It costs a ton of dough to raise a family in New York City — and, according to a new residential market report, the costs are getting even worse.
That’s according to real-estate developer Sam Eshaghoff, founder of West Egg Development, who said in a startling Wednesday post on X that “Family apartments are in crisis.”
His firm analyzed rental data from the first quarter of 2026 and found that three-bedroom units — a layout that’s infamously in short local supply — saw rents surge 7% across the board from the fourth quarter of 2025. West Egg Development organized the data in a heat map to show where rents are the highest — and where they’re jumping the fastest. The colors run from green to a deep red.
Even more jaw-dropping, he added that in Park Slope, the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side — the city’s most popular family-friendly neighborhoods — “those apartments are renting for 40%+ more than last quarter,” he said.
“On the most basic level, fewer people are forming families (or forming them later), and more people are unmarried, so there is more demand for [one-bedrooms],” Eshaghoff told The Post in a message. He later added, “even rich people are delaying parenthood (even the people with the highest ability to pay are keeping their family size small). The incentives are to cater to this dynamic.”
In Park Slope, for instance, the heat map shows a burning red color for three-bedroom rents, meaning big rents. There, the mean rent for units with three or more bedrooms is $3,600, according to the firm’s data. But hovering a mouse over the neighborhood’s map shows estimated three-bedroom rents priced much higher — some even reaching near $9,000 along certain streets between Fourth and Fifth avenues. The map additionally shows massive increases over the three-month period, all of which hover around 40%.
But, according to the West Egg numbers, there are other city neighborhoods that saw higher quarter-over-quarter growth for three-bedroom rents.
At No. 1, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose first quarter median hit $12,500 — a nearly 71% jump from the $7,325 the firm tallied in the final months of 2025. Lincoln Square, on the southern end of the Upper West Side, had a Q1 median of $14,750 — nearly 44% above the $10,250 median monthly rent in Q4 of 2025.
Across Central Park, Carnegie Hill saw a nearly 36% quarter-over-quarter boost with a median of $7,600 in the first three months of 2026 over the $5,600 recorded during the previous three months.
At the same time, according to Eshaghoff, “there’s actually also a shortage of high-end [one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms] in many desirable areas, and so you’re seeing something very interesting happen now: the developers who in 2013-2023 chopped their units into as many bedrooms as possible (to create three-plus bedrooms) are actually tearing down those walls now and reducing the bedroom count of those units back to their original form to meet the insatiable demand for high-end [one- and two-bedrooms].”
It’s not all bad news, however. In a subsequent post, Eshaghoff noted, “Those looking for [one-bedrooms] in deeper Brooklyn and Queens were able to grab sharp discounts in Q1, with rents down by double-digit percentages in those areas.” The area spanning from Kew Gardens to Flushing in Queens overall saw discounts of 20% or higher quarter-over-quarter, he said.
