How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Sara Robinson boarded a Greyhound bus from Oregon to New York City to attend Hunter College in the early 2000s, bright-eyed and eager to pick up odd jobs to fuel her dream of living there.

For a long time, she made it work. But recently, that has been more challenging than ever.

Right around her 40th birthday, Ms. Robinson began to feel financially squeezed in Brooklyn, where she had lived for years. Ms. Robinson (no relation to this reporter) was also feeling too grown to live with roommates.

“As a child,” she said, “you don’t think you’re going to have a roommate at 40.” She decided to move into a place of her own: a one-bedroom apartment in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island.

After she moved, the preschool where she’d worked for over a decade closed. Now, she works two jobs. She is a seasonal employee for the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, working from Tuesday to Saturday. And on Monday nights, she sells concessions at the West Village movie theater Film Forum, which pays $25 an hour plus tips.

Ms. Robinson, now 45, loves her job as an environmental educator at a state park on Staten Island. Her team runs the park’s social media accounts and comes up with event programming, like a recent project tapping maple trees to make syrup.

But the role is temporary. Her last stint was from June 2024 to January 2025. Then she was unemployed until August 2025. Ms. Robinson’s current contract will be up in April, unless she gets an extension or a different parks job opens up.

Ms. Robinson’s biweekly pay stubs from the parks department amount to about $1,300 before taxes. She barely felt a difference, she said, while she was out of work and pocketing around $880 every two weeks from her unemployment checks. (Her previous parks gig paid $1,100 a check.)

Living in New York’s Greenest Borough

“It used to be, ‘There’s no way I’m moving to Staten Island,’” Ms. Robinson said. “But the place is close to the water. I’m three minutes from the ferry. The rest is history.” She lives on the third floor of a multifamily house, above an art studio and another tenant. Her rent is $1,600 a month, plus $125 in utilities, including her phone bill.

“If my situation changes, I don’t know if I could find something similar,” she said. “So much of my New York life has been feeling trapped to an apartment. You get a place for a good price, and you’re like, ‘I can’t leave now.’”

Staten Island is convenient for Ms. Robinson’s parks job, but it’s become harder to justify living in a borough where she knows few people. It takes more than an hour to get to friends in Brooklyn, an especially hard trek during the winter. After four years of living on Staten Island, Ms. Robinson feels somewhat isolated.

“All my friends on Staten Island are senior citizens,” she said. “It’s great. I love it. But I do want friends closer to my age.”

One of Ms. Robinson’s friends, Ray, took her on nature walks and taught her about tree identification, sparking an interest in mycology, the study of mushrooms. This led to a productive — and free — fungi foraging hobby during unemployment. She has found all sorts of mushrooms, including, after a month of searching, the elusive morel.

The Budgeting Game

Ms. Robinson doesn’t update her furniture often, but when she does, she shops stoop sales in Park Slope or other parts of Brooklyn.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” she said. “You could make a whole apartment off the street, off the stuff that people throw away.”

She also makes a game out of grocery shopping, biking to Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Manhattan’s Chinatown to go to stores where there are better deals. She budgets about $300 for groceries each month.

Ms. Robinson bikes almost everywhere, sometimes traveling a little farther to enter the Staten Island Railway at one of the stations that don’t charge a fare. She spends $80 a month on subway and ferry fares, and $5 a month for a discounted Citi Bike membership she gets through a credit union, though she usually uses her own bike. She is handy and does repairs herself.

There are certain splurges — Ms. Robinson drops $400 once or twice a year on round-trip airfare to Seattle, where her family lives. She also spent $100 last year to see a concert at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

She said she has many financial saving graces. She has no student loans and no car to make payments on. She doesn’t get health insurance from her jobs, but she qualifies for Medicaid.

She mostly eats at home, though sometimes friends will treat her to dinner. She repays them with tickets to Film Forum movies.

Nothing Beats the Twinkling Lights

Ms. Robinson’s friends often talk about leaving the city — and the country.

Two friends have their eyes set on Sweden, where they hope to get the affordable child care and social safety net they are struggling to access in New York.

Ms. Robinson can’t see herself moving elsewhere in the United States, but she is entertaining the idea of an international move if she can’t hack it on Staten Island.

Yet the pull of the city is hard for her to resist.

“I just get a rush when I’m riding the Staten Island Ferry across the bay,” she said. “You see all the little twinkling lights. It’s this feeling of, ‘everything is possible here.’”

That feeling, plus the many friendly faces Ms. Robinson sees every day — the ferry operators, the conductors on the Staten Island Railway, her co-workers at Film Forum — are what tie her to New York.

“My savings are not increasing, so there’s that,” she said. “But I’ve been OK so far. I think I’m going to figure it out.”

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

It has never really occurred to Marian or Charles Wade to live anywhere but the city where they were born and where they raised their children.

New York is in their bones. “We have our roots here, and our families enjoyed life here before us,” Ms. Wade said.

And they feel lucky. Between Mr. Wade’s pension, earned after more than 40 years as an analyst at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and his Social Security benefits, along with Ms. Wade’s work as a physical therapist at a psychiatric center, they bring in about $208,000 a year.

Still, it’s hard for the couple not to notice how much the city has changed as it has become wealthier.

About 10 years ago, Ms. Wade, 65, and Mr. Wade, 69, sold the Morningside Heights apartment they had lived in for decades. The Manhattan neighborhood had become more affluent, and tensions over how their building should be managed and how much residents should be expected to pay for upkeep boiled over between people who had lived there for years and newer neighbors.

They found a new home in Harlem, large enough to fit their two children, who are now adults struggling to afford the city’s housing market.

All in the Family

Ms. Wade knew it was time to leave Morningside Heights when she spotted her husband hiding behind a bush outside their building, hoping to avoid an unpleasant new neighbor. They had bought their apartment in 1994 for $206,000, using some money they had inherited from their families, and sold it in 2015 for $1.13 million.

The couple found a new apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem for $811,000, and put most of the money down upfront. They took out a loan with a good rate for the remaining cost, and had a $947 monthly payment. They recently finished paying off the mortgage, but they have monthly maintenance payments of $1,555, as well as two temporary assessments to help improve the building, totaling $415 a month.

Their two children each moved home shortly after graduating from college.

The couple’s son, Jacob Wade, 28, split an apartment with three roommates nearby for a while, but spent down his savings and moved back in with his parents. He is searching for an affordable one bedroom nearby and plans to move out later in the year. Their daughter, Elka Wade, 27, came home after college but recently moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, with roommates.

Until their daughter moved out a few weeks ago, she and her brother each took a bedroom, and Mr. and Ms. Wade slept in the dining room, which they had converted into their bedroom with the help of a Murphy bed and a new set of curtains for privacy.

There is very little storage space. A piano occupies an entire closet in their son’s bedroom, because the family has no other place to fit it.

The setup is cramped, but close quarters have their benefits: When their daughter, a classically trained cellist, was living there, she often practiced at home in the evenings. “I love listening to her play,” Ms. Wade said.

Three Foodtowns and a Thrift Shop

The Wades do what they can to keep their costs low. They’ve decided against installing new, better insulated windows in their drafty apartment. They don’t go on vacations, instead visiting their small weekend home in rural upstate New York. And they’ve pulled back on takeout food and retail shopping.

Instead, Mr. Wade surveys the three Foodtown supermarkets near their home for the best deals, preferring one for produce and another for meat. The weekly grocery bill has been around $500 with both kids living at home, and the family usually orders delivery twice a week, rotating between Chinese and Indian food, which typically costs $70, including leftovers.

For an occasional splurge, they love Pisticci, a nearby restaurant where the penne with homemade mozzarella costs $21.

The couple owns a car, which they park on the street for free. But they often use public transportation to avoid paying the $9 congestion pricing fee to drive downtown, or when they have a good parking spot they don’t want to give up. They have a senior discount for their transit cards, which allows them to pay $1.50 per subway or bus ride, rather than $3.

Ms. Wade stopped shopping at the stores she used to frequent, like Eileen Fisher and Banana Republic, years ago. Instead, she visits a thrift store called Unique Boutique on the Upper West Side. She was browsing the aisles a few months ago, before a big Thanksgiving dinner, and spotted the perfect dress for the occasion for just $20.

But she has one nonnegotiable weekly expense: a private yoga lesson in an instructor’s apartment nearby, for $150 a session.

Swapping Mortgage Payments for Singing Lessons

For every member of the Wade family, life in New York is all about the arts.

The children each attended the Special Music School, a public school focused on the arts. Their son, an actor, teacher and director, works part time at the Metropolitan Opera and the Kaufman Music Center, a performing arts complex in Manhattan. His sister works in administration at the Kaufman Center.

Mr. Wade is still close with friends from high school who are now professional musicians, and the couple often goes to see them play at venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where shows typically have a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum.

The couple has cut back on going to expensive concerts — they used to try to see Elvis Costello every time he came to New York, for example — but have timeworn strategies for getting affordable theater tickets.

They recently splurged on tickets to “Oedipus” on Broadway for themselves and their daughter, who they treated to a ticket as a birthday gift. The seats were in the nosebleed section, but still cost $80 apiece.

The couple has a $75 annual membership to the Film Forum, which gives them reduced price tickets to movies. They occasionally get discounted tickets to the opera through their son’s work, and when they don’t, they pay for family circle passes, which are usually $47 a head, plus a $10 fee.

Ms. Wade, who grew up commuting from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan to take dance lessons, sometimes takes $20 drop-in ballet classes during the week at the Dance Theater of Harlem, just a few blocks away from the apartment.

Recently, when the couple paid off their mortgage, Ms. Wade celebrated by giving herself a treat: weekly private singing lessons, for $125 a session.