Rents in NYC hit ANOTHER record: The median cost of a Manhattan apartment is $4,241

Rents in New York City have soared to new all-time highs, with the average price of a Manhattan apartment rising to an eye-watering $4,241, a real estate survey found on Thursday.

Average rents for new leases in Manhattan, Brooklyn and northwest Queens broke records in April as people moved back to the city in droves in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report, from appraiser Miller Samuel and broker Douglas Elliman Real Estate, confirms what many New Yorkers have been complaining about on social media for weeks: that rents are “too damn high.”

The typical Manhattan apartment is 8.1 percent more expensive than a year ago, the report said.

They are also 1.6 percent or $66 more expensive than March, another record month.

New Yorkers pass through a realtor’s window in Brooklyn, where rents have risen nearly 15 percent in the past year

Brooklyn’s median rent of $3,500 was nearly 15 percent higher than last year, researchers said.

The median in the portion of Queens that includes Astoria and Long Island City rose nearly 13 percent from a year earlier to $3,525.

“There’s a lot of demand, and it’s not just for one type of apartment,” real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller said in a statement.

NYC is a “painmaker for renters,” says appraiser Jonathan Miller

“This is an equal opportunity pain reliever for tenants.”

Researchers said landlords were confident they could fill vacant apartments and drove up prices and tapered off incentives, defying a nationwide trend of falling rents.

The Big Apple goes against another trend. Typically, the city’s rental market builds up from spring and peaks in late summer.

This year, the high prices arrived early.

In those three areas, prices in almost every category were higher than a year earlier.

The average luxury pads in Manhattan rose 13 percent to $11,310.

At the same time, studios in Brooklyn rose 8.5 percent, and the cost of three-bedroom apartments rose 47 percent, the report said.

After looking at the listings, many would-be movers are choosing to stay – new apartment leases were a fifth lower than in March and 14 percent lower than a year ago.

More New Yorkers are staying put because good deals have dried up

Tenants and housing rights activists disrupted a meeting of the New York City Rent Commission this month demanding a zero percent rent increase for apartments with stabilized city rents

“The decline in the number of new leases indicates that there is a strong increase in lease renewals,” says Miller.

‘The tenant consumer has accepted that we will not see any improvement in affordability in the short term. They sign extensions instead of testing the market to find better opportunities.”

Still, Miller added, they can wait a little longer.

“The only real answer to that seems to be a recession,” Miller said.

Economists have been calling for a recession for two years. Given the current state of the market, it doesn’t seem like something people are waiting for in the short term.’

He predicted more price increases throughout the summer.

In the face of rising prices, New York activists staged a “rent is too damn high” protest in Brooklyn on Saturday.

“Working-class New Yorkers hang by a thread as rents skyrocket and evictions plague our communities,” the local group Democratic Socialists of America wrote online.