Carrie Bradshaw’s life on “Sex and The City” wasn’t quite as unrealistic as you might think.
There’s no way she could have afforded routine purchases of Manolo Blahnik shoes and designer dresses on her estimated ~$60k-$70k salary as a freelance New York City magazine columnist. But her ability to afford her apartment, a West Village alcove studio, wasn’t so far-fetched in the late 1990s.
Classified ads from the time showed West Village studios for as low as $1k per month. Even a fancy Lower Manhattan studio with a doorman went for ~$2.2k/month on average.
But as rents have skyrocketed beyond incomes, there’s no way a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw could afford to live alone in the West Village.
The average rent for a Manhattan studio last month was ~$3.1k, and West Village studios go from ~$3k-$4k+.
The median freelance journalist in New York City makes ~$69k annually, according to ZipRecruiter, offering less purchasing power than what Bradshaw made more than two decades ago.
As millions of Americans stream “Sex and the City” and other old sitcoms, warm nostalgia has been accompanied by a cold dose of skepticism about the characters’ apartments and houses.
Were they paying far beyond their means, or are we judging with a 2020s perspective?
The Hustle analyzed the salaries and living situations of several famous sitcom characters over the past few decades as a lens on today’s housing market.
What we found is that not every sitcom was a fantasy. But with many young people priced out of cities, and average families unable to buy homes, it just feels that way today.
Income vs. housing costs
When sitcoms began populating the airwaves, housing costs — both for homeownership and rent — tended to rise in tandem with income and wages. From 1960 to 1970, US median household income barely lagged growth in median rent and actually exceeded the increase in median home sales prices.
But the trends began to change after the ’70s.
In 1970, the median home sales price in the US was ~$23k ($161k in 2021 values), and the median gross rent was $108 ($756). The median household income back then was ~$9k (~$63k).
By 2021, the median home sales price had increased 18x to ~$424k, the median gross rent 11x to ~$1.2k, and the median household income 7.7x to ~$69k.
The increases in recent years have been particularly dramatic. Housing prices climbed steadily in the early 2000s, cooled during the Great Recession, and rose by ~24% in the 2010s, compared to a ~17% rise in income, adjusted for inflation.
And then came the wild pandemic housing market, when the median sales price jumped ~39% from mid-2020 to mid-2022.
The run-up in housing prices has led more people to rent, but rent increases, too, are crushing — outpacing inflation and income growth since 2001. In 2022, cities like Boston and Miami saw rents rise ~20%-40% YoY.
Keep reading on The Hustle.
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