Whose Vision of an Affordable New York are We Fighting For?

By Shamira Ibrahim

New York City sells opportunity and aspiration as its siren song, from the sitcoms that showcase downtown apartments with sunken living rooms that haven’t been on the market since the late 80s to the pop songs that insist that all you need is hustle, pluck, and chutzpah to finagle a charmed lifestyle here. Its status as one of the major financial hubs of the world makes it easy to be held hostage by envy; there is always someone with more money or resources than you, living the life of your dreams. I often joke that one of the key delusions of the city involves millionaires playing victims of the class war because they cannot afford the lifestyles of billionaires. It also makes honest conversations about what an “affordable” lifestyle is frustratingly contextual to individual expectations of what people believe their class position should afford them. 

Nowhere is this dissonance felt more acutely than in the arts, a universe where wages have long been divorced from common conventions around the cost of living in the city. The arts have historically been a world of patronage where compensation is nominal at worst and survivable at best, relegating the limited slate of fellowships and residencies to upper-middle-class transplants with guarantors and nepo kids who are padding their resumes between vanity projects. But with wages in the city (and country) remaining stagnant, these offers of renumeration have the double-bind of being both insulting to the middle class of artistic strivers trying to build a life in New York, while also being desirable to a disproportionate amount of the city’s (overwhelmingly nonwhite) working poor.

A great example of this is the recent dust-up over The Baffler’s job listing for an Associate Editor, with a listed salary range between $65,000 and $72,000. On social media, the backlash was swift, pointing out how those wages could not afford the median rent to live alone in New York City. While that is true, it is not an accurate reflection of how working-class New Yorkers actually live. The majority, which consists of disproportionately nonwhite individuals, survives on less than $80,000 a year per household, which raises a stark contradiction: How can we insist that a wage is unsustainable when half of the city has to build a life with less? 

Offering $65-72k for a difficult full time in-office job where you have to live in NYC is a criminal offense

— gal debored (@ckayerawlings) April 28, 2026

The first apartment I ever lived in as an adult in NYC was a modest second-floor walk-up in the Ditmars neighborhood of Astoria. Being from Harlem, Queens was largely unfamiliar to me–I had really only spent time at Queens Center Mall, Flushing-Meadows Park, and the since-closed Coliseum in my teen years. My landlords were a divorcing Albanian couple who were both too burdened with debt to buy the other out of their attached rowhouse. I would often see the husband outside, solemnly puffing a cigarette as I politely tried to evade his melancholy musings about life; his wife would reliably invent new ways of chastising me and my roommate for the crime of walking on wood floors with shoes on before leaving the house. This is how you built a life for yourself as a freshly out-of-college adult in 2010; taking on affordable leases under sketchy circumstances that offered you the financial liberty to indulge in the follies of youth.

At the time, my annual salary came out to $45,000, which was a nice jump from the $18 an hour I was making in operations support for a startup. The compensation was nothing to brag about, but it was enough to cover my $925 monthly rent with ease, despite having zero credit history beyond a lapsed hospital bill. My income still afforded me the ability to indulge in debauchery every weekend as my friends rotated between “free” happy hours at Calico Jack’s, La Linea, and 123 Burger Shot Beer. It was far from a stress-free life; I spent way more than I saved, I regretted every astronomically priced late-night cab from Bed-Stuy back to Queens (which, in a pre-Uber era, always took extensive pleading), and unexpected expenses (like the $4,000 tax bill I was hit with from a year of freelancing on the side), required careful redistributions of finances to make my life work. But as a twentysomething, I genuinely felt like the entire city was available to me, without qualification or condition, and by the time I moved out on my own to Flatbush, armed with a whopping raise to $5o,ooo annually, I felt like I made it.

Part of this perspective is informed by my own circumstances of growing up poor in the city, shuffling between the various ossified structures that the city has for the working poor. I have lived in shelters, motels, and transitional facilities; my most stable accommodations as a young New Yorker were in NYCHA housing, where my family remains to this day. $45,000 as an individual was twice what my household had ever seen in a year, and just around the mean household income for all of NYC. The fact that I could comfortably splurge on drop-off laundry instead of spending my entire day folding clothes at the laundromat felt like a luxury well beyond what I ever imagined for myself.

A lot has changed in the decade since, of course: Post-COVID inflation has doubled the cost of goods, the median rent in the city is up to nearly $4,000, and if the levels of occupancy in my local gym at 10:30 AM are any indication, employment numbers are in the toilet. Many of the local dives have been shuttered due to skyrocketing commercial retail costs, replaced by smoke shops with bizarre Rick & Morty paraphernalia. But even a decade ago, I would often find myself amongst colleagues who insisted it was impossible to make a living in New York City for less than $100,000. It always left me astonished because it revealed just how disconnected from the working poor the average New York resident was in these environments. Even in the present day, while the median household income sits around $80,000, the per capita median is around $50,000, or about the same income I was making in the 2010s.

Photo by Spencer Platt via Getty Images

It should go without saying that we have an affordability crisis in this city, and we elected our current Mayor in large part due to this bleak reality. Wages must go up across the board, and prices—from rent to groceries to transit—desperately need to go down. But there’s a hyperfocus on the “forgotten middle” of New York that is shockingly dissonant and blind to the way the majority of the city’s working class lives. It emphasizes the right of an office worker to demand a six-figure salary while conspicuously failing to advocate for service workers or the barista they order coffee from to receive similar compensation beyond lip service to the “Fight for $15” (which would amount to about a $30,000 federal minimum wage). Despite often being positioned as a class argument for collective wages, I find that the largest indignation seems uniquely reserved for those who feel failed by the promise a degree was supposed to grant them–a legitimate grievance, but a myopic one that is entirely ignorant of the check-to-check lifestyle in a metropolis like ours.

There’s nothing explicitly wrong with lamenting having roommates in your 30s, or even resenting having to relegate eating out to the occasional indulgence while living in one of the most diverse culinary cities in the world (which has equally incredible, affordable takeout options in every working-class neighborhood). In an ideal society, these would not be considered luxuries for a dignified quality of life. But when we start to centralize these concerns as primary obstacles, we ignore the reality of half the city, whose exploitation is essential to maintaining the municipal ecosystem we currently live in; and insisting all wages below $100,000 are not livable implicitly suggests there is an entire subclass of New Yorkers that is expected to make up that infrastructure of suffering.

When the focus of affordability comes down to lifestyle preferences, perhaps it’s time to consider why what is unconscionable for the arts community remains an acceptable reality for the city’s working poor. Ultimately, prioritizing the grievances of our professional silos is not a sufficient substitute for class-based conversations in New York City.

One of the biggest obstacles to class solidarity is the human tendency to exceptionalize one’s circumstances. If your fight for progress is unaffected by the fate of the poorest residents, then we are no longer having an affordability conversation as much as a conversation about individual social mobility. While that struggle may be no less legitimate in the singular, it begs the question of when, if ever, people will deem it necessary to free the city’s poorest from the so-called indignities they refuse to suffer themselves.