You Need This Much Money To Live In NYC's Priciest Neighborhood

NEW YORK — Moving on up is easier said than done. Living in New York City's priciest neighborhood requires a salary more than twice what it takes to make rent in the cheapest part of town, a new study shows.

Nestpick, a European website that aggregates real estate listings, created a "neighborhood price index" to examine how living costs vary in cities across the globe. The site measured median rents per square meter and the monthly salary it takes to afford them, among other factors.

Downtown Manhattan, perhaps unsurprisingly, requires the biggest average paycheck among the 20 areas of New York in the index.

A single renter there must make an average of $9,666.45 a month — or nearly $116,000 per year — to afford the median rent of $6.26 per square meter, the report shows. That's the highest rent for a single person on the city's list.

The figure is even steeper for a family, which must earn $16,349.64 a month, or more than $196,000 a year, to make the median rent of $3.96 per square meter, according to the index. That's the third-highest rent for a family apartment on the city list.

That's more than twice the income it takes to live in The Rockaways, which requires the smallest salary in the city. A family there needs $7,663.16 a month — close to $92,000 a year — to make the median rent of just $1.86 per square meter, the report says.

While that's the third-cheapest family rent on the city list, The Rockaways has the lowest median rent for a single person apartment at $2.88 per square meter, the index shows.

Stark disparities are also present in other cities, the study shows. For example, the City of London requires the highest average monthly salary of any neighborhood on the index while Bexley, another part of the United Kingdom's capital, ranks 430th.

"A byproduct of this data has been that we’ve confirmed the gap of inequality that exists within certain cities," Ömer Kücükdere, Nestpick's managing director, said on the website. "In some cases, an individual working on minimum wage might need to work over 500 hours just to afford one month’s rent in a particular neighbourhood."

In Downtown Manhattan's case, a minimum-wage earner would need to work more than 261 hours a month, or roughly 60 hours a week, to afford the median rent, the index shows. But such a person would only have to work about 120 hours a month to make rent in the Rockaways, according to the report.

See Nestpick's full neighborhood price index here to see how your area stacks up.

(Lead image: One World Trade Center is seen in Downtown Manhattan. Photo by Ciara McCarthy/Patch)