The High Cost of City Living in 1876
An expatriate writing from London offers a comparative analysis of the staggering costs of housing, labor, and provisions in New York City versus abroad.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Living in London and New York: Rents such as are common in New York, says Mr. Jennings, in a letter from England to the New York Herald, of $2,000 a year would here suffice to hire a mansion in the most fashionable part of town, and the class that can afford to pay $1,500 or $2,000 a year for a house is exceedingly limited. I should myself, speaking from personal experience and after careful inquiry among my friends, put down rent for a house, in a good locality, at $400 a year. For this you may obtain a house in almost any direction—north or south, east or west—whereas you have to pay even now from $1,000 to $1,500 a year in New York, not including taxes. Here the tenant pays the taxes; in New York the landlord does, that the comparison may be made with entire accuracy. And it must be remembered that I have taken the diminished New York rent, not the price of three or four years ago. We now come to the servants' wages, which, perhaps, I had better give from two different households well known to me. The cook in one case gets $125 a year; in the other $110. Who used to pay from $4 to $6 a month in New York for cooks? And she was not as good as a $120 a year cook would be here. A waitress or parlor maid, about $112 a year, and house maid $100 a year. Most English servants expect, in addition to their wages, an allowance of 1s 6d a week for washing and 1s for beer—10s a year more. So that, taking these three servants at the wages I have given, which are the average in respectable middle-class families, the total cost of them, with board, amounts to $450 a year, or $350 in gold coin per annum.
“For this you may obtain a house in almost any direction—north or south, east or west—whereas you have to pay even now from $1,000 to $1,500 a year in New York.”
This 1876 dispatch mirrors modern Seattle’s housing and cost-of-living anxiety almost perfectly. Just as nineteenth-century residents compared the 'extortionate' rents of global hubs like New York to their local realities, contemporary Seattleites grapple with the same frustration of balancing domestic stability against a runaway housing market.
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