If You Can't Afford It, Don't Move to Manhattan

Nov. 21, 2007 — -- Lackawanna County in Pennsylvania is only a two hours' drive from New York City, but it may as well be a world apart.

Workers in the rural county, home to the Electric City Trolley Museum and plenty of coal mines, earn less than a fourth of Manhattan residents, roughly a quarter for every dollar earned by New Yorkers.

The average weekly salary in Lackawanna County is $634 compared to $2,821 in Manhattan in the first quarter of 2007.

And they're not alone -- workers in Manhattan command by far the highest salaries in the country. Most other large cities lag far behind, the closest ones being San Francisco at $1,639 a week and Washington, D.C., at $1,428 a week.

Manhattan has always been bigger and brighter when it comes to culture, personality, attitude and wealth. But life at the top has only grown more extreme in the last few years as salaries and real-estate prices in the city have mushroomed.

And salaries keep rising for already wealthy New Yorkers -- the average weekly wage increased 16.7 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the second-highest increase of any county in the country.

Only workers in Trumbull, Ohio, saw a larger percent increase (and they're still only earning $860 a week, less than third of workers in Manhattan.)

Manhattan's vast financial industry is driving this income gap; the average weekly pretax pay for workers in Manhattan's financial sector was $16,918 in the first quarter of 2007, an increase of about 25 percent compared to last year, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.

And those numbers are actually much higher, since Wall Street is planning about $38 billion in bonuses this year, which works out to an average of $201,500 per person. That bonus is four times the median American family income of $43,000, enough money to snap up a Cessna plane and a new Mercedes S-Class 4matic sedan.