And yet the median household income is only about $87,000. I’m skeptical.

What’s there to be skeptical about? It’s well known and data-confirmed that wealth has been transferred out of the middle and lower classes in the last half century or so.

The people who are making below the median make things work by living in public or rent controlled housing, getting a heck of a lot of roommates, or living in single room apartments with shared bathrooms.

▲

wat10000 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You obviously don’t need that much to live if well over half the city makes less.

▲

dangus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Unless the lower half is getting by via overcrowding (living in a small apartment with a large number of roommates or extended family), supplemental nutrition assistance, rent control, etc.

The common example given is how Walmart is the largest employer of people on SNAP in the USA, which equates to corporate welfare. Walmart is directly receiving taxpayer dollars since they don't need to pay employees a living wage.

▲

wat10000 an hour ago | parent [-]

I’m extremely skeptical that well over half of NYC households are in such dire straits.

But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t say “to live alone” or “to live without government assistance.” It just says “to live.”

I don’t think having roommates or a rent-controlled apartment is so terrible that it wouldn’t qualify as “living.” It doesn’t have to be completely literal. If it meant not being homeless, I could work with that. But a number that’s more than 50% higher than the median? I don’t know what the heck it means “to live” in that case. It clearly means something well beyond what the average New Yorker actually has, but I don’t know what and I don’t know why you’d call that “living.”

	▲	dangus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's literally in the first sentence of the article: "New York families need six-figure incomes to live without government assistance in all five boroughs of New York City, according to two new reports."