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Manhattan skyline view from the roof deck of a Park Slope building ." /> Manhattan skyline view from the roof deck of a Park Slope building . View Full Caption Corcoran Group MANHATTAN— Yes, New York City is way less affordable now than seven years ago. Case in point: An apartment going for $2,000 a month for rent in 2010 would now get $2,657 a month, a report published Wednesday from real estate search engine StreetEasy reveals. Compounding the city’s affordability crisis: rents in the city rose twice as fast as wages, according to the analysis, which compared the StreetEasy Rent Index with wage data from the city’s Department of Labor. While median rents increased 3 .9 percent a year since 2010, wages increased by 1.8 percent over the same period. Those working in the city’s lowest wage jobs were hit hardest. Low- wage earners — those in the bottom 20 percent of the workforce, which represent a little more than 800,000 of the roughly 4.1 million employed New Yorkers ...

Rich and Poor. Credit: Flickr/Sandra Cohen Rose and Colin Rose. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Originally published on  Everyday Feminism . The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.” Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range. “It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained. Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then,  I thought, doing the math in my head. At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my tak...

The Fountainhead , part 1, chapter 12 T he Wynand newspaper chain, trying to boost its sales and publicity, decides to run an exposé of living conditions in New York’s slums. The editor-in- chief Alvah Scarret assigns Dominique Francon , who’s his favorite columnist, to do an investigation. Although Dominique is used to living in the lap of luxury, she agrees to spend two weeks living in a run-down tenement on the East Side, washing up in a tin bath, peeling potatoes in a shared kitchen, mingling with the poor people who live there and getting to know them. At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account. She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. “My dear, you didn’t actually write those things?” “Dominique, you didn’t really live in that place?” “Oh, yes,” she answered. “The house you own on East Twelfth Street , Mrs. P...