I’m always kind of surprised when people use this as an example for New York being the greatest city in the world. Where else can you do that? Tons of major cities in the US. But more importantly, even if it were the only city in the world to offer this perk, why is that so great and how does that contribute to making the city the greatest in the world?
If I lived in NYC, I think the fascination with getting hotdogs in the middle of the night would get on my nerves. I can see how it would be cool for a visitor to the city–especially a visitor from Bumfuck, Egypt. But like any other notable feature of a city, it is a giant “meh” for the people who live there. I mean, if you’re eating a street hotdog at 4:00AM, chances are you’re doing so because you don’t have a lot of other options. Chances are, unless you’re a tourist, you don’t really want to be up that late (or that early). And that hotdog is your pathetic dinner or breakfast on your way home from a long-day at work. And what kind of crap meal is that? Only a tourist would get excited about a fuckin’ 4:00 AM hotdog.
I know that is supposed to be a sarcastic comment but there may be a lot of wisdom to it. Louisiana and several other poorer states scored unusually well in this study partially because the people there know that they will have little chance of being number one (other than college football) in anything and they are fine with that. You can drive yourself crazy if you were always obsessed with getting into Harvard and becoming a law partner in a major firm before 30. If you have to go to Yale instead and don’t become a partner until 35, you may secretly consider yourself a failure. You still sacrificed many of your younger years to achieve that goal but you still failed in your own mind.
Meanwhile, the person who never did well in high school in Louisiana decides to get their act together, finally enrolls in community college and becomes a nurse two years later. By their mid 20’s, they are married and their house is much nicer than anything than you can hope for in Manhattan unless you are multi-millionaire and sustain that trend over a long period so that you don’t have to constantly worry about losing everything.
A lot of the things that people consider luxuries, even big ones, like lots of land, multiple cars and horses are perfectly obtainable for even middle-class people in large parts of the country. I am always shocked when I see photos of very rich people’s homes in the Hamptons. I am sure they seem luxurious to some but they look positively downscale to me and I have no idea why they are in demand when they obviously have the money to go to some place much, much better. There are middle-class beach homes in Alabama that are x10 more impressive than anything the Hamptons has to offer (I am not kidding; Alabama and the Florida panhandle have some of the prettiest beaches outside of the Caribbean).
This phenomenon doesn’t just apply to the U.S. Keep it in mind when when you look at world rankings for life satisfaction and happiness rankings among countries as well. Denmark is usually at or near the top. There is nothing objectively special about Denmark. They are positively mediocre on almost all objective measures and not especially notable even among the Nordic countries. What they do have is low expectations because they will never be a world power again and a more care-free lifestyle than most others.
Another study came out recently that said that happiness in high-income English-speaking countries dips in middle life:
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-29899769
From the article:
That would seem to align with the idea that people in NYC are willing to stress themselves out while working so that they can be happier in retirement later.
I know that is supposed to be a sarcastic comment but there may be a lot of wisdom to it.
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Not so much just sarcasm — and that desire to piss people [ neo-loberal goodie-goodies ] off — more a drive by musing. Materialism, like all bitch goddesses, eventually fails to deliver.
I think it’s because the place IS a mecca for tourists. There is no room for the middle class, it’s a city for either the ultra rich or the dirt poor. The rich get by because, duh, money. The poor get by due to welfare, etc. There is no middle class, and young people (mainly middle class) who go there in search of their dreams find living there hard and disappointing, and hideously expensive. I can well believe everyone is unhappy. The rich because of the homeless cluttering up ‘their city’. The poor because, poor. The mids because it’s so hard to make it there. Everyone because the people who made the place interesting can’t afford to live there, and Disney and big corporations have ‘cleaned the place up’ and taken over to attact busloads of tourists.
In their defense, lemme see anyone try keeping the area around Times Square any cleaner and nicer. That’s just too *&^%$ many more human bodies and much more human activity than should ever be around that physical space. Which probably explains the mood and attitude.
(Heh… and we hear all the whiners about how Times Square got too cleaned up and “Disneyfied” and that Brooklyn has been overrun with hipsters. I can just see the South Bronx becoming a stylish address before the 2030s.)
Extremely crowded, extremely expensive, harshly cold in the winter.
The actual reason is that to actually live in a nice part of NYC, you need to make enough money to afford a $3000 a month 1 BR apartment, not to mention all your other living expenses. And that typically means a six figure job at an investment bank, law firm, consulting firm, Big-4 accounting firm, tech company or other high-pressure, highly competitive field with long hours and high turnover. Failing to earn that much will typically mean living further out in a worse neighborhood in an outer borough with a long commute. As Manhattan (and it’s central business district cores in Midtown and Wall Street) is on an island, anyone not living on the island automatically incurs a huge commute time increase by having to cross one of the rivers.
In contrast, most other “cities” don’t have people living in them in the way that they do in NYC. People live in the suburbs with houses and yards and maybe commute back and forth to the central business core or an office park somewhere. They are a lot more affordable too.
Not to mention that I haven’t got a hot dog or falafel at 4am in the past 10 years.
Stay classy.
I don’t know why people insist on propagating this idiotic meme. Do people seriously think everyone in New York City lives on the upper west side across from Lincoln Center?
I’ve lived in New York City for 14 years and have never paid more than $1200 in rent. I have never had roommates, and I’ve never lived in a dump. My current place is 1500 sq. ft. and my mortgage + co-op fees combined are less than $1500 a month. And I don’t work in finance, law, accounting, or even the mafia.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t live in Park Slope (or Park Avenue.)
New York real estate is very expensive compared to almost everywhere else, but believe it or not, articles in the NYT real estate page are not a representative sample of reality.
Is it really that far off though? NYC confuses me because some people really do pay a tremendous amount of money for extremely little space. It is a meme that sitcoms based in NYC (like Friends, Seinfeld and lots of others) have characters that live in unrealistic apartments even though they aren’t very nice at all by national standards.
Like I said, I have barely been to NYC and probably won’t ever spend any significant amount of time there because I am truly not a city person even though I could afford to live there in some reasonable capacity if I chose. Still, I figured it would be just the thing for a great number of people but it sounds like that isn’t true based on this thread.
Just for shits and giggles, I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out where I should live in Manhattan if, for some unfathomable reason, I ever had to move there. I came up with one of the tip ends of Roosevelt Island in one of their new condo developments. I know nothing about it other than what I read but it is quiet and isolated because it is a literal island in the East River with a population of just 10,000 people. It used to used to house smallpox victims in isolation but now it is a semi-functional community albeit one without any of the stores or nightlife of Manhattan proper just 4 minutes away by sky tram. If you gave me the most isolated unit on a development bordering a quiet park and I could probably make it work for a while. Otherwise, no deal. NYC is not for me at any price but I thought lots more people would see it as nirvana.
Why do so many people force themselves onto that small sliver of land then? Some of it is for historic reasons but the U.S. has plenty of land. Is it just all about being physically close to other influential people and, more importantly, the money? Even that is really spread out these days. You have everything from Silicon Valley to national politics which are probably underrepresented in NYC.
It is a meme, but that doesn’t make it accurate. All of the Friends (sans Phoebe, who didn’t live in Manhattan) had extremely high-paying jobs and/or rent-controlled apartments. And Seinfeld featured multiple episodes where Jerry’s bulging bank account was a plot point. These kinds of in-universe explanations exist for almost every “How can this character afford that apartment?” question.
For most people, I imagine it’s about enjoying city life, not some kind of externally focused scheming.
To a certain extent you are correct. Thanks to the media, the assumption in every New Yorker lives in a luxury condo in the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park or a giant loft in the Meat Packing District or Soho. Maybe Williamsburg Brooklyn if they are a “broke” hipster. In my experience, yes, a lot of younger people with high paying jobs live in those areas until they decide to settle down and move to New Jersey. A lot of people do find great deals by living up in Harlem, or the Upper East Side (like York Avenue), Alphabet City. or places like Long Island City or Astoria in Queens. After all, there are like ten million New Yorkers and they all don’t work for Goldman Sachs.
Out of curiosity, where do you live? Because even by Hoboken standards, that’s a pretty good deal.
Yes, those Liberals with their hateful, mean-spirit, intolerant agenda of tolerance, the environment, equal rights, and access to health care.:rolleyes:
Seriously. (That’s another NYC meme that’s rooted in truth; everyone wants to know where everyone lives and whether they got a good deal. That When Harry Met Sally monologue about combining the obituaries with the real estate section is funny because it’s true…)
As a side note friend, you consider yourself a liberal and I consider myself a conservative even though we seem to have almost the extract same views on almost all issues. I would love to figure out some time why people apply different labels to themselves even if they are essentially the same.
Some people pay a huge amount , if they want to live in certain parts of Manhattan,Brooklyn or Queens. Others are willing to live in the less-fashionable parts of Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx and pay much less- one bedrooms in my neighborhood are around $1500 ( and they are most likely in a two-family house with a yard as there aren’t that many apartment buildings). For $3000 I could rent either a 4 bedroom apartment or a single family house.
NYC is confusing to a lot of people because what you see on TV and in the NY Times isn’t how most of us live. The bank tellers, retail workers and Starbuck’s baristas aren’t being bused in every day from hundreds of miles away, after all. People come here on vacation or for business, see Manhattan and maybe a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Queens and think all of NYC is like that. But that’s like me visiting New Orleans and spending a week in the French Quarter and thinking that’s typical of the whole city. It might be - but I wouldn’t know since I spent pretty much the whole time in the French Quarter or near the casino.
Good point but the difference is that anyone really can live in French Quarter in New Orleans, even wait-staff on their own even through regular jobs. It can be more expensive than other parts of the city but hardly unobtainable even for people doing shift work if that is what they want. It can be a hassle in terms of parking and crime but that is also an area that never sleeps, is a nonstop party and is affordable to the average Joe or Jane if they want to deal with the trade-offs.
I don’t know much about New York culture other than what I have seen on sitcoms and by going to college with lots of them that chose to flee and never go back. From what my New York friends that moved to New Orleans tell me, the latter has it beat by a lot for shear decadence. Las Vegas is more affordable too if you just want pure hedonism. What is NYC’s specialty these days if you don’t work on Wall Street?
Millions of people live in the area and some love it. What makes that so for some? Many that live there claim to not like it at all so why do they stay?
Your location tag says Brooklyn. Have you neglected to change it since moving to Manhattan? Or is it that you *swim *across the East River? Maybe you fly? Or do you, perhaps, use a bridge and/or tunnel?