Median family income is extremely deceptive in NYC, because adults typically cannot afford to live without roommates. Median household income is $48,631. The arithmetic average wage is around 37k.

By any measurement, 180k is a hell of a lot of money for two retirees living alone. That's over double the average wages of two working adults. That is quite wealthy, even in NYC. (I just looked it up: median income for a black man over 65 in New York is $14,400 a year. For his female companion, $9,966. These people are earning roughly 8x the median for their demographic.)

Edit: As a local, I'm really, really sick of hearing that the "middle class" in NYC includes 200k households. Because it doesn't. HN posters, such as myself, are privileged individuals. We forget about the veritable sea of average workers underneath us on the income scale.

> We forget about the veritable sea of average workers underneath us on the income scale.

If you ever need a reminder, hang around a McDonald's in the early morning and watch the number and kind of people that are obviously eating it every day.

That was one of the most shocking things about NYC for me, coming from another country.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions that it is due to income. There are many other reasons why that might be the case, such as convenience. It's the Starbucks, Duane Reade, Chase, etc. model of retail -- put one every 2 blocks, sometimes on the same block across the street -- because people are lazy and will go somewhere convenient, even if it isn't in their best interests. If people were truly concerned about budget, they would cook at home and not pay McDonalds to cook their food. (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/09/12/does-cooking-at-ho...)

You forget that 'poor' doesn't only refer to the amount of money a person has.

These people are 'time poor' too.

That's a vary unusual view of the middle class as by definition of Median and your bands more than half of all households below the middle class. It's true that the original definitions of middle class was not peasant and not aristocracy but the US does not have peasants or aristocracy so the definitions changed with the times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class

I'm referring to the bands from this: http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map

  Extremely Low Income: $0 - $23,050
  Very Low Income: $23,050 - $38,400
  Low Income: $38,400 - $61,450
  Moderate Income: $61,450 - $92,150
  Middle Income: $92,150 - $192,000
  High Income: >= $192,000

There is no one classification to rule them all -- I'd just like to point out that comparing "American" anything to NYC specifically is a waste of time. To anyone that lives in NYC and perhaps a few other cities in the country, you'd know generalized statistics for the country are way off the real world situation found in the city.

Generalized statistics are quite reasonably applied to NYC. The NYC average wage (37k) is only about 10k more than the national median, 28k.

Yes, the wealthiest people in the world live in NYC, but the average New Yorker is not substantially wealthier than the average American, by any measure. He is, in fact, poorer, thanks to cost of living. There are census tracts in NYC where the median income is under $10,000.

According to the BLS[1], the average wage (based upon weekly pay in 2012 Q1) in Manhattan is $128k and the average wage in other boroughs is around $41k.

  [1]: http://www.bls.gov/ro2/qcew9310.htm

let's start from the beginning

1. Manhattan is 7% of NYC's land area

2. Manhattan (County of New York) is the richest county in NY by per capita income (as opposed to resident income: Manhattan is home to hundreds of thousands of urban poor)

3. the arithmetic average wage is not the same as the median personal income. The average wage in America is around $41k. The median wage is about 28k.

I will admit it makes the case that statistics are applicable, but I suppose I'd like to see Manhattan as an exception then rather than all of NYC.

Where are you getting this $28k figure from? BLS[1] more recently stated that the median wage was $758/wk in 2012 Q3 (~$40k/yr).

  [1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

The BLS figures you cite only include full-time hourly and salaried workers. These are the upper crust of employment in America.

My figure comes from payrolls reported to the Social Security Administration: http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2011

"By definition, 50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage, which is estimated to be $26,965.43 for 2011."

28k was a peak value from a graph that adjusted old dollar values to present dollars. (The SSA data is unadjusted for inflation.)

Something I should have mentioned yesterday: Manhattan alone, county of New York, has a higher poverty rate than NY state as a whole.

Urban poverty and inequality are inescapable facts in NYC.