Middle-class families getting priced out 

Families earning up to $150,000 are finding it harder to afford New York City’s rising real estate costs. “For middle- and working-class families, [the city] is unaffordable—increasingly unaffordable,” said Vicki Been, director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. According to the Furman Center, just 4.6 percent of homes for sale in 2005 were affordable to residents earning the city’s median income of $43,434, down from 11 percent in 2000. Also, the number of rental units that median-income earners could afford fell 9 percent between 2002 and 2005. “I read The New York Times real estate section as a fantasy novel,” said Dr. Vatsal Thakkar, a psychiatrist at New York University Medical Center. “It does leave you feeling a little depressed.”