People at All Levels Can Struggle to Make Ends Meet

[starshipcat]

The discussion started with what annual income a family should have to be able to afford an upstairs unit in a New York City row house in a sort-of-safe neighborhood. The figures are pretty eye-popping for people who live in areas with more modest housing expenses, but what was truly astonishing was the reaction of many readers to those numbers:

Comments

[wombat_socho]

I saw some of that discussion bleed over into social media, and yes, it was pretty amazing how peoples' anger at this hypothetical couple drowned out any discussion of just why the cost of living in Manhattan and the spiffier parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn & Queens is so damn high. Among my online friends, there was a fair amount of pointing and laughing along the lines of "You made your hideously expensive bed, now lie in it and don't whine to us about it", a little bit of talk about how rent control and high taxes* made the hypothetical couple's poor choices even worse, and a bit of "Stupid idiots should move to [insert midwestern small city here] where they could buy a house for that rent."

*I was horrified in the early days of my tax preparation career to discover that New York City and Yonkers both had city income tax stacked on top of the state and Federal taxes, and that neither one cared if you were a non-resident. NYS at least let you off the hook if you were a military tax payer not actually serving in the state.