Carrie Bradshaw might want to rethink whether she can afford that Cosmo.
Manhattan real estate prices have been notoriously frothy, but a clutch of recent data reinforced the lament of the city’s renters, where the market is equally as expensive. The median price of a one-bedroom rental apartment rose by 1.2 percent in May, according to real estate firm MNS’s latest monthly report, with the average price jumping by 0.55 percent to nearly $3950.
This week brought more bracing news for the Big Apple’s would-be apartment hunters. According to Apartment List data, New York rents have jumped by 0.4 percent just this month, and are up by more than a percent year over year. That information dovetailed with findings by Roomi, an apartment hunting app, which recently indulged in a useful thought experiment: How would some of television’s most recognizable fictional faces fare in NYC’s overheated rental market?
For fans of popular TV staples like “Sex and the City,” “Girls” and “Friends”, Roomi’s answers may come as something of a surprise. Their favorite characters live seemingly idyllic lives, brunching with abandon, frequenting the most popular bars and clubs, and wearing the trendiest clothes.
Yet, when Roomi crunched the numbers, comparing salary information available on Glassdoor against current real estate data, it found that most of TV’s beloved characters couldn’t afford to live in the city in which these shows are set.
Below are Roomi’s findings, which employed current salary information from Glassdoor and its own rental data to extrapolate its conclusions. To be certain, a few of Roomi’s comparisons are less than exact: Some of the TV characters it lists were at the pinnacle of their respective careers, and presumably made more than the prevailing wage in their respective professions.
However, the data do give a glimpse of how hard it’s become for New Yorkers at a certain salary level to find affordable housing in a city where median rent prices are far above comparable U.S cities.