But Where Do They Live?

Manhattan. The most expensive of New York’s legendary boroughs. High rises and ultimate cool. Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Filled with retail clerks, waiters and busboys, messengers, cabbies, secretaries, receptionists, clerks and interns, doormen, stock clerks, janitors and maids and other folks who are not exactly earning enough to live there. With approximately 1.6 million residents, Manhattan is an island that requires you to cross water to move into a suburb or another borough.

Overall, there are pockets of housing affordability across all of New York, much of it in the form of fairly unattractive public housing. “Based upon the 2000 Census, [New York City Public Housing Authority’s] Public Housing represents 8.6% of the city's rental apartments and is home to 5.2% of the city’s population. NYCHA residents and Section 8 voucher holders combined occupy 12.7% of the city’s rental apartments. In mid-2007, NYCHA faced a $225 million budget shortfall.” Wikipedia. Created in the mid-1930s, the NYCHA is a lifeline to so many of those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. For many others, having bought apartments (or inherited them) a very long time ago or living in rent-controlled units is the only way they could live in the city.

Sure trains bring folks efficiently from neighboring communities or the less expensive boroughs to their jobs in the city, but often this involves tight schedules and occasionally dangerous late-night forays on trains and subways. Gentrification has claimed most of Brooklyn and has just about taken the balance of upper Manhattan from the once-dreaded gang-infested ghettos areas where the middle and upper classes never ventured and seems to be moving in on the South Bronx as well. Queens has its tony neighborhoods now, so the prognosis for affordable housing isn’t particularly good in the coming years.

Roommates stacked like pancakes, apartments the size of walk-in closets and younger residents staying with parents longer are additional features of this mega-expensive metropolis. With real estate costs and high taxes filtering into every nook and cranny of life in the Big Apple, retail establishments are forced to pass all kinds of higher costs on to their customers. “The price tag for life’s basic necessities — everything from milk to haircuts to Lipitor to electricity, and especially housing — is more than twice the national average.” New York Times, January 18^th.

Expensive condominium high rises share blocks with MacDonald’s and public housing. Wealth is reclaiming land from squalor… very, very quickly. Making $100,000 and feeling like you are on top of the world? You’d be struggling in Manhattan and wouldn’t even think of buying “something nice” to live in. The $70,000 for a family of four – what the Pew Research Center believes is the national average definition of middle class – doesn’t remotely cut it in New York. The costs here are staggering.

“The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000. The middle class makes up a smaller proportion of the population in New York than elsewhere in the nation. New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.” NY Times. Have kids? Probably can’t afford living in Manhattan. According to the last census, only 17% of Manhattanites have kids.

But here’s the strange part of it all. Manhattan specifically and New York City generally have always struggled with “the end is near for New York’s middle and lower classes.” Every few years, some major article appears that the city is simply beyond the ability of working folks to live there. And yet all those lower level jobs are filled and the city just hums along. Maybe life is a tad more uncomfortable for them, but it is New York… and dreams seem to grow like weeds in the Big Apple.

“In 1968, New York magazine documented the mad scramble for affordable apartments in a cover article detailing the extreme lengths to which average people went to secure one. ‘Surgeons have postponed operations, housewives have gone back to work, hippies have cut their hair and families have destroyed their pets,’ the magazine reported. ‘Little hope is held out for the middle-income ($15-20,000 a year) people, career girls who do not want roommates and couples with more than one drawer-sized infant.’ Brownstones that had sold for $125,000 in 1958, according to the article, were selling 10 years later for twice that much (in today’s dollars, a jump from $827,000 to $1.65 million).” NY Times. Perhaps New York is “the city that never sleeps” because so many cannot afford a place to put a bed!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the way New York residents cope with the cost of living never ceases to amaze me.