A Housing Crisis Deepens, and a Reporter Digs In

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The pandemic disoriented us in many ways. In New York City, one of the most dizzying changes was a rental rate boomerang between 2020 and 2022. First, apartment rates dropped steeply, and many renters celebrated the pandemic deals they had secured in high-demand neighborhoods. Soon enough, though, rents shot back up with renewed vigor, sending the cost of living in New York, America’s biggest city, to even more stratospheric levels. By June 2022, the average monthly rent on a new lease in Manhattan had risen above a staggering $5,000.

I always knew New York City was an expensive place to live. That’s one reason I had wanted to write about housing for the Metro desk, a beat I started covering in 2021. But the Covid-era phenomenon underscored how absolutely nutty the city’s housing market is. And it illustrated something curious about New York City: Even though it can feel impossible to live here, it is still one of the most sought after places in the world to live.

Why does it have to be this way? Why must people at almost every income level (except those of exceptional wealth) feel they are stretched thin and just scraping by in order to live here? That’s the question at the heart of my beat, and of the five-part newsletter I published this month, The Housing Crunch.

I’ve covered most of the story lines running through this busy beat in these last three years, like the challenges confronting public housing; evictions; neighborhood planning; population change; tenants versus landlords; the fight over rent regulation; the housing shortage; the dangers of illegal basement homes; and more.

I noticed, though, that a lot of the conversations around these newsy issues felt too complex and overly contentious; people would talk past each other instead of trying to explain what was really wrong in a more sober and objective way. I had a feeling that to really communicate with people about the many problems arrayed across the housing landscape, we needed to cut through the noise.