High Brooklyn Rent Encourages Residents To Move To Manhattan

The days of moving to Brooklyn to escape Manhattan's ridiculously high rent are no more.

Skyrocketing rental prices in Brooklyn could be leading residents to actually move back to Manhattan, DNAinfo.com reports. Certain neighborhoods in the historically more expensive borough are now less costly than areas of Brooklyn, according to a recent rental market report from MNS Real Estate.

"I have more space and pay less," Alex Baker, a former Williamsburg resident who now lives in Manhattan, told DNAinfo.

While the average rent for a studio in Williamsburg reached $2,709 in December, the mean rent for a studio in a non-doorman building on both the Upper East and West Sides was $1,905 and $1892, respectively.

Average studio rent in Brooklyn overall climbed to $1,976 in December -- a 7 percent increase from the same time last year. One-bedroom rent in Brooklyn increased 8 percent to $2,556. MNS’s data comes from more than 10,000 available listings.

MNS’s report noted that inventory for studio apartments in Brooklyn is particularly low, leading to the surge in prices. But for Brooklynites looking to move back Manhattan, good luck finding a place. Citi Habitats recently projected the vacancy rate to be as low as 1.44 percent on the Upper West Side and .89 percent in Soho/Tribeca.

New York City isn’t the only area of the country increasingly housing a generation of renters. More and more, Americans are getting over the notion that purchasing a home is part of the American Dream and are settling on renting instead, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Facing a jobless rate hovering above 8 percent since 2009, as well as more than $1 trillion in student loans, 20- to 34-year-olds across the country are renting rather than buying apartments, sending rental vacancy rates to all time lows, according to Businessweek.

Still, New York City remains at the top of most lists of the least affordable cities for renters. According to Cit Habitats, the average three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan's West Village, for example, cost $6,600 per month last year.