OK, Park Avenue and East 64th Street, one room plus bath, plus access to the terrace, 180 square feet (count 'em!). It is going for about half of what its twin went for a couple of years ago. Such a deal!
How much? Go on, guess!
US$135,000
It is really a co-op so you have to pay your share of the building costs, go on guess!
US$1,500 a month
So I am scratching Manhattan off the places to live list.
That’s not the cheapest place to live in Manhattan. It may be the cheapest apartment on the upper east side but you can live in lots of places on the island without all that crap. For example, we have started looking at places to buy here and I found a 1 bedroom (about 700 sq ft) in Washington Heights for sale for $189,000 with $400-$500 per month condo fees. Much, much cheaper and still in Manhattan. It doesn’t have the prestige of being able to say you live on E 64th but you don’t have to cook on a hot plate you keep on top of the toilet tank either so I think it all works out for the best. We won’t be able to buy a place for at least a year but we’ve started looking now and we’ve found some great stuff. We’ve found some crap too, for sure, but there is some good stuff out there too.
Shows you what I know about NYC geography.
[QUOTE=Paul in Qatar;12600982It is really a co-op so you have to pay your share of the building costs, go on guess!
US$1,500 a month
So I am scratching Manhattan off the places to live list.
[/QUOTE]
Good grief - who would live like this? I can rent a much larger studio elsewhere in Manhattan for less than the co-op fee at this place. It makes no sense.
God, New Yorkers are dumb. Sometimes I think they don’t realize there’s a rest of the world out there, you know?
Manhattan is an expensive place to live, but as others have pointed out, it’s not as expensive as some people would have you believe.
One problem is that, for some people (especially tourists), Manhattan consists of the area bordered by Battery Park in the south, the Central Park reservoir in the north (about 97th St.), Park Avenue on the east, and Broadway on the West. This area also happens to contain some of the most expensive real estate (renting or buying) in the world.
Even within this area, you can find places much better than the one described in the OP, for non-crazy amounts of money. And if you’re prepared to look a bit further afield, especially to the north of Central Park, there are some decent-sized places to be had for the sort of money that normal people can fairly comfortably afford.
We stayed in Manhattan for the last two weeks, and one evening we had dinner with friends who live in Washington Heights, north of Harlem. They are near the 175th Street subway stop. They rent a very good-sized, recently-renovated three-bedroom place, with a nice kitchen, large living room, and comfortable bedrooms for $2100 a month. Here’s a three bedroom only a few blocks from my friends’ place, for $2250.
I dunno, go to google.com, zero in on any major metro area. Click Other, then Real Estate. Doesn’t work in every country, like France, but just take a run down to Monaco and give it a try. Now there’s some severely limited real estate in which a lot of rich people want to live.
Hell, prices are wonky all over. I can’t believe that grassland in South Dakota that used to be $500 per acre (and is only really worth about that in terms of what it will produce) has been going for MORE than really productive farm land in southern Minnesota (my home state). Even here, I’ll find one person trying to sell land for $30-50,000 an acre while a place just a mile or so down the road, someone else is selling for $10k. Or in another spot, someone is trying to unload their farm at $15k per acre while another farm 2 miles down the same road is up for sale at $5k per acre.
When media stories pop up about depressed real estate prices, I remind myself that they’re only depressed from their completely insane peak prices and are still completely out of line with reality.
Now that is pretty darned sweet. And they’re only, what, twenty minutes from Midtown?
:dubious:
No, I don’t.
Yes, some people here pay astronomical prices to live in Manhattan. I personally don’t but a lot of people do. I pay $1400 per month in rent to live in Harlem and a lot of people probably think that makes me nuts because I could rent an apartment for $700 in Minnesota or Iowa but then I have to live in Minnesota or Iowa. This weekend I got to see two off Broadway plays, a rich guy with more time than money paid us $100 to join us for lunch so he wouldn’t have to wait in line to get into the restaurant, I got three flavors of gelato in Little Italy, and I walked from my apartment down to a specialty store that sells the best lox in the city to pick up breakfast for today. Next weekend I’m busy but the weekend after we are going to get up early and walk down to the opera house and pay $15 to sit in the back of the balcony for a matinee and see the world’s best opera singers perform. Or, you know, I could live in Kansas and hang out at the mall on the weekend.
Yep.
In fact, one of them works in Midtown, right around Radio City Music Hall, and it takes him about 20-25 minutes on the subway to get to work. The A train is an express, and doesn’t make a single stop between 125th and Columbus Circle.
When they first looked at the place, it was listed at around $2600. They offered $1800, and eventually settled on $2100. The market isn’t what it was 5 or 10 years ago. Prices have come down, especially in less-desirable neighborhoods, and it’s possible to negotiate over price. Previously, they were on the Upper West Side, but decided to move when the landlord tried to raise the rent on their small two-bedroom to $3600. They dug their heels in, and got him to keep it at about $2800, but decided to move anyway.
Washington Heights does have some drawbacks. It’s not the dangerous drug neighborhood that it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it still lacks some of the amenities of the lower half of Manhattan. In their neighborhood, for example, almost every restaurant is Dominican, which is great if you like Dominican food every night, but not so great if you like the variety you get in some other parts of town.
Also, it’s very much a neighborhood, in the old-fashioned sense, which has it’s good and bad points. It’s great because people are friendly (especially if you speak Spanish), people know one another, and on the weekend everyone has cookouts on the balconies and the streets. It’s not so good when the neighborhood teenagers sit in their cars at 3 a.m. with the doors open, blasting their stereos so loud that no-one can get any sleep.
Heh. My mortgage payment for a 3 BR/2 bath house on a half acre lot with a metric buttload of trees is $557/month, with homestead exemption figured in to the escrow. I’m a country boy at heart. I’d be miserable in NYC. Then again, someone that likes living in NYC would probably not be happy in the rural South.
. . . and this is relevant to what? If that’s where you work and that’s where you play, why would you live somewhere else, just to save money on rent? Especially if your salary is 3x what it would be anywhere else.
And for the record, Park and 64th is a fairly upscale location, and I’m not surprised by the numbers for a studio apartment.
Exactly.
I give this example to my students - say for instance an entry level job here in Vegas would pay $35,000 a year, that same job might possibly pay $70,000 or more in NYC. Of course, my students all jump up and say, “Let’s move to NYC!”
Then I explain rent and other “normal” expenses and suddenly the bloom is off the rose. Sure, some can live very cheaply in NYC if you know where to shop and there are people who share studio apartments (one sleeps by day, the other by night) etc. But to live “normally” in perhaps a one room, or one bedroom apartment, and go out to dinner once a week and maybe catch a movie and buy clothes every other month, well - NYC is gonna cost ya!
(Just compare prices of going to see a first run movie in NYC compared to where you live - I believe I read that NYC has just seen its first $20 movie ticket in some theaters!)
But for the most part, expensive cities and locations pay more salary than cheaper cities and locations. Employers know what rent and expenses are locally and although it is not always the case, most of the times your salary is commensurate.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, because all us hicks in flyover country are bereft of culture or exposure to different nationalities or cuisine. Frankly, it’s stuff like this that make us say comments similar to Zsofia’s. I realize that New York’s got a huge variety of things to see and do at various price points, but Minneapolis, for all that it’s smaller, is also a pretty amazing place, even outside its malls.
And yet Zsofia was the first one in this thread who derided someone else for their choices.
I am not from New York but I lived there for five years. New Yorkers are not any dumber or more isolated than the rest of the country. In fact I met many intelligent and worldly people when living in New York.
I mean it’s a city of 8 million people, a good number of which came from other COUNTRIES. Do you really think they are all there because they are too stupid to move?
Is the OP not “holy shit look at this crazy-ass thing!” I’m sorry if I offended, and I understand why some people would choose to live in Manhattan. Half the New Yorkers I meet, though, seem to have no idea that you don’t have to live in New York.
Yes, it is. But it doesn’t describe New Yorkers as dumb.
Also, before you even posted, two New Yorkers actually chimed in to observe that, despite having a cheap purchase price, the apartment mentioned in the OP is not good value, even for New York.
Boston recently took over Manhattan as most expensive city. As you can see the top four cities: Boston, New York (Manhattan), San Francisco and DC are all very small, very dense urban environments. SF and NYC also have to contend with rent control.