Perhaps the best way to describe the cost of housing in New York City is to paraphrase an old song - if you can afford it there, you can probably afford it anywhere! Housing costs are just one of several topics covered in this Brief, which examines various housing characteristics of our Nation's most populous city. The statistics were collected by the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS). For more details about the NYCHVS, see the box at the bottom of page 2.

There were 3 million housing units in New York City in 1993; 2.8 million of them were occupied, the rest were vacant. The table at the top of page 2 provides the distribution by borough.