One city, two rental markets

In January 2010, the median asking rent across the city was $2,650. By June 2026 it was $4,200. The climb was not a straight line: rents cratered when eviction enforcement was suspended and Manhattan emptied out in 2020, then recovered their entire loss — and kept going — within two years.

The markers show when the major policy interventions of the period took effect. They are timestamps, not verdicts — each one changed the rules renters and landlords play by, and the market’s path around each is charted below for the reader to weigh.

The citywide line hides how unevenly the shock landed. Manhattan’s 2020 crater was the deepest and its rebound the steepest; the outer boroughs barely dipped, then resumed climbing. By June 2026 every borough sits at or near its record.

Prices are the symptom. The condition is scarcity, and the city’s official measure of it collapsed after the pandemic: the net rental vacancy rate fell to 1.41% in 2023 — the tightest rental market since the 1960s, and far below the 5% line that legally defines New York’s permanent “housing emergency.” Everything else on this page is, one way or another, an explanation of that number.

Before June 2019, a rent-stabilized building was a regulated asset with a package of embedded options. On every tenant turnover the owner could raise the legal rent about 20%. Renovating an empty unit added the cost to the rent permanently, with no cap. And once those steps pushed the legal rent past a threshold (about $2,775), the unit left regulation entirely on the next vacancy and became a market-rate apartment. Roughly 170,000 units took that exit between 1994 and 2019 — the standard playbook, and the thesis a generation of building loans was underwritten on.

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act struck every one of those options in a single day: deregulation abolished, the turnover bump repealed, renovation recovery capped at $15,000 over fifteen years, building-wide capital pass-throughs cut from 6% to 2%, preferential discounts locked in for the tenancy. Owner returns became whatever the Rent Guidelines Board votes, against uncapped taxes, insurance and labor.

Why does a rule about stabilized units move the rent a newcomer pays? Because the market a mover faces is not the housing stock — it is the flow of units actually available to rent. That flow had three feeds: new construction, turnover of existing market-rate units, and the five-to-thirteen thousand units a year converting out of stabilization. The chart above is the third feed going to zero, permanently — roughly twenty thousand market units that never materialized by 2024, on a conservative estimate. The law also deepened lock-in on both sides of the regulatory wall: stabilized leases became economically irrational to surrender, and as asking rents ran away from sitting rents, market-rate tenants stopped moving too. Less conversion, less turnover — the whole adjustment burden of a tight market now lands on the shrinking slice of leases that actually trade.

Then the first feed closed too. New construction ran on the 421-a property-tax exemption; when it lapsed in June 2022, developers raced to vest — 69,077 units permitted in 2022, roughly 69% of them in the single quarter before the deadline — and then the pipeline collapsed: 16,420 units in 2023, 15,626 in 2024, the fewest since 2017. The 2024 replacement program (485-x) had not revived it through 2024. Because permits take roughly four years to become apartments, the 2022 vintage delivers through about 2026 — after which the construction feed thins just as the other feeds stay shut.

The supply story needs a partner, and it starts with a paradox: through most of this rent run-up, New York was shrinking. The city lost over 400,000 residents from the 2020 census peak to the 2022 trough and has only partly rebounded. If rents were about headcount, they should have fallen. They didn’t — because rents are set by households competing for units, not by people, and the two decoupled.

The same population forms more households when roommates split up, families delay forming, and a spare bedroom becomes an office. Households hit a record 3.39 million in 2023 while the city’s population sat below its 2020 peak — more demand for units from fewer people. Note that this ran against the price current: rising rents push people to double up, yet household size kept falling through 2023 — a sign of how strong the income and preference shifts underneath were. The 2024 uptick may be the price effect finally biting. And the churn beneath the headline number matters as much as the level: domestic out-migration never stopped — negative every single year, peaking at a 330,000-person outflow in 2021 — while the 2023–24 rebound came entirely from international arrivals.

Meanwhile the pool of renters doing the bidding transformed. The share of renter households earning $100K+ went from a fifth to over a third; the $150K+ share doubled — from 211,571 households in 2015 to 465,091 in 2024 — while the total number of renter households barely moved. Asking rents are set by the strongest bidder for the marginal lease, and the strongest bidder got much stronger. Record employment (4.65 million jobs by 2025, above the pre-pandemic peak) and strong wage growth at the top sustained it.

An honest aside, because the data cuts against the easy version of this story: the richer renter pool did not come from a swap of low-income leavers for high-income arrivers. IRS migration records show households leaving NYC out-earn the ones arriving in every single year — and during the pandemic the gap tripled. The city bled high earners in 2020–21 (roughly $24 billion of adjusted gross income in one filing year). The pool got richer anyway: the households that stayed earned more, the post-2021 arrivers were far better paid than pre-pandemic arrivers, and — per the state Comptroller — it was lower-income households leaving in greater numbers from 2022 on as costs rose.

The final demand shock came from the housing market next door. Renting and buying are substitutes, and in 2022 the substitute repriced violently: mortgage rates doubled in ten months and never came back down — while metro home prices rose another ~25% after the shock (Case-Shiller NY: 274.9 in June 2022 → 342.6 in April 2026, an all-time high). The exit from renting closed on both axes at once: the high-earning cohort that historically left the rental market for ownership stayed in it, bidding for leases, while owners locked into 3% mortgages stopped selling. The panels below share a time axis — watch what rent growth does after the rate shock: instead of reverting to its pre-2019 drift, it settles onto a permanently higher floor.

Those forces did not raise everyone’s rent equally — they split the city in two. Since June 2022, the price of moving — asking rents — is up 20%, and the rents tenants actually pay (the CPI measure, which follows leases as they renew) rose 21%. A rent-stabilized tenant who renewed each year saw the Rent Guidelines Board allow a cumulative 12.5% — and the board’s June 2026 vote froze renewals at 0% for the year starting this October.

The dashed gray line is what everything else cost — all-items inflation, up 15.0% over the same window. Read against it, the chart says something both camps should sit with: stabilized rents fell in real terms. That is the protection working, and it is also, from the owner’s side of the ledger, real revenue shrinking against real costs — the same fact, seen from two directions. Nearly a million stabilized households ride the bottom line; everyone else — and anyone who moves — faces the top ones.

Caveat: the CPI rent index pools regulated and market rentals metro-wide, so as a market-only growth measure it is conservative — the true market-tenant line likely sits somewhat higher.

Zoom out, and the regime change is visible in the shape of the citywide series itself. Through the freeze era of 2015–2019 asking rents drifted down about 2% a year. After the pandemic whipsaw cleared, they settled onto a 4.2%-per-year climb. By June 2026, asking rents sat 43.6% above the June 2019 level — and 11.1% above that level even after growing it at the metro’s all-items inflation, through the worst inflation in four decades. The sharpest fact is the recent slope: inflation normalized after 2023; rent growth didn’t.

Stabilization shields sitting tenants, and the shield is unevenly distributed — in parts of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan most rental stock is stabilized; in much of outer Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, very little is. The vertical axis shows the consequence for mobility: our estimated mover premium, today’s asking rent against what a market-rate sitting tenant in the same neighborhood pays in 2026. The higher the dot, the more expensive the decision to move — or the event of losing a lease. (The extreme outliers — Gerritsen Beach, Coney Island — are thin coastal markets with few listings; read them directionally, not precisely.)

Citywide context from the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey: about 41% of renter households are stabilized, and their median rent ($1,500) sat a third below the market median ($2,000).

Behind every one of those dots are households making the ledger balance, four different ways. For 32% of the city’s renter households, reported income covers the current rent outright. For 37%, a below-market stabilized rent is what makes it work. 15% pay through direct subsidy — public housing or vouchers. And for 15% of households, measured income shows no visible means of paying the rent they pay — the books balance on savings, family support, informal income, or money the surveys simply don’t see.

The mix varies enormously by neighborhood. Heavily stabilized areas run on protection; public-housing corridors run on subsidy; and in the least-regulated outer-borough areas, the “no visible means” slice is largest — these are shares of households, not claims about any individual’s finances.

The wedge protects those already inside. For everyone else, entry is priced at today’s asking rents — and landlords commonly require an annual salary of 40× the monthly rent. The chart ranks the neighborhoods where that entry salary most exceeds what the median local resident earns.

A wide gap reads two ways, and both are true somewhere on this list: in lower-income areas it measures displacement pressure — the people who live there could not afford to arrive today; in higher-income areas it means entry increasingly runs on resources beyond a salary. Neither reading alone tells the story.

The mechanism, assembled: demand acts through households and the income of the marginal bidder — more households from fewer people, a much richer bidding pool, and would-be buyers trapped as renters — while policy sealed every channel through which the accessible stock could respond: conversions, turnover, construction. A 1.41% vacancy rate is what that collision looks like in the statistics. The mover premium is what it feels like in a lease. And the burden falls almost entirely on whoever has to sign one — the newcomer, the evicted, the growing family — while everyone already seated, stabilized and market alike, holds still.