If you’ve rented an apartment in New York City, you’ve almost certainly come across this little sentence in the listing: Applicant needs 40x the rent in income. Despite being considerably higher than what tenants have to prove in other cities, the number is now ingrained in our rental market. The math can get funny: Let’s say you’re looking for a one-bedroom in Midtown East, where the median rent in October was $3,430 in a non-doorman building (for a doorman building, the median was $4,715). The income requirement for that place would be $137,200. The median salary in New York City is $76,607. If I had to move right now, I wouldn’t be able to meet the income requirement in my own neighborhood, even though I have a full-time job writing at this magazine. As a tenant, all of this can feel random, like the city’s landlords all got together one day and pulled “40” out of a hat. I decided to try and find out where it came from.
