Often, you’ll hear New Yorkers complain about how expensive it is to live here. Along with complaints about the traffic, the subway, the Knicks or Nets, the city’s high cost of living is always an issue.
For neighborhoods in Southern Brooklyn it’s no different.
A new report from Reclaim New York takes a unique, local, and personal look at the problem.
This “Affordability Crisis Report” breaks down all the taxes residents pay and combines them with the cost of basics, like energy, food, transportation, housing, and your cell phone, to see what it really costs for Brooklyn residents to live here.
The shocking findings show middle-class families in Southern Brooklyn neighborhoods making a wide range of incomes can’t afford to save. Across Sheepshead Bay, Midwood, Gravesend, Seagate, Brighton Beach, Bay Ridge, and Dyker Heights, residents are in a terrible financial situation.
In all of these neighborhoods families making middle-class incomes spend over 90 percent of their earnings on taxes and the basics. Often they aren’t even able to “get by”, they’re barely surviving.
Families making double the median income in Gravesend, Brighton Beach, or Midwood, all go into the red after their taxes and basics. Their incomes are more than $80,000, but they must take on debt, or assistance to attempt to make ends meet.
If these families can’t afford Brooklyn, people making less are in deep trouble. They can’t afford to have a family and build a future in Brooklyn, and are getting priced out.
For lower income earners, expenses are brutal. In one shocking case, a median income Borough Park family sees over 100 percent of their earnings consumed by expenses alone.
Making a little more money? Taxes scale way up to make life difficult, and expensive. A family of four earning over $192,000 and living in Dyker Heights will pay almost 40 percent of that to their combined tax burden. This is a big reason they’re left with just 3 percent of their annual income.
Southern Brooklyn residents face some major costs that are more unique to the region.
For one, the rent is too damn high. Rent is estimated by the Affordability Crisis Report to cost a family of four in Sheepshead Bay over 27 percent of their income, or $23,112 every year.
The city’s unbelievably complex property tax system drives much of these costs, and manages to cost apartment renters five times what it costs homeowners.
Commuting is painful enough with the massive time cost, when you add in the gas, fares, and car expenses, it’s highway robbery.
In both Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, families are spending over $1,500 every month to get around, in large part because many use mass transit but still need a car – a unique struggle for these neighborhoods.
A middle-class family in Midwood loses 20 percent of their income on transportation costs alone.
These are staggering totals, and especially tough to take as the subway’s on-time performance dropped by 20 percent in just the past 10 years, and bus service reliability declined on the vast majority of routes measured by the MTA.
Brooklynites are paying more and getting less from mass transit.
These findings are more than numbers, these are people watching their chance to save for retirement, or a college fund go out the window. This is why families move out, and it takes new graduates years to move out and get on their feet.
At the root of it all is an unwelcoming tax and regulatory environment at the state and local level.
New Yorkers pay around 200 different taxes. They drive the highest state and local tax burden in the nation, and have the business tax climate ranked at an unwelcoming 49th. Brooklyn residents can throw city income tax in as well, ranging from around 3 percent to 3.6 percent of their earnings.
To fix an affordability and savings crisis this deep, citizens need to consider government reforms that can help get the cost of living under control. Reclaim’s report shows a bad situation, but it will get worse.
These results should serve as a spark for Southern Brooklyn residents to start a serious discussion at every level of government about the out of control cost of living that is their futures.
Nick Anzalone is the New York Affordability Project Manager for Reclaim New York, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that empowers New Yorkers, through education and civic engagement, to reclaim ownership of their government.
