$30,000 a Year for Housing? That’s Average in New York.

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at housing costs in New York City. We’ll also look at the state’s plans to close a hospital it runs in Brooklyn.

Housing costs a lot in New York City: about $30,000 per year for the average household, according to a report from the state comptroller that tabulated rents and home prices from 2021 and 2022.

That figure was up 13.3 percent from three years earlier. And it accounted for roughly 40 percent of total household expenses, compared with 34 percent nationally, the report from the comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, said.

The report examined housing costs — including mortgage payments and property taxes for homeowners; rent for tenants; utilities; and maintenance — and found that in the decade from 2011-12 to 2021-22, costs in New York increased by more than 68 percent, leading the nation. Seattle was second, with a nearly 62 percent increase over the same 10 years.

The report said the increase was greatest among low-income households, but moderate- and middle-income households had also felt the pressure.

Renters were hit hardest, despite a dip in rents in 2020, during the pandemic, the report found. For the three years from 2018-19 to 2021-22, the increases in housing costs in New York ranked seventh among 10 large cities nationally. Still, by October 2023, 18 percent of New York City residents were behind on rent — down from 26 percent in June 2021 but still well above the national figure of 12 percent, the report said.

The statistics pointed to a question that has long bedeviled officials: When will New York solve its housing crisis?

DiNapoli hinted at it when he said in a statement that city and state officials “need to implement cost-effective solutions more quickly.”

Our colleague Mihir Zaveri noted in early January that the backdrop is in some ways more ominous this year than it was in 2023, when addressing the housing crisis was perhaps the top issue for Democratic legislators. Since then, migrant arrivals have overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelter system, and high interest rates and the expiration of a tax break for developers have slowed the construction of new apartments.

Last year, hopes for a deal on housing were dashed in little more than 100 days. An ambitious plan from Gov. Kathy Hochul, partly built on ideas borrowed from other states, was doomed by entrenched political forces.

The most outspoken resistance came from legislators from Westchester County and the two Long Island counties, Nassau and Suffolk. They chafed at her proposal to build denser housing in the suburbs. Democrats worried that moving away from age-old restrictions that favor single-family homes could cost them votes on Election Day.

Hochul has said that she would not reintroduce her housing plan this year. Her supporters say there have already been some incremental improvements: She signed a bill last October to help rehabilitate affordable homes, and she took executive actions, including affordable-housing incentives for developers. Some 19 applications for projects with some 5,500 units — 1,400 of them considered affordable — had been filed as of mid-December.

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Too few patients. Operating deficits of about $100 million a year. A deteriorating building.

Those are the symptoms of what the state sees as a troubled hospital. The diagnosis is to downsize the facility, University Hospital at Downstate in Brooklyn, or even shut it down.

Administrators at the hospital, in East Flatbush, told doctors last week about the plan for the hospital, which is the only state-run medical hospital in the city. Our colleague Joseph Goldstein writes that it’s not clear how the plan will affect access to medical care for central Brooklyn residents.

Another large hospital, Kings County Hospital, part of the city-run system, is just across the street from SUNY Downstate, so shrinking or shuttering SUNY Downstate would not deprive residents of nearby neighborhoods of access to a hospital.

But Downstate and Kings County are different. SUNY Downstate provides some types of specialized care that are not available at Kings County. SUNY Downstate has the only kidney transplant program in Brooklyn, and hospital administrators said last week that they were not certain about that program’s future.

SUNY Downstate has about 144 admitted patients on a typical day, though it has more than twice as many beds. The union representing about 2,300 workers at Downstate said that nearly 90 percent of the patients at SUNY Downstate are Medicaid recipients, underinsured or uninsured. Downstate is part of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, a major medical school and research institution that is, in turn, part of the State University of New York.

John King Jr., the SUNY chancellor, said the proposed changes would “strengthen” Downstate. He said the plan is to shift inpatient care from Downstate to other hospitals, with much of Downstate’s inpatient services going across the street, creating in effect what he called “a SUNY Downstate wing at Kings County.” He said there would be perhaps 150 beds, less than half the number at Downstate.

He said that closing inpatient services at Downstate would free up funding and make Downstate eligible for additional state money that he said would go for a new urgent care center and an ambulatory surgery center, along with increased primary care.

As for whether the changes would lead to less available health care in East Flatbush and nearby neighborhoods, he said it would increase. “This isn’t a cut,” King said.

But Frederick Kowal, the president of United University Professions, the union representing many health care workers at Downstate, said in a statement that moving services to other hospitals would diminish Downstate and would “undoubtedly harm the health of the central Brooklyn community.”

“Let’s call this what it is: SUNY is closing Downstate,” Kowal said.

METROPOLITAN diary

Backward Cinderella

Dear Diary:

It was 2009, and I was 23. I was at a bar in Midtown with four of my best girlfriends. We had tickets for a Girl Talk concert.

My closest friend was dating my boss at the time, and it had slowly been driving a wedge between her and me. It all came to a head that day after a pitcher of margaritas. We exploded at each other, and she left for the show.

I stepped out of the bar into the sunlight. A man driving a pedicab caught my eye. He smiled and, in a Turkish accent, asked if I wanted a ride.

“I’m with my friends,” I said.

He motioned to a second pedicab driver, who, it turned out, was his roommate, to come over.

“So am I,” he said. “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

We piled into the pedicabs and went off on an all-night adventure.

The driver and I began dating. We would often meet in Central Park, where he also drove a horse and carriage.

For eight months I felt like a backward Cinderella, meeting him when his shift ended at midnight. Times Square looked magical as we rode through it on our way back to the stables.