It’s long been held that housing costs shouldn’t exceed 30 percent of one’s monthly income, a threshold that’s becoming increasingly un-realistic for most renters nationwide to stay below. But what’s unrealistic for most Americans has become an outright pipe dream for New Yorkers, according to a recent study by our friends at StreetEasy.

The median asking rent of a typical Big Apple apartment is expected to increase to $2,700 in 2015, according to StreetEasy estimates. At this level, renters making New York City’s median income should expect to fork over a whopping 58 percent of their incomes to their landlords. Of course, real estate is local, and much depends on where a renter is looking to rent. According to StreetEasy, the rent burden is the most to bear in Brooklyn, where renters can expect to spend 60 percent of their income to rent the typical apartment. Renters in the Bronx should also expect to pay more than half their income in rent (52 percent), followed by Manhattan (48.8 percent), Queens (41.4 percent) and Staten Island (30.1 percent).

Nationwide, renters making the U.S. median income should expect to pay about 30 percent of their income on a typical apartment nationwide, up from 25 percent in the pre-bubble period from 1985 to 1999. Nationally, rents have risen at roughly twice the pace of wages since 2000, a trend echoed in New York City, according to StreetEasy. Rising rents and flat wages naturally lead to pinched rental affordability.

StreetEasy also chalked some of the causes of the Big Apple’s big rental problems up to very tight supply of apartments for rent and very high demand. According to StreetEasy’s research, New York City’s rental vacancy rate is just 3.45 percent. In other words, more people are moving to New York City than there are apartments to house them all.

Visit StreetEasy’s new StreetSmarts blog for more on New York City’s rental affordability issues, or read about the study in the Wall Street Journal.