Have you ever lived a decent life in an expensive city on little money

In My Humble Opinion
1

In thisthread the conversation got sidetracked by myself and various other people discussing the cost of living in a large city. I am under the impression that the bulk of the difference in cost of living is due to housing, while some others are claiming all costs are higher and they all add up.

As I said, I’ve spent time in some higher cost of living cities and housing was the only cost I noticed that was appreciably different. But I was a visitor for a short time to those places (days to months), I was not a long term resident. I didn’t really use the healthcare, I had no kids in school or daycare, I had free parking because I was staying with someone, etc.

Seeing how even in high cost of living areas, the median household income is only about 60k there has to be a market for low/cheap consumer goods. Brooklyn has a median houshold income of 44k. San Francisco and Manhattan are about 70k. Seeing how those cities have median household incomes not much higher than the rest of the country, and they are magnets for hipsters and artists, both of whom may be starving, there has to be a large market for low cost of living venues for food, entertainment, transportation, possibly healthcare.

So have other people done it? And when I say ‘decent life’, I do not mean something unrealistic like a 3 bedroom home, daycare for 2 kids, private school, a luxury car, etc. on the cheap. That is pretty much impossible in a high cost of living city unless you are living vicariously through barbie dolls. I mean you (and I’m assuming you’d have to be childless, have no expensive health problems and live with a roommate(s) to live decently on the cheap) have a decent amount of varied entertainment, good food, a sense of privacy, a sense of dignity and security all on what would be considered a fairly low wage for those areas (10-30k a year in personal income)?

By a sense of privacy I mean not having 5 people sharing a studio apartment, although a roommate is going to be needed. However I’m assuming you can get your own bedroom in an apartment or house for a somewhat reasonable rate in most high COL areas. I’ve seen private bedrooms in a multi bedroom domicile for $500-800 in NYC, SF, Chicago, etc posted on craigslist and roommates.com.

2

We had an OK life in DC with little money. We have a much better life in DC with more money now. If you have enough time to look for the right living situation, it’s not so bad - and if you can use the slug lanes you can save a lot on transportation; but after a while it gets old.

3

I have a one-bedroom in Chicago that’s $795 right now. Was $725 when I moved in 4 years ago. It’s a nice building on a nice block in a decent neighborhood where I’m not nervous to walk home by myself after midnight. I’ve situated myself near multiple choices for public transportation and I car share. If I had to own a car, I wouldn’t be able to afford a place without a roommate.

4

I really don’t like driving in Chicago, with all the speeding cameras and red light cameras I feel like I’m always being watched. I always took public transit when I was there.

$725 for a 1 bedroom is pretty nice. The person I was staying with was paying about a thousand for a 2 bedroom in the ghetto.

5

From 1993-1998 I lived in NYC (mostly Brooklyn) with salaries ranging from 26K-36K. I never had to have a roommate, but got married in 1996 to someone with roughly the same salary. We lived in a tiny one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn; we had to live somewhere where neither of us would have a 90-120 minute commute, which ruled out the less expensive neighborhoods. We weren’t destitute, but after our first child was born we moved to the DC area (where we got paid more for nonsupervisory work with a lower cost of living). When living alone I lived in a studio in a not too convenient neighborhood.

6

I was a graduate student in Palo Alto, California. I didn’t have much money but I thought I lived decently. How did I do it? I had roommates – well, housemates, actually.

7

A few years ago when my son went from college in a small town to a life in the big city (Chicago) I saw this up close.

Almost everything in the city is at least a little more expensive.

The bus fare at his college was $1, vs. $2+ in Chicago.

There was no city sales tax where he went to college, vs. one of the highest in the nation in Chicago.

A Sunday newspaper cost at least twice as much.

Groceries, as a rule, cost more.

Movie tickets were more.

I even noticed when he did his laundry that the coin operated washers were 50 cents more while the dryers gave less time per quarter.

(I will grant you that the selection of food, movies, bus routes, etc. are all much better in the big city than they are in a small Midwestern town.)

Ways to save money? Neither of my sons living in the big city has a car. They buy transit passes or they walk. Neither has cable TV or a landline phone. They use their phones for entertainment in ways I don’t even understand. They often shop at second-hand or thrift shops, something the hipsters understand. There’s a lot more free entertainment in a big city, and if you keep your alcohol and tobacco consumption to a minimum, that frees up a lot of money for necessities.

8

My first year in grad school in northern NJ, I lived on $12K. Even though I lived in low-income housing, it was rough living. I had to bike around a lot because I didn’t have a car and felt like I couldn’t splurge on public transit too much. I ate a lot of creative meals, like crackers and PB for lunch and butter noodles for dinner. I would go into NYC a lot, though, and entertain myself quite easily for free. That was a blast.

As time went on, my stipend grew more generous. I think I was up to $20K by the time I graduated. I only really felt poor that first year.

But one thing that helped me stretch my dollar was availing myself of low-income housing. I think I paid $450/month for my tiny one bedroom, which is a bargain anywhere in NJ. There were maximum income limits to live there. I don’t remember what the criteria was, though. It was a life-saver, but I’d hate to go back to that place. It was so roach-infested that I don’t know how I made it without gagging. The stairwells smelled of urine and drunk guys laid out on the floor. Which meant the out-of-order sign on the elevator was one of the worst things to come home to (I lived on the sixth floor). And then there was the terrible parking situation. Every month I’d see grown men breaking down in tears because they couldn’t obtain a parking permit for them and their families. I felt like Wilona on Good Times, but without the sexy attitude or the snappy comebacks.

I have fond memories from the five years I was there. But it was only bearable because I knew it was temporary. Maybe I would do it all again if I could find another cheap place without roaches, though.

9

Brooklyn has 58,000 units of public housing, in which the average annual income is $23,000. (source: Housing Authority fact sheet)

Bad news though, 247,000 people are on the public housing waiting list, so your chances of getting in are… zero.

10

And all those little increases really add up. In the other thread, Wesley Clark, you mentioned that non-housing cost of living expenses didn’t seem more than 20-30% higher, and that was “doable”. But 20-30% is huge. If I woke up tomorrow to a 25% income cut, we’d be screwed–and we live frugally.

11

Food for a single person may be $200-300/month in a smaller town. Gasoline about $200. Utilities about $200. If you add 30% to those costs it adds maybe $200/month, which is a far cry from the $1000+ in extra rent you have to pay. For a family it would add more, but for a single person even if the food/utilities/fuel were higher it would be $200 a month or less extra I would assume.

What is your experience with the non-rent cost differences and how they add up? Like I said, I have never lived in an expensive town.

12

One classic example of this is living is foreign cities. If you ever see the articles on the cost of living in foreign cities, Moscow appears to have a very high cost of living. Yet the substantial majority of Russians have a much lower income than most Americans, so it would appear middle class Russians couldn’t afford to live in Moscow. Yet they do–they adapt.

13

I lived in Providence in 1992. The per capita personal income of Rhode Island was $20,867; my income was about $12,000. My rent was $450 a month. Most of my money went to gas–I worked and went to school in other states. I ate a lot of rice.

14

Fortunately my apartment complex wasn’t a project. I didn’t have to wait on any waiting list (maybe I just lucked out because I was single and childless).

I just remembered another thing that helped me during those times. There wasn’t a sales tax on food items at the grocery store.

Wesley, to be honest I didn’t feel the sting of the high cost of living until I moved down to Miami. Maybe I was able to ignore the priciness of the northeast because I was supposed to be a broke graduate student. But in Miami, my low-income situation was harder to ignore. My rent down there for a craptastic one bedroom apartment was more expensive than the house I rent now. I had to take out a mortgage just to put gas in my car, and I had to drive a lot more than I had ever had to do because the public transit was terrible and I couldn’t walk places (it’s too damn hot). My electric bill was skyhigh because I had to run the AC year-round almost. It’s almost impossible to not go crazy if you don’t have AC down there.

So not all expensive places are expensive in quite the same way. If I were a poor person looking for a city to move to, I’d definitely stay away from south Florida.

15

Define “decent.” From 1993 - 1999 I lived in a studio apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. I was making about $20 - 30k during that span. The apartment was in a door man building, but far from fancy. It had cracked plaster walls and a bathroom with chipped porcelain in the tub. Also an occasional roach and mouse scurried through (I was on the ground floor.) The laundry room was in the basement and was a horror show for rats, roaches and spiders. However, it was an excellent location to get around the city. I could walk to my office. I had a lot of friends in similar situations and we always managed to have fun with practically no money. Museums were cheap (sometimes free.) Plenty of parks and people-watching. I look back on that time very fondly, so I guess it was decent. Eventually met my wife and we moved to nicer digs.

16

First, I want to point out there’s a difference between a comparable life (which was being discussed in the other thread) and a decent life. You can live much more inexpensively if you’re willing to rent a single bedroom of an multi-bedroom apartment ,but then you have to compare it to renting that same single bedroom in a similar part of your comparison area. You also can’t really look at median income over the whole of NYC or even a whole borough- I’m sure the median income in Brownsville , Brooklyn in much lower than that in Bay Ridge, but you also won’t be living in a neighborhood of housing projects and dilapidated tenements in Bay Ridge. You can absolutely live a decent life in Manhattan on less than a crazy amount of money- but you can’t do it on less than 30K unless you somehow get a rent-controlled apartment ( which you can’t) or public housing (which you have a tiny chance of) and it won’t be anything close to the same lifestyle you can have other places for the same money.

And I wonder where the $500 a month bedrooms are- probably not in a nice part of Manhattan. Because 27 years ago, when I was renting a whole 1BR apartment in Queens for $525/mo, I had a coworker who just had to live in Manhattan. He was paying $500/mo to sleep on the couch - he didn’t even get a bedroom. The people with the bedrooms paid more.

17

You are comparing apples and oranges here. A brief stint of poverty as a young person is an entirely different planet than long-term poverty with a family. It’s like trying to understand cancer by talking to people with broken arms.

I lived in DC as a grad student, rented a shabby room in a bad neighborhood cheap, and spent my pennies having fun and it was fine. But I also had zero responsibilities and knew my situation was temporary.

18

Groceries are more expensive, though it varies from item to item. When I moved from small-town Midwest to Boston I was shocked at the nearly double prices for meat and dairy.

Bars and restaurants are more expensive. Again for an example, a burger at a basic bar and grill might cost $7 in a cheap town, vs $12 at a totally unremarkable restaurant in a big city. Similarly, the cheapest beer will go from $3 to $5 or more.

Simply owning a car is more expensive. Insurance rates might be 50% higher due to crime rates and greater risk of accidents from all of the heavy traffic. Then you have to budget for parking and/or tickets. Parking for a quick shopping trip could be $5, or $10-$30 for a night out. On top of that, there might be excise tax on your car. I’m paying $100/month for tax on two moderately valued cars right now. In small-town New England, that was more like $40/month.

19

For a brief time we were quite poor in Santa Monica. 30 years ago or so. I remember making a chicken last for three meals.

20

True and I don’t think student life should be counted in this thread. I lived quite “poor” as a student in London in the late 2000’s, from an income POV…but I did not want want for anything. I ate well, travelled extensively, went to many cultural events and generally had a jolly good time.

Not something a real poor person would do.