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What Would $50 In 1940 Rent A New Yorker Today?
With the average Manhattan rent hovering around $3,800, it can seem impossible that there was a time when one could find a whole apartment for $500 to $600 a month, let alone something in the double digits. But throughout the 1940s, rents average a mere $50 per month, with many places costing even less than that. But how far would that $50 take you in the next decade? Or the 1980s? Or even today?
To figure that out (in a very unscientific way), we calculated how much $50 of 1940s currency would be throughout the following decades, and then we searched through archived Village Voice classifieds to find apartments that fit the budget. Rents and inflation did not rise on an even scale, so as the years go on, the choices get much slimmer.
[The Lower East Side map in the 1943 market analysis]
1940s
Average Rent: $50
In 1943, four major newspapers published an extensive analysis of the market (recently digitized by CUNY's Center for Urban Research), which shows that while $50 may have been the average, there were a whole lot of places cheaper than that. Housing across nearly the entire Lower East Side was less than $30. Greenwich Village was more of a mixed bag, with a decent amount of housing in the $50 to ... more

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