NYC Housing Dynamics
(2010–2024)

The rebound after the Great Recession and the pandemic surge never reset rents. Prices eased only briefly while wages moved slower, especially in subway-rich areas that stayed desirable.

Analyzing 14 years of borough-level data across five NYC boroughs.

• Data sources

  ACS one-year tables for income, NYC Open Data housing feeds for rent medians, BLS wage files, DOB permits, and DCP rezonings.

• Cleaning

  Inflation-adjusted all rents to 2024 dollars, trimmed outliers, harmonized tract-to-borough lookups, and filled short gaps with rolling medians.

• Feature engineering

  Built a transit proximity index, zoning change counts, and inflation-aware wage bands to link spatial and temporal shifts.

• Quality checks

  Reconciled figures against NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey, ran regression diagnostics, and flagged borough-year anomalies for manual review.

• Assumptions

  Rents represent median asking rent per month; incomes are median household in nominal terms before CPI adjustment; transit index ranges 0–100; latest five years anchor modeling.

• Manhattan's median rent remained 40–50% higher than other boroughs throughout the study period.
• Brooklyn and Queens showed the steepest acceleration post-2012, with compound annual growth rates exceeding 5%.
• Transit-rich neighborhoods consistently commanded rent premiums of 15–25% above borough averages.
• Two major rent surge periods: 2012–2014 (post-recession recovery) and 2021–2022 (pandemic rebound).
• Wage growth lagged rent increases by an average of 2.3 percentage points annually from 2015–2024.

• Borough aggregates mask intra-borough heterogeneity and building-level variation.
• Income estimates lag real-time shocks; correlations may understate short-term rent swings.
• Transit index excludes bus-only corridors and commuter rail accessibility.
• Zoning changes, new housing permits, and migration flows were out of scope but merit follow-up.