That's what it costs to take care of each and every migrant (at least in New York City)!!!

Each Migrant Costs NYC $10,000 a Month

The cost for the “asylum seeker crisis” could double to $2.8 billion

March 8, 2023
by Daniel Greenfield

Each Migrant Costs NYC $10,000 a Month | Frontpage Mag

FWIW

They are horrible money managers.  Each of those people could be working and earning less and living just fine. Assuming they were here legally but that is another issue. Everything the government runs costs more.

In New York it takes that much to live about as well as you can live on $5000 a year in Appalachia.

$5,000? Really? They must hunt and grow their own food.

Probably. New York and San Francisco are the most expensive cost of living places in the nation, many times that of most places. Meanwhile parts of Appalachia are the most poverty stricken areas, with the lowest median income for the region.

In a place like NY or SF, you pretty much can't really get by on less than about a quarter million or so, and $120k is practically poverty level with rent and taxes and all the regulatory compliance type costs, compared to a far more affordable place like most of Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, etc.

That is true.

It's one reason the middle class and the upper level poor to lower middle class are fleeing those places in droves. The ultra-rich don't really feel that kind of pinch - but when the cheapest rent can hit $4k a month with a 2 year waiting list, and it keeps going up at somewhat higher than the rate of inflation, it's unsustainable and so one eventually has to just flee the gentrification, which then removes the service sector workers that often work for the gentrifiers, and there ends up a labor shortage, which finally drives out the affluent either who move or mothball their billion dollar properties since they can't find a cook or a maid or a limo driver.

It’s true a lot of jobs are going unfilled.  Rents are ridiculously high.

In a true free market, rents should eventually collapse. But what seems to be going on is, private equity funds have bought up an awful lot of real estate, and keep units vacant and off the market to artificially keep rent very high, because they can profit a bit more with, say, 10 residents in a 50 unit building with rent 5x higher than it could be, if the building were fully occupied.

The maintenance on an empty unit is fairly low, and apparently New York has a weird tax structure where you can take a unit off the market entirely leaving it vacant, and save a bundle on taxes, which are already ridiculous.

Then they've focused on building unsustainable numbers of very high end luxury places, to attract foreign billionaire oligarchs to park their money in the US. But if all those properties locked up in equity funds were forced to be liquidated, the prices would implode as the rent and property prices are all a huge bubble, that is so high the average person can't afford them.

There's only a finite and fairly small number of billionaires and centimillionaires who can afford to live in those places, compared to the teeming numbers who work for ordinary wages. So there is a gigantic imbalance between the kinds of housing available versus the housing the masses require.