I recall an episode where Elaine was looking to move into Jerry’s building and the rent was $400 a month.
Plus a huge deposit to take over this dead little old ladies rent controlled apartment. Although that huge deposit went from $1,000 to $10,000 thanks to Kramer and the loud musicians moved in who mysteriously disappeared.
I believe that it worked out that Manny and that other guy were salaried so they didn’t care what people paid in rent. But they could simply pocket the deposit themselves. Hmmm, perhaps they got caught, fired and the musician kicked out which is why we had the Eastern European guy in the episode with the man purse. Hmmm.
Now that you mention this one I think I may have mixed up some elements of both Seinfeld and Friends. But the general point still stands.
Yeah, but if we’re talking about places to live in fictional realms, Westchester County has it’s own set of problems…I hear the folks in Salem Center can cause quite a commotion, in certain universes. 
I just did a quick check of the Seattle Times classifieds, and the most expensive apartment/condo rental in Seattle that I could find was a 2BR/2 bath penthouse with a nice view down by the waterfront, going for $2500 per month. There’s a couple of 1-br places in Belltown advertised for $2495 that say they have a “180 view of the water”.
There are only eleven listings, total, in the apartment/condo/townhouse rentals section, that advertise rents over $2000 a month. Seattle housing prices suck, but not nearly as much as they do in NYC.
My youngest sister is buying my grandparents’ house from their estate for somewhere between $50-60K. It’s a rowhouse in Canton, on a street where parking is almost non-existent after 5PM. Similar houses on her street are going in the $130K+ range. I almost choked when she told me that.
The house where my dad grew up backs up to Boston and Aliceanna street. He felt lucky to unload the place for $4K in the 70s. Houses along that street are going well over $100K now, with new ones over $300K. These are row houses with no yards to speak of, and almost no parking available (tho the pricier ones do have single-car garages as the bottom floor). I could never live like that.
Very warm. I’m in the Parkville-Perry Hall area. And we actually got quite a steal on our house. It was a “Handyman Special” in need of some TLC, owned by a little old lady who only drove it on Sundays.
Oops, I mean a widow who just wanted to get rid of it.
Dewey Cheatem Undhow:
So who says she was part of a large law firm? I have a friend who’s a lawyer and his office is in downtown Brooklyn, conveniently across the street from the courthouse.
There’s no eligibility, it’s just luck. That’s part of what makes the system grossly unfair: it isn’t limited to certain income levels. One of New York’s more famous gay-rights cases determined that the partner of man who died could succeed under the rent-controlled lease. What wasn’t mentioned was that the partner had also inherited a multimillion $ estate, and the decision enabled him to continue paying and absurdly small rent on an enormous Upper East Side apartment. So while I support the decision on the basis of non-discrimination, I find it grotesque in its economic effect.
Now, succeeding to a rent-control lease is difficult - I believe it can only be done if you are family and live continuously in the apartment for three years. Rent-stabilization is different. An apartment stays stabilized until either the rent reaches a certain level (I think either $2,000 or $2,500/mo) within stabilization, or, as I understand, the tenant’s income hits $175,000/year. Until one of those things happens, the apartment is stabilized and anybody can get it, if they know about it. So it’s all a game of connections. Before I bought my current apartment I (legally) sublet a rent-stabilized unit. If my overtenant had decided to give it up, I probably could have succeeded him.
There are also small, income-determined programs that subsidize apartments in certain buildings - so called 80/20 programs. In exchange for getting state-subsidized financing, a developer agrees that only 80% of the units will be market rate, and 20% will be moderate or low income. I don’t know how you get one of those. And there are large, income-qualified developments that have massive wait lists. When last I heard, Stuyvesant Town, a well-kept, multiblock, several-thousand-unit postwar complex just above the East Village, had a nine-year wait list. Union-owned developments like the Chelsea Houses are even longer. My friend Jay knows a guy our age who was living there - eligible because his parents were members of the needletrades union. The waitlist is 25 years. They put him on it when he was born.
Well, someone had to pay for those expensive knobby sweaters for Bill… 
IIRC, there was an article in People on this very topic, also analyzing other TV abodes. The consesus was that “Friends” don’t let friends buy that apt w/the money they have. BTW, the Barone’s (“ELR”) could live in their home on Ray’s likely salary.
I think I’ve been whooshed… 
X-Men.
Over here in Orange County, CA, a 2 BR/2BA apt range aroun $1,000-$1,200 a month. We lucked out, however, buying a mobile home dirt cheap from the son of the lady who lived here. Rent is $525 a month.
People can call me “trailer trash” all they like – I’m still paying $500-$1,000 less a month than they are.
Sorry to revive this, but there’s an interesting tidbit over at [url="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/lopezapt1.html"The Smoking Gun. Seems J. Lo just rented a place downtown for $13,500/month (that is not a typo). The place is about 3500 square feet. The link has a floorplan and pictures. So for those of you interested in seeing what your dollar buys in NYC housing, take a gander.
Dammit, let’s try again:
What about Melrose Place? Considering that the building was older, most of the building residents had roomies (in the show’s earlier seasons), and that salaries in Los Angeles are typically pretty good, I would think that the apartments that show’s characters occupy aren’t too out-of-whack with west LA.
In the cancelled TV show Jesse, the house shown is a two-flat in the north section of Buffalo’s Kensington neighborhood. A two bedroom, one bathroom lower would probably go for about $350 a month in that neighborhood, maybe a little bit more as you get further north. However, it’s doubtful Jesse would be living there; Kensington has been undergoing racial transition for the past 20 years or so, and the street she lives on (Lisbon Avenue, corner of Suffolk Avenue) is considered part of the 'hood. She’d be better off in University Heights, about five or six blocks to the west.
Archie Bunker’s house in Queens was probably affordable to a man of his situation at the time he bought it … maye the mid-1950s to the 1960s?
Was there ever a time when a middle class family could afford a nice apartment in Manhattan? I’m not talking about the old ethnic ghettos, but rather the West Side or East Side?
They showed in a flashback episode that the house had supposedly been in the family for a while, and her grandmother gave it to her in exchange for not naming her child after Axl Rose.
She would have to pay property taxes on it.
My understanding is that the Upper West Side was reasonably affordable (by Manhattan standards, anyway) until it went through its own gentrification in the 80’s. Not cheap by any stretch, but accessible to moderately successful white-collar types.