Average Brooklyn worker would need a 27% raise to buy a borough home

Brooklynites looking to buy in the borough will need to ask for a big pay bump.

The average wage earner in Brooklyn would need a 27.2 percent pay raise in order to buy and make the mortgage payments on a median-price home in the borough, making it the most unaffordable place to live in the country, a new study shows.

Real estate and property-data provide Attom Data Solutions conducted a survey of 447 urban and suburban counties nationwide for the study, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Brooklyn has ranked as the most unaffordable place in the country since the second quarter of 2013.

The high cost of housing could hamper the borough’s economy, said Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce president Andrew Hoan, who took over in December after former president Carlo Scissura left to helm the New York Building Congress.

“We need affordable housing, we need market housing and we need luxury housing. We are already behind,” he said.

Manhattan ranked as the fifth least-affordable place to live, behind Santa Cruz and Marin counties on California’s northern coast and Summit County in Utah, not far from Salt Lake City.

Unlike most suburban counties, though, Brooklyn has a huge stock of rental housing that helps reduce some of the pressures brought on by high housing costs. Roughly 69 percent of people in Brooklyn and 75 percent of Manhattanites rent, according to U.S. Census data. [WSJ] – Rich Bockmann