At Nike's NYC street race, where runners went head-to-head for rent money, affordability was top of mind

Akinola Raymond, 32, of Manhattan, grinning at the podium on Saturday. Raymond said his rent was $3,800 a month. Truman Dickerson / Business Insider

Nike offered two NYC street-race winners up to $4,000 each to cover a month's rent.

Some racers and spectators said $4,000 doesn't go far enough in New York's housing market.

Affordability has been a major focus of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration.

Luckily for the winners of Nike's street race — and perhaps Nike as well — both pay less than $4,000 for their share of rent in New York City.

The sportswear giant was offering that much, which it described as a month's rent, to two winners of a multi-heat street race held in New York City on Saturday. That's less than the median monthly rental cost for a Manhattan apartment.

One winner, Destiny Scott, told Business Insider in a post-race interview that she lives with her mother in a "decent-sized" apartment in East Harlem. She said her share of the rent is $1,000 a month.

"It can help out as rent gets more expensive ," the 26-year-old said of the prize money.

The other winner, Akinola Raymond, said he pays $3,800 for a two-bedroom apartment in the East Village, meaning his winnings will just barely cover his next check to the landlord.

Raymond said he lives with his fiancé. "We have a wedding in two weeks," he said, "so having that prize money helped us a lot."

Saturday's race, held on Orchard Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, drew dozens of runners willing to sweat it out in the late summer sun for a chance at winning some rent money.

The race resembled a block party punctuated by bursts of activity as runners bounded down the pavement in different heats of 100-meter dashes and 400-meter relays. Hundreds of spectators lined the sidewalks and cheered wildly during the races.

Nike billed the race as a chance to determine who was the fastest in New York, with the distinctly New York incentive of rent as a prize.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made lowering the city's housing costs a centerpiece of his administration. His signature rent freeze for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments takes effect this fall, while City Hall is pursuing a broader plan to build and preserve 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade.

The race came as Nike tries to recapture some of the cultural cachet it has lost in recent years. CEO Elliott Hill, a Nike veteran who returned to lead the company in 2024, has been working to refocus the brand on sports, rebuild relationships with retailers, and revive product innovation after years of losing ground to competitors like Hoka and On.

For some spectators, though, $4,000 didn't seem like much given the cost of housing in New York.

Favio Quizhpi, a 40-year-old police officer who lives in Queens, said the prize was a good incentive but that Nike was "lowballing it."

"$4,000 would be nice, but depending on where you live in the city, that might not be enough," he said.

Quizhpi said Nike should have "offered way higher."

"They're Nike, they're a billion-dollar corporation," he said. "They can afford that."

Astor Singh, a 25-year-old affiliate marketer who lives in Brooklyn, finished third in his preliminary group but didn't make the podium . He said the prospect of winning rent money appealed to young New Yorkers like him.

"As someone in my mid-20s who's pretty early in the professional world still, it honestly catered directly to my life," Singh said.

Singh grew up in Queens and Long Island before moving back to New York about a year ago. He said rising housing costs aren't an abstraction for him.

"I have family out here who are getting slowly pushed out," he said, adding that he'd watched gentrification reshape neighborhoods he knew growing up.

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