Tenants in New York City are having a difficult time finding a place to live. In May 2022, the median rent in Manhattan reached $4,000. And other boroughs aren’t faring any better. The median rent in Brooklyn sits at around $3,300, and in Queens, a tenant can expect to pay around $2,500. Added to this is a vacancy rate of 4.54%, with 354,000 units that are vacant but not available to rent. And the lower the rent, the lower the vacancy rate. Just 1 percent of apartments listed below $1,500 were vacant. But, this shouldn’t be read as a weather report—where the working class stands idly by as they are subjected to the whims of the market. No, rising rents in New York City are the logical consequence of a capitalist system rearing its ugly head.
The COVID-19 pandemic has added to all of this, with mass unemployment in 2020 and 2021 signaling capitalism’s inability to handle a public health crisis. 7 in 10 renters who were behind on rent lost income during the pandemic. And to make matters worse, the overall number of renters behind on payments doubled. To ‘assist,’ the Federal
— source counterpunch.org | Theia Chatelle | Jul 22, 2022