You need to be earning a lot of money to afford a one-bedroom apartment by yourself in Manhattan

If you're planning to live alone and rent a one-bedroom in Manhattan, you’ll have to earn roughly $130,800 a year.

That’s 40 times the amount of September’s median monthly asking rent, which was a record $3,271, according to real estate search engine Streeteasy. Many landlords require tenants earn 40 times the rent in order to sign a lease.

Those looking in Brooklyn have to be high earners, too: median asking rents for one-bedrooms were $2,200 a month, meaning someone would have to earn $88,000 a year to pay that.

Lynn, a 35-year-old graphic designer, moved to the city 13 years ago, first to Bushwick, then to Boerum Hill, Park Slope, and Carroll Gardens, always living with friends or boyfriends.

After a recent break-up, she decided to pursue her dream to live alone for the first time, preferably in a one-bedroom for under $1,500 a month.

“I’ve been seeing all the crappy places New York has to offer,” said Lynn, who requested DNAinfo use only her middle name. Two studios she looked at in her price range around the Clinton Hill/Bedford-Stuyvesant border both had two-burner hot plates above a beer fridge.

“I’m 35,” she said. “I don’t think I could honestly live with a hot plate and feel like I’m doing OK.”

via Stage 3 Properties

More than half of the city’s population are single New Yorkers, according to Census data; 32 percent of the city’s households are made up of New Yorkers who live alone, Census figures show. And while many developers are focusing the micro-suite model on millennials, single households skew older.

Only 19 percent of single-person households are under 35 years old, 20 percent are 35 to 55 years old, and just over 50 percent are older than 55, according to a report from the Citizens Housing Planning Council. Yet there are few housing options for single person households, especially older people, the report added.

Developers are well aware that single-unit prices are prohibitively expensive for many single New Yorkers, and since they can’t do much about the high costs of land and construction here, they’re hoping to squeeze more tenants into buildings by creating smaller units.

via Common Living/DNAinfo

Many are catering to single people with “micro-suites,” where tenants, each with their own small room, share a kitchen and bathroom, often with amenities appealing to the post-college crowd, such as cleaning services, high-speed Wi-Fi, and rooftop gardens like at a newly launched Crown Heights building that costs $1,800 a month for rooms.

They’re also hoping to build more micro-units — defined as apartments smaller than 400 square feet — especially as the city is floating new zoning codes that would allow for developers to build units of this size, reversing a ban implemented in the 1980s.

“[It] shows that the city is thinking about this and would like to make this type of apartment buildable,” said Tobias Oriwol of Monadnock Development.