capacity, and I am not so sure about their motivations to write an article like that.
For example:
> Quality of Life: Rising crime and strained infrastructure.
Rising crime is factually untrue, and NYC is one of the safest cities of any size in the country. Just one example: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR006/nypd-fewest-murders...
I would also make the argument that primary residence and income tax optimization tricks mean that many of these people with very high incomes still spend a lot of time if not most of their time in NYC. If you're making $1+ million a year in W2 income you most definitely own more than one property and are probably important enough in your work to be able to restructure your income to keep it out of NY State income tax collection. Get paid in stock options, or send your paycheck down to your Florida condo and totally live there 6 months out of the year.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
It didn't experience population drops because NYC scared away the businesses and billionaires/millionaires with left-leaning policy. That population loss happened because of macroeconomic trends that were already in motion, as well as local factors that really had very little to do with who was mayor at the time.
Detroit didn't have a population collapse because of who was mayor or what the tax rate on the local businesses was.
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.
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.
The common example given is how Walmart is the largest employer of people on SNAP in the USA, which equates to corporate welfare. Walmart is directly receiving taxpayer dollars since they don't need to pay employees a living wage.
But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t say “to live alone” or “to live without government assistance.” It just says “to live.”
I don’t think having roommates or a rent-controlled apartment is so terrible that it wouldn’t qualify as “living.” It doesn’t have to be completely literal. If it meant not being homeless, I could work with that. But a number that’s more than 50% higher than the median? I don’t know what the heck it means “to live” in that case. It clearly means something well beyond what the average New Yorker actually has, but I don’t know what and I don’t know why you’d call that “living.”
"New York families need six-figure incomes to live without government assistance in all five boroughs of New York City, according to two new reports."
"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.