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Where The Rent Goes in NYC
Yuanhao WuKeywords: NYC Rental / Data Visualization / Neighborhood Analysis / Violin and Ridge Plots / Python / GIS
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/KharleWu/Rent_NYC/tree/main
Overview
New York City’s rental landscape has long been not just a matter of price, but a story of place, pressure, and movement. In this project, I examine how average rents across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx evolved from 2013 to 2022, and how those trends connect to shifting population flows in early 2023.
Drawing on datasets from MNS Real Estate’s annual reports and the United States Postal Service Change-of-Address records, I created interactive visualizations that allow users to explore distributional nuances (via violin plots) and temporal dynamics (via ridge plots) of rent‐growth and migration.
The goal is to unravel how high housing costs, neighborhood diversity, and migration choices intertwine in the city’s rental market, and to help viewers see beyond numbers: where people live, where they move, and why.
- Data & Methodology
The analysis integrates multiple public and private data sources, including:
- MNS Real Estate: Monthly average rent reports by borough and doorman status (only for Manhattan).
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): Consumer Expenditure Survey for New York Metropolitan Area (2021–2022).
- U.S. Postal Service (USPS): Change-of-Address data representing migration inflow and outflow (2023).
- NYC Open Data: Geographic boundaries and neighborhood definitions.
All datasets were cleaned and standardized in Python (Pandas, NumPy), joined by ZIP Code / MODZCTA, and visualized using Tableau, ArcGIS Online, and custom Plotly.js / Chart.js / D3.js / JavaScript for interactive components.
How Do People in New York City Spend Their Money
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during the 2021–2022 fiscal year, the average pre-tax annual income in the New York City metropolitan area was $117,048, while the average annual expenditure reached $83,064.
The following tree map illustrates the composition of household spending across major categories, highlighting how housing/rent remains the dominant expense for most New Yorkers.
Which means
New Yorkers pay $2,603 on Housing/Rent every month
That is to say
If the hourly pay is $30, you have to work 22 hours/week just to pay the housing/rent
Housing and rent constitute a significant part of our everyday life and expenditure
Monthly Rent Fluctuation in The Neighborhoods of NYC
Drawing from M.N.S. Real Estate’s annual rental reports (2013–2022), I built a dataset tracing the evolution of average rents across four New York City boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. (Staten Island was excluded due to limited data.)
Using Chart.js, I transformed these records into interactive line charts that allow viewers to explore how rental prices shifted across time and space. In Manhattan, the data was divided into two categories, doorman and non-doorman buildings, represented in yellow and gray, emphasizing the persistent price gap between these housing types. For the other boroughs, a single yellow line captures their broader market trajectory.
Beyond the numbers, this visualization tells a decade-long story of how New York’s rental landscape breathes and transforms, revealing moments of contraction, recovery, and acceleration that mirror the city’s social and economic pulse.
From the visualization, it becomes clear that although rental prices vary widely across neighborhoods, boroughs tend to follow remarkably similar trajectories over time. To further examine whether neighborhoods within the same borough share consistent year-over-year rent change patterns, I calculated the annual growth rate for each neighborhood.
The results were visualized through a violin plot, which highlights the overall distribution of rent changes within each borough and year. The shape of each violin captures how tightly (or loosely) rent growth is clustered, while the scattered dots represent outlier neighborhoods that experienced huge increases or decreases.
This visualization reveals both the shared rhythm of each borough’s rental market and the local irregularities that make New York’s housing landscape so dynamic.
While the violin plots provide a static view of distribution, they do not fully capture how rental volatility evolved through time. To better understand how these changes unfolded over time, I turned to a ridge plot, where each ridge represents the density of rent change rates across different years. This approach transforms the analysis from spatial comparison to temporal storytelling, showing how different boroughs moved through cycles of expansion, contraction, and recovery across the decade.
In the ridge plot,
- Manhattan’s distribution appears the most dynamic: sharp expansions and contractions reflect its sensitivity to economic cycles and market sentiment.
- Brooklyn follows a similar pattern, but with slightly smoother transitions, showing steady growth punctuated by brief corrections.
- Queens and the Bronx, on the other hand, exhibit narrower ridges and lower variance, suggesting more gradual, stable rent adjustments within their local markets.
Together, the violin and ridge plots form a complementary narrative:
The violin frames the internal diversity, the ridge traces their shared temporal evolution
These two perspectives, distribution and progression, reveal that despite clear spatial disparities, New York’s housing market moves in synchrony. Each borough breathes to the same rhythm of expansion and contraction, reflecting the city’s intertwined economic, demographic, and cultural forces.
Are people moving out of New York City?
To explore whether the recent surge in rent might be driving residents to leave New York City, I analyzed the USPS Change-of-Address (COA) data from January to June 2023. This dataset records household-level address changes, offering a near real-time proxy for population mobility. By aggregating COA entries at the borough and ZIP code levels, I identified the number of move-ins (people registering a new address in NYC) and move-outs (people relocating elsewhere).
The resulting visualization allows users to toggle between two layers, Move Volume and Population Change, to examine different aspects of the city’s mobility dynamics.
The Population Change = Move-in - Move-out, highlighting the net difference between incoming and outgoing moves. Positive changes are represented in blue, indicating growth, while varying degrees of red signify negative changes.
The Move Volume = Move-in + Move-out, capturing the overall scale of residential mobility. The color intensity increases with higher volume, shown in shades of yellow.
Summary
Rent has always been a topic of keen interest among New Yorkers, as settling down in such a glamorous metropolis is no easy feat. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, housing accounts for 33.5% of the average annual expenditure in the United States, while in New York, it rises to 37.6%. As the category with the highest share of people's expenses, housing is influenced by individuals' income levels and, to some extent, affects their lifestyle choices.
Due to factors such as regional development, safety, and transportation, there is a significant disparity in rent prices among different neighborhoods in New York. Generally, prices decrease in the order of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx. However, within the same borough, price variations seem to be interconnected, especially evident in the fluctuation of prices for non-doorman apartments in Manhattan.
After Covid-19, there was a certain decline in New York's rent prices, followed by a significant rebound. The rapid surge in housing prices seemed to deter some people, causing them to hesitate or even leave the city. Nevertheless, the gradual return to office work, at least part-time, and the enduring allure of the city as a global tourist destination are prompting some individuals to return, a trend supported by the NYC Total Move data.