Report: Rising rents squeezing all New Yorkers

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - Tom Vaught has seen the Lower East Side go through some changes over the past 30 years. More high-rise condos are being built next to the old walk-ups. One-bedroom apartments in this area near Orchard and Rivington can go for $3,000 a month. As the gentrification continues, the face of the neighborhood keeps changing.

"There's a lot less people in this neighborhood from this neighborhood," Vaught says. "The East Village is not a community of artists anymore. It's a community of entitled millennials."

A new report released by NYU's Furman Center found young, wealthy, educated single people are moving into gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. But it also says there is little evidence that proves gentrification is displacing poorer New Yorkers. Researchers found the issues of rising rents and lower incomes was felt across the city, whether the neighborhood was changing or not. 

Tom Waters is a housing policy analyst at Community Service Society. He says it is a citywide problem.

"In Chicago when a neighborhood is gentrified and high-income people move in there, the low-income people who are displaced move to neighborhoods where the population is actually decreasing," Waters says. "In New York there are no neighborhoods where the population is decreasing."

Researchers looked at 15 neighborhoods including the Lower East Side; Astoria, Queens; and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which used to be a predominately Polish neighborhood but many have been pushed out due to rising rents. Steve's Meat Market on Nassau Avenue is a perfect example. After more than 40 years in business, it closed just last year.

Now this is the new face of Greenpoint. What was once a polish bakery is now the Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Company.

"As much as the neighborhood has changed there's still so many traditions and so many of the people that are still here and it stays the same," Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Company's Melissa Baum says. "Just because new people have moved into the neighborhood, there is still quite a bit of charm."

But that means out with the old and in with the new in many areas of the city.