New York City is rather poor!

Note: This is updated post from my pathetically small Medianist website as an experiment (mentioned earlier) to see if I get more traffic on this hosting service or on my previous hosting service. 

Yglesias notes that New York City is rather poor!

the median household income in New York City is about $50,000, which is slightly below the national median of $55,000. People are perhaps thinking of the fact that in Manhattan, average incomes are higher than the national average. But even in Manhattan the median household income is only $65,000, and if you’re earning almost quadruple the local median income you’re obviously doing pretty well. The flipside of this is that in the Bronx the median household income is below $35,000, so if you want to work in New York and make sure you’re way wealthier than your neighbors, you can always move there (speaking of which, I recommend Adam Davidson’s piece on Bronxonomics).

The more serious concern people have is that housing costs in New York (and several other major cities) are wildly higher than the national average. This is true and represents a real blow to the living standards of New Yorkers, Bostonians, San Franciscans, and so forth.

I certainly think of New York as being rather rich and it is by mean income, but what a change in my thinking medianism produces!