What Is Middle Class in NYC? View Full Caption Photos.com

MANHATTAN — Mayor Bill de Blasio's vision for the five boroughs is to move past the "tale of two cities," to create "a city where everyone has a shot at the middle class," he said during his State of the City address earlier this month.

But just who is part of New York City's middle class? It is not an exact science. Here's why.

The term is slippery to define, especially when a family of four earning $67,201 (the city's median income, according to the most recent census data) in TriBeCa might be seen as struggling while the same income in Morrisania might go a lot farther.



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"The middle class in New York City is a moving target, and it risks being a receding target," said Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College sociology professor and author of "Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places."

Take affordable housing, which is defined using income brackets from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that include people living within the city limits as well as those in the wealthy surrounding suburbs.

As part of de Blasio's affordable housing plan, for example, 11 percent of the 200,000 units expected to be created or preserved would be for moderate-income households, defined as earning between $67,000 and $101,000 (for a family of four) and another 11 percent would be for middle-income households defined as those earning between $101,000 and $138,000.

"This is the middle class," de Blasio said of earners in this range, noting how their ranks shrank from 29 percent of the city's population in 1990 to 25 percent now.

"As our population has grown," he said, "the percent of folks who would be squarely in the middle class has reduced."

A City Council report from 2013, however, expanded the definition of middle class upward to a family earning roughly $200,000.

Being middle class is also grounded in achieving a certain standard of living and that's often different depending on one's neighborhood, family size and when someone got into the housing market, said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at the New York-based think tank Demos.

A middle class lifestyle, she said, is often is defined as "being able to afford things like quality health care; a safe and stable home — whether it's a house or an apartment and is owned or rented; the opportunity to provide a good education for one’s children; time off work for vacations and major life events; the chance to save; and the anticipation of a secure retirement."

Having enough for a MetroCard or car to travel to and from work is important, as is job security, Traub said. "If a household can afford these things today but constantly fears losing a job or seeing hours and income cutback, it won't feel much like a middle-class life."

A family in most parts of Manhattan or Brownstone Brooklyn, however, would need "quite a bit more income to secure the middle-class basics" than a family in The Bronx, she noted.

"A family living in an Upper West Side co-op apartment that they bought in the 1980s could maintain a middle-class standard of living at a much lower cost than a young family trying to buy or rent a similar apartment in the same neighborhood today," she said.

Pinpointing New York City's middle class has become more difficult since the 1980s, with the "increasing polarization of income," Zukin said.

That also was when the financial industry started to profit more from deregulation, the city's real estate market saw a rise in foreign investors, and rentals started being converted to owner-occupied units, initially as co-ops and then as condos, Zukin said.

"This really created the whirlwind of high rents and high housing prices that we are suffering from today," Zukin said, citing the changes now sweeping through neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Hamilton Heights and Jackson Heights.

Zukin, who writes extensively on gentrification, recalled how in 2006, few of her Brooklyn College students heard of that word. Nowadays, it's a big topic of discussion.

"Everybody is being pushed out," Zukin said. "To be middle class is just a horribly unstable existence."