A Big New Report Tells Us What We Already Know: NYC Housing is Expensive!

It will take you some time to plow through the new report from the Furman Center at NYU that quantifies what every New Yorker knows: It is getting hard to find a place to live that you can afford. Should you want to tackle it--and its full of fascinating data--be warned that the PDF is 3.6 megabytes.

Now that you've all muttered, "No kidding, genius" (or worse), the report will provide you with all sorts of statistical backup with which to make your case over dinner at your favorite dining establishment tonight. To make a long story short, the number of apartments affordable to households earning about $32,000 a year, or 80 percent of the NYC median household income, has dropped by 205,000 in just three years. The median sale price of a condo went up 12 percent from 2002-04 to $430,000.

The Brooklyn picture mirrors that in the city at large--being worse than average in some neighborhoods and about average in others. From 2002-2004, the median price of a single family home in Brooklyn shot up from $288,758 to $397,000. The median monthly rent in Brooklyn went from $779 in 2002 to $850 in 2005. Carroll Gardens-Park Slope boasts a median monthly rent of $1,090. The rental vacancy rate is significantly less than 2 percent in many neighborhoods.

Happy weekend reading.