For some perspective, this is a satellite picture of the far end of Staten Island, so people can see how “rural” it is.
For comparison, this satellite picture shows the geographic center of Nebraska.
Yep. Rural. Look, have you been there? The shit is podunk.
It’s expensive, but it’s not as horrible as people say, and if you’re willing to comparison shop and prioritize a little you’ll do much better than a studio on Staten Island.
Yes, I have been to Staten Island. And I grew up in a rural area. I know the difference. Staten Island is a suburb not rural.
This is what Staten Island looks like and this is what Podunk looks like. Rural isn’t when you can see some trees between the houses. Rural is when you can’t see any houses between the trees.
Yes, that maybe what rural USUALLY IS, but that isn’t what it is when a New Yorker is cracking a joke about the difference between Staten Island and, say, Brooklyn. Come on, don’t be thick in front of me. We all knew it was a joke.
I can tell you my daughter’s experience. Her first apartment in 1990 on 21st near 1st in Manhattan cost $600 or $4 a square foot. It was pretty exiguous, but had a small bathroom and a tiny kitchen. She slept on a daybed that she used as a sofa. That was a second floor walkup. Her second, next door was about 300 sq ft for about $900, a 4th storey walkup. Now she had a real kitchen, but still a small bath and a more-or-less separate bedroom. Next she moved to Stuyvesant Town and had a very nice 1 BR apartment for about $1100. But Stuyvesant Town was owned by Met Life, then a mutual insurance company and they were satisfied with modest profits. That changed when they demutualized. At any rate she acquired a live-in boyfriend and they decided to go for a 2BR apartment, also in Stuy Town. That was out of rent control and cost $2500. I might mention that BF had lived across the river in a 1BR in Hoboken for about $700 and it was a short PATH ride to his job in Manhattan. (Curiously, now that he lives in Brooklyn, his company has moved to Hoboken.) Then Stuy Town was sold for $5.5 billion to a real-estate company. They (married by now) got a rent increase to $3500 and told informally that they planned on tripling the rents in five years. (Then the Great Recession hit and I think they are near bankruptcy.) So they baled out and moved to Brooklyn (Park Slope maybe the most upscale neighborhood in Brooklyn). The first apartment had 2BR, one very small and cost around $3000. Then baby came and they moved to another apartment that is large, but odd. It has two storeys and there are actually 3BRs on the second floor. On the first floor, there is one large living room and one large kitchen/dining room and a full bathroom. But the apartment is odd in other ways. The bathroom, though heated is mostly uninsulated and gets very cold. And the landlord has the habit of not keeping the oil tank full, so they need an emergency delivery sometimes in the middle of the night. It costs only a bit more than $3000 and they put up with the idiosyncracies for the low rent. Low by Park Slope standards.
I suspect one aspect of that is the reverse of something I’ve noticed (and been guilty of): a huge place in North Nowhere at $400/month! Amazing! (but median income in North Nowhere is also 1/6 of what it is here … and it’s far from the subway).
My old studio, near the Brooklyn Museum and the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, is probably under $1200 even now; if the idea of a museum in Brooklyn conflicts with your worldview, you wouldn’t want to live there, but it was possibly the nicest place I’ve ever paid to live in.
I live in Elmhurst, Queens, a 45 minute commute by train to my job in Manhattan. I have two roommates, shared bathroom, my own bedroom, and my rent is $520/month. With internet and electric, I probably spend about $600 total. It takes me about 8 minutes to walk to my train station.
My friend has a studio further out in Queens, a 30 minute walk to the train station, for $800/month. There is no AC and the shoddy state of the wiring makes putting in an AC undesirable. There is no way I’m suffering through the hot ass NYC summers just to live in a tin can for $800 a month.
And for some perspective, here’s a link to the definition of “hyperbole”.
Also “pedantic”.
I think everyone here understands there is nothing like Buttfuck Nebraska “rural” within a hundred miles of NYC.
Ahh, Elmhurst. I grew up in Jackson Heights, so I know the area. I’m guessing you walk to the 7 train and ride in from there? Nice. There are a fair number of decent-sized places in the area (and a good number of rent-stablized apartments, or at least there were last time I looked in the area).
Yes, there are affordable rents available in NYC, if you don’t absolutely have to live in the most fashionable or posh neighborhoods. You can even find a place close enough to a subway line so that you don’t have to take a bus to the subway.
Just for curiosity’s sake, what would housing look like in NYC for a married couple, no kids, with a household income of about $250k? What kind of place would you expect them to have and in what neighborhood?
And you, sir, are no Staten Islander. 
I grew up there, in an area resembling less dense portions of Queens and Brooklyn. It’s likely been decades since any part of the Island could be called “rural”.
If there are decent apartments to be found in, say, St. George within 5 minutes of the ferry terminal you’ve got a decent commute into Manhattan. And I hear tell there are express buses to get you into the city from other areas. Might be preferable to living in comfortable, relatively affordable rental housing on S.I. (assuming such exists) than to squat in a festering dump in one of the other boroughs.
Thankfully I have a nice pad here in Flyover Country and don’t have to worry about such things. 
Depends on how high a priority really nice housing is for them, but with that kind of income, they could get a mortgage on a million dollar apartment, which would give them quite a nice place in a “luxury” (meaning with a doorman and a gym and other niceties) building in great neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Brooklyn Heights or DUMBO or Park Slope. Or Williamsburg, if they fancy themselves hipsters. It could buy a really nice whole house in Flushing or Bayside or Whitestone in Queens.
I don’t know much about housing in Manhattan, but these days Brooklyn is hotter than Manhattan (proven by the odd fact that “Brooklyn” seems to be a popular name for young girls these days).
I’ve paid $1450-$1800 for studios in Manhattan. One was all the way up on 109th (west side, so actually a good location for me as I was at Columbia).
I shared a 2 BR in Lefferts Gardens (so basically Flatbush, near the Prospect Park Q) with a washer/dryer in unit, tons of storage, a beautiful roof deck, etc. for $900 each. Really great apartment but inconvenient area that’s a total food desert.
If you aren’t inheriting an apartment or being placed in low-income housing (which I believe is a lottery), don’t expect to pay less than $1300 for a studio in Manhattan. A studio this cheap will be pretty far uptown. Harlem, Inwood, or Morningside. I like all the these neighborhoods but don’t have many friends up there and never have to be there for work or events.
You can find an okay studio in Brooklyn for less, but there are still dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn (ex. Brownsville, highest murder rate in the city) and cheaper neighborhoods often lack a real supermarket and can be very hard to get to.
Most people I know share an apartment with several people in either Brooklyn or Manhattan. I do know a few people who live in Jersey City and commute to work. You couldn’t pay me to live in Jersey or a borough other than Manhattan or Brooklyn.
Something else to note about rentals here: you have to prove 40x the rent to be approved with most property management companies/building owners. This means a hypothetical $1000 apartment requires an income of $40,000/yr income. You also need a decent credit score. Someone can guarantee your lease, but they need to pay 80x the rent.
Also, apartments listed as “by owner” almost never are being rented by the owner. The broker is rearranging numbers so he can collect a fee. No broker works for free. You’re going to have to pay a brokers fee of 1 month or 12-15% of yearly rent in the vast majority of rental situations.
It’s not an easy city to live.
Hip Brooklyn = Greenpoint+Williamsburg+some of Bushwick, and much of it is as or more expensive than Manhattan.
Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights are comparable to nice Manhattan neighborhoods in terms of price. Celebrities and the super rich live in these neighborhoods.
Patrick Stewart lives in Park Slope, which is the only reason I want to move there.
Well, not only celebrities and the super-rich. I live there (Brooklyn Heights), for instance.
Lately there has been an influx of celebs and Wall Streeters into the area. But years (decades) back, Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill (the next neighborhood going south on the waterfront) were home to editors and academics and the like. Nice, quiet, near everything, and affordable to middle-class people. And plenty of them still live there, having paid off their apartments or brownstones years ago.
And the next neighborhood going south, Carroll Gardens, was an Italian-American working class neighborhood. No movie stars. No super-rich.
And this is all within walking distance. I can walk from my Brooklyn Heights home to Carroll Gardens in no more than fifteen minutes.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to go ahead and quash the rising tide of Brooklyn pride. It’s simply not as expensive or desirable as Manhattan. People name their kids after it because it sounds like a name (phonetically Brooklyn isn’t much different than Brooke Lynn).Thisis two years out of date, but I doubt things have changed significantly.
I’d also like to point out that people are often qualifying the affordability of housing with the assumption that one lives with a roommate. To me that underscores how unaffordable most of the city is. In how many other cities is this common past the age of 25?
Parts of Brooklyn are more desirable than parts of Manhattan, sure. But it doesn’t make much sense to talk just compare two boroughs because there are so many different neighborhoods within each. They’re both the size of a lot of other cities.
How far out could one live and be within say a one hour train/subway trip to let’s say Wall Street? What would the rents be there?