What happens when the push to by a home causes all sorts of bad behavior and wrecks the economy? Renters get screwed, too:
A registered nurse came close to losing her $1,550-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side after being let go from two jobs in three months. A woman found herself dipping into a 401(k) to keep her $3,375 unit in Peter Cooper Village after her husband was laid off in February from his six-figure marketing job. A father of two with an M.B.A. and a law degree owed $5,400 in back rent in Stuyvesant Town after he struggled to find steady work and lent money to his wife’s family.
Lawyers, judges and tenant advocates say the staggering economy has sent an increasing number of middle-class renters across New York City to the brink of eviction, straining the legal and financial services of city agencies and charities. Suddenly, residents of middle-class havens like Rego Park in Queens and Riverdale in the Bronx are crowding into the city’s already burdened housing courts, long known as poor people’s court.
Even some affluent people in high-end places are finding themselves facing off with landlords. One man, laid off by Merrill Lynch, was forced to move out of his $5,700 apartment in TriBeCa, owing $20,000 in back rent. Todd Nahins, a lawyer who represents owners of luxury residential buildings, has been busy negotiating payment plans for tenants in arrears.
Although I will say this- just the idea of paying $3,375 a month in rent gives me chest pains.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
I’ll just post the standard wingnut comment, from a standard wingnut I know, by way of rebuttal:
“I think personal responsibility and accountability is a fantasy in todays world. People always blame others for their failures never looking at themselves and the path they have taken in life as the cause of their failures. Reestablishing this principle into society would go a long way in improving every aspect of society, from crime, welfare, unemployment, poor health, just to name a few.
“When we as a society take responsibility and accountability for our lives and the cause and effects of our decisions then we will once again head towards the greatness that our founders started (we are on a detour right now in my opinion).”
Da Bomb
$3,375 a month for rent?!
I live in Houston and I have a two bedroom, two bathroom with granite countertops – 1100 sq ft apartment for about $920.00 a month. It’s around the Galleria Area.
I think I just had about two heart attacks and a stroke reading that story. You don’t even pay that much for houses in Houston. That’s absolutely wild!
MNPundit
Houston has a lot more room than New York.
Da Bomb
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: “I think personal responsibility and accountability is a fantasy in todays world. People always blame others for their failures never looking at themselves and the path they have taken in life as the cause of their failures. Reestablishing this principle into society would go a long way in improving every aspect of society, from crime, welfare, unemployment, poor health, just to name a few.”
(The sounds of shoes tapping…)
Hunter Gathers
The $400 a month I pay wouldn’t get me a closet in NYC.
$3,375 is 8 and a half months worth of rent. Am I better off being “poor”?
August J. Pollak
Yeah, I’m in Atlanta- the center of Atlanta- and I pay a little less than $900 for a 1BR, and that’s high by Atlanta standards. My friends in New York are paying $3,400 a month for an apartment near the WTC with nearly the same floor space. I don’t miss New York that much.
Da Bomb
@MNPundit: True, but I still can’t imagine paying that much in rent.
I think I am getting the vapors just thinking about it.
Xenos
It is about time there was serious downward pressure on rents in NY. I remember a similar phenomenon in the late 80s when Wall Street laid off a lot of bankers.
A lot of hip Brooklyn residents may see what reverse gentrification looks like…
rts
I live in Manhattan. $3375 in rent is very typical for a 2 bedroom apartment. Peter Cooper Village is a nice area with gracious apartments. I lived near there in 1988 and paid $1500 back then for a small one bedroom. Could easily imagine that it would cost $2500 today. Heck, a parking garage space costs about $350 per month.
Cat Lady
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
Until Republicans accept responsibility for trashing the economy, lying us into a war with a country that didn’t harm us and violating the Geneva Convention, FISA and the Constitution, then insist that they didn’t lose an election because it was stolen from them by George Soros and ACORN, then the only response is:
Bite Me.
patrick
Sheesh, I’m a Mechanical Engineer specializing in Finite Element Analysis 12 1/2 years out of college, and my take home averages only a few hundred dollars more than the $3375/mo apartment….
I suppose if you don’t have a car, car insurance, gas costs, etc it makes it a little more manageable. for us, add in those costs to our mortgage and property taxes, and we still only spend about $1600/mo between house and car expenses, and feel like we’re barely getting by with little left over for savings.
gopher2b
Because you have to live on the Upper East side. Stop whining and move to Brooklyn
Ken G.
A tiny one-bedroom here in DC goes for $1000. Some areas just have really high rents. That nurse’s 1550/mo. apartment is probably not extravagant.
MikeJ
This is why people from Kansas or someplace think $100k/yr is “rich” and people from population centers think it’s middle class.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Cat Lady:
Pretty much, yeah. But I like that post. It perfectly encapsulates the cheerful, banal brand of utter insulated idiocy that made the GOP such a force to be reckoned with for so long. “I’m doing alright because I’m smart and work hard. If things are going badly for you, that’s because you’re stupid and lazy. Go fuck yourself, it’s not my responsibility to subsidize your stupidity and your laziness.”
It’s also very demonstrative of an utter lack of curiosity about any contradictions between this worldview and reality. It’s pretty difficult to puncture the complacent solipsism of the modern Republican.
demimondian
@Hunter Gathers:
That’s easy to fix — a closet is included, free, with each Republican party membership these days!
gopher2b
BTW, and my wife is a nurse, any RN who is fired from two jobs in three months…..must be a terrible employee. My wife can walk into any hospital (and as long as she doesn’t wear sweatpants to the interview) could walk out with a job.
geg6
As a renter myself, can I just say those rental payments make me hyperventilate? Yegads. Makes me very, very happy to be living in perpetually economically depressed Beaver County, PA. My $360 a month one-bedroom (but with fabulous closets) is looking better and better by comparison.
That said, I haven’t read the article but I was talking to a good friend who lives in the West Palm Beach area the other night. He’s looking to buy a house for the first time in his life and is amazed by all the bargains available due to the housing meltdown there. He said there are McMansion neighborhoods there that look like the plague went through and killed everyone there. But he also said that one of the major problems cropping up there are renters whose landlords have “overextended” themselves and whose mortgage holders are now foreclosing. And the renters are the ones who end up screwed. They’re getting evicted left and right with no warning from the landlord and even though they have paid their rent on time and in full and have leases. He was wondering what their legal recourse might be, if any, because it happened to a woman who is a dispatcher for his company. She had to scramble to get another place that wouldn’t disrupt her kids emotionally any more than necessarily and would keep them in their current schools. I’m not an attorney, so I don’t know. But I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have some sort of rights in such a situation under state renter laws. Anyone know?
Carnacki
“…gives me chest pains.”
At our age, what doesn’t give us chest pains?
gbear
@rts:
rts, where do waitresses, store clerks and school teachers who work in Manhattan live?
From 1983 thru 1996 I lived in a 400sf apartment right across the (very busy) street from Macalaster College in St. Paul, MN. In the 13 years I lived there, the rent rose from $225/mo to $235/mo. It was very hard to get myself out of there to buy the house I now live in, but even after a major refinancing to do some updating, the PITI on my three bedroom house is in three-figures. I can’t even imagine how people can afford to live in NYC or SF.
Krista
It all depends on where you live, and what’s available. When I was in downtown Halifax, I was paying $950/month for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment. A lot of people would probably be shocked to hear of rents that high in Nova Scotia, of all places. But, when your city is on a peninsula (or in the case of Manhattan, an island), there’s only so much room and so many apartments to go around.
Frankly, I’m surprised that the RN found an Upper East Side apartment for only $1550 a month. And I’m shocked that an RN was let go from two jobs — we’re absolutely begging for nurses up here, and you folks are laying them off? Bizarre!
Hunter Gathers
@demimondian: GOP party membership is very tempting according to those terms, but there’s not enough room for me and Larry Craig in that closet. I’ll have to pass, thank you very much.
Hunter Gathers
@gopher2b: True, true. My mom’s an RN and she turns down offers all the time because she doesn’t want to give up her teaching gig. The fact that the school helps pay for her grad work doesn’t hurt.
jj
In less tony areas in the outer boroughs. Quite possibly with roommates.
geemoney
gbear: Were you at Mac? I was there 1991 – 1995. I lived in the now-destroyed Dayton dorm for a while. One of the times I lived there, my room looked out on that very busy street. With no A/C in those rooms, especially when the school year started, you had to get used to the traffic noise pretty quick. The rumor at the time was that those rooms were smaller than regulation jail cells.
I imagine they’d go for upward of $2k a month in Manhattan.
Brucie
I live on the Upper East and I pay $4000/mo for my by no means fancy 2 BR (it’s really a 1 BR but we put up a wall to make a room for the kid). Not atypical. And, to all those who say “move”–well, would you want to leave your home and the neighborhood you grew up in?
Charity
Christ on toast, our mortgage is only $1,910 a month for our townhouse in central NJ.
BenA
Heck…. 10 years ago a decent 1 bed room appartment near Allentown, PA cost me $920/month. I imagine it hasn’t gotten any better…. and housing costs around here are actually reasonable… so $1000/m in DC or $1550 in Manhatten sounds obscenely great.
@Krista:
Something about the RN thing sounds fishy… even in NYC RNs should find work pretty easily.
Dennis-SGMM
These people simply need to retrain themselves – just like all of the poor bastards who’ve had their jobs outsourced and offshored out of existence. Lost everything you worked for? Had to take a shit job at less pay? Insecure about your future? Welcome to the rest of America.
Xenos
@geg6:
It can vary a lot from state to state. Also, if someone only had a month or two left on that lease, then there is no recourse in any case.
For what it is worth, in Massachusetts, even commercial tenants will get a very sympathetic judge if they can show they have fulfilled their lease requirements.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Dennis-SGMM:
LOL, yeah. Or, as smug wingnut kids in college would put it:
“I think personal responsibility and accountability is a fantasy in todays world. People always blame others for their failures never looking at themselves and the path they have taken in life as the cause of their failures. Reestablishing this principle into society would go a long way in improving every aspect of society, from crime, welfare, unemployment, poor health, just to name a few.
“When we as a society take responsibility and accountability for our lives and the cause and effects of our decisions then we will once again head towards the greatness that our founders started (we are on a detour right now in my opinion).”
Now, if that wingnut bastard just stays in college for the next 47 years or so, he’ll be okay.
gbear
@geemoney:
I wasn’t a Mac student. I had an AC unit, but the noise on Snelling Ave is what ultimately drove me out of the apartment. I had the apartment right above Carmello’s restaurant. Except for the traffic on Snelling, that was really a wonderful neighborhood.
John PM
I have friends in New York, and the rents given the locations do not seem out of line to me. New York has the highest standard of living in the country. I love visiting New York but I could never live there.
Now I am going off topic slightly: One thing that has always puzzled me is why people rent cars. My wife has a friend who just lost a job and now has to try to get out of the lease on her luxury vehicle. We have other friends who lease cars as well. Other than being able to get a “new” car every three years, leasing does not make sense to me ecomonically. Both of our cars are now paid off and I am going to be driving mine until the day it just all falls apart at once. Leasing a car means (1) when the lease is up you have no car and (2) you are continually making payments. Is there something I am missing?
chiggins
I loved living in NYC when we were there, and we had a sweetheart deal on a 250 s.f. studio in the L.E.S., but when I’d think about trying to stay permanently (given that our family had gone from 2 to 3 people), the idea that I’d have to keep earning that kind of money just to break even every month was pretty intimidating.
demimondian
@Hunter Gathers: Well, of course you’d have to pass. That’s what the closet is all about.
Xenos
@John PM: There can be some useful tax benefits to leasing if you are self-employed. Never done it myself, though. I find it is generally a mistake to give tax savings a priority over real savings.
Hunter Gathers
@John PM:
Me thinks that they just enjoy setting fire to large piles of money.
Leasing a car – all of the pressure of making a car payment with no outright ownership at the end. Genius!
Hunter Gathers
@demimondian: HA!
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
@John PM: If you own cars for a long time and eventually want to stop making payments, leasing makes no sense at all. But if you are one of those people who like buying a new car every 5 years or so, leasing instead of buying makes more sense because you generally don’t need a down payment and you usually find your monthly payments are lower.
And the certified used vehicles you get from car dealers are generally leased cars that have been returned at lease end. So even if you’re a thrifty type who always buys used, you might find that someone else leasing actually benefits you.
(Me? I have a bike. Suits me just fine.)
wilfred
So stop paying reant and force the eviction courts to the point of overload.
Or act like pathetic, fecking sheep. If there was ever a time for a political statement, it’s now. What – 700 billion to bail out a bank and people on the street because they can’t cover their rent.
Who the fuck is going to move into these empty apartments? Don;t pay and force the landlords to negotiate the price downwards.
Stefan
$3,375 a month for rent?! I live in Houston and I have a two bedroom, two bathroom with granite countertops – 1100 sq ft apartment for about $920.00 a month. It’s around the Galleria Area. I think I just had about two heart attacks and a stroke reading that story. You don’t even pay that much for houses in Houston. That’s absolutely wild!
Well, that’s capitalism for you. Many more people want to live in New York than want to live in Houston, so apartments in NY are worth more than they are in Houston. The scarcer and more valuable the resource, the higher the price it commands.
Meanwhile, there are people living in even bigger apartments than yours in, say, Ciudad Juarez or Mexico City who are having a heart attack and stroke when they read that you pay $920 a month when they pay $300……
Stefan
rts, where do waitresses, store clerks and school teachers who work in Manhattan live?
Upper Manhattan (ie. Washington Heights, Inwood and Harlem), Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Nassau County, Suffolk County, New Jersey, etc.
Surabaya Stew
Yeah, the numbers sound just about right for an apartment in Lower Manhattan. Considering that my folks brought their 3-bedroom apartment for less than $100,000 back in the late 70’s, and at the height of the (un)real estate market peak it was worth close to 3 million, I’d say that renting actually makes sense!
LD50
$400 a month? Where do you live, Flint?
Beauzeaux
$920.00 a month would get you a fairly crappy apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood here in Los Angeles.
$1,550 might get you a moderately non-crappy place.
I drove by a new housing development in Hollywood the other day, and made a mental note of the web address on the banners out front. I was a little stunned to learn that the lowest priced units will start at $700,000. And this isn’t even in one of the relatively clean and quiet areas of Hollywood.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@John PM:
The car is treated as something other than what it is, which is transportation.
It is a luxury. It is status. It is the pleasure of having a new vehicle. If you are a car nut, it’s just the idea of experiencing different machines. It is sometimes a business thing, a public relations issue. It’s vanity. It’s just a discretionary use of disposable income, if you have it.
It’s a way to get vehicles off the lot without putting up a lot of cash up front for them. It also sustains a healthy used car market, if there is a demand for used cars.
SGEW
The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. It’s hard to stay on the rock . . . but it is possible.
So far I’ve been priced out of southern Manhattan all the way up 204th street: when I first moved to Manhattan as a teenager I didn’t even know that Manhattan went up to 204th street! There are still spots in New York county (as opposed to exile[1] in Kings or Queens county) that are relatively affordable, but there aren’t many: parts of Harlem, the Heights, Inwood, and (so I’ve heard) Chinatown (but only if you’re Han and know the right people, natch).
My rent on an East Village 2 bedroom (an actual 2 bedroom, with a living room and a kitchen and closets and everything) in 1996 was $1200: pretty pricey, I thought at the time, but worth it for the location and the new hardwood floors and all that (and a magnificent bodega downstairs[2]). In 2006, a 2 bed in the E. Vill. went for $3000 – at least. A 250% increase, in just ten years: unsustainable!
We are right now seeing the end of the ever-increasing rent madness, however: prices are actually dropping in some areas (true!). Now, I wouldn’t particularly like it there was a precipitous drop in rents along with an increase in urban blight (the seventies and eighties in NYC was somewhat unpleasant, I am led to believe), but I am certainly optimistic about seeing prices return to a sane level, so I can get my ass back downtown. I’m getting nosebleeds up here!
[1] Yeah, yeah. Brooklyn rocks, whatever. I like me my 212.
[2] I miss that bodega. Best 3 a.m. steak sandwiches ever.
mclaren
“An individual working full-time at minimum wage cannot afford the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in any state in the U.S., according to a new study.”
All part of the sub-proletarianization of America.
BruceK
Suddenly, 475 euros a month plus utilities for a forty-or-so-square-meter one-bedroom in the Kolonaki district of Athens doesn’t sound so bad.
(Kolonaki’s a high-rent district, but the building I’m in is old and a bit on the shabby side.)
John Cole
@John PM: I have no idea. I paid cash for my car and will drive it until it doesn’t drive anymore. Considering it is a Subaru with only 100k miles and I only drive about 3-4k miles a year, that will be sometime in 2020 or thereabouts. If then.
chopper
yeah, y’all got chest pains at thought of paying so much. when i read ‘living in houston’ i got chest pains. brooklyn is expensive, but it’s brooklyn. aint a place like it on earf.
Hunter Gathers
@LD50: Nope. Paris, Illinois. Small town about 15 minutes east of Terre Haute, Indiana. It’s a small, one bedroom duplex with a basement. In no way luxurious, but it suits me, my fiance and my small herd of animals just fine.
SGEW
Oh, I agree.
…
gex
All sorts of stuff gets grossly distorted when some people are grossly overpaid. Nothing surprising there.
LD50
I think you mean west. East of Terre Haute is Indiana.
But yes, that explains the $400/month rent.
Hunter Gathers
@LD50: You’re right. It is west. I is teh stupid. It’s not that bad, though, once you get used to dealing with the morons. Although in my experience, the morons are everywhere.
gbear
@Hunter Gathers:
Don’t ever go into commissioned sales, HG.
southpaw
I live on manhattan and actually have to write a check for slightly less than that every month. The pain is not localized in the chest, in my experience.
Hunter Gathers
@gbear: I couldn’t sell shit to a pig. My first instinct would be to tell the pig he can get cheaper shit down the road at ‘Shit-Mart’. It’s why I got out of radio. The only way to make any money in radio (besides being a loudmouthed asshole) is to work in the sales department. Trying to convice people to buy air, for Christ’s sake. I make more money at my crappy retail job than I ever did in radio. And I did that shit for 6 years.
iluvsummr
@patrick:
See that’s your problem right there. You chose to work as a lowly mechanical engineer instead of parlaying those skills into a cushy job with a hedge fund or doing finite element modeling of cardiac muscle for stent manufacturers.
/Jake DeSantis
CobbleHill_PITA
Brooklyn isn’t much cheaper than Manhattan nowadays. A 1-bed in Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Hts, Park Slope or Carroll Gardens is between $2500-$4000/month.
If you want to live cheaply you’d have to move much farther out, but then you end up with nightmare commutes on the train. Alternatively you could take your chances in a “pre-gentrified” neighborhood, but don’t expect any of your friends to visit you.
kevinNYC
New York City has well north of 8 million people living here. Any area that “desirable” with an easy commute tends to be pricey.
The house my parents bought for 22,000 in the mid 60’s in Brooklyn, could have fetched close to a million dollars a year or two ago.
iluvsummr
@mclaren:
Yes, yes, but it’s not like those people don’t have options. There’s always tent cities.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@mclaren:
I’m sorry, I never tire of posting this crazy shit.
“I think personal responsibility and accountability is a fantasy in todays world. People always blame others for their failures never looking at themselves and the path they have taken in life as the cause of their failures. Reestablishing this principle into society would go a long way in improving every aspect of society, from crime, welfare, unemployment, poor health, just to name a few.
“When we as a society take responsibility and accountability for our lives and the cause and effects of our decisions then we will once again head towards the greatness that our founders started (we are on a detour right now in my opinion).”
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: OK. I’ll bite – is that early John Cole, circa 2002?
Glocksman
I recently bought a used 2008 Kia Spectra EX that was formerly owned by Enterprise for 9 months and rented out locally here in Evansville.
The car had 19,911 miles on it when they sold it to the dealer I bought it from.
The tires (junk Goodyear Eagle LS’s) only had about 5000 miles left on them, but otherwise it was a good clean used car with 3½ years/40,000 miles of factory warranty left on it for $10k.
All in all with an additional 6 yr warranty, GAP coverage, oil change plan, taxes and registration, it came to $13,800 financed through a local credit union at 5.69%.
The only thing I’ve done to it so far is change the air filters and have a set of Bridgestone Potenza G019 Grids mounted to replace the POS Goodyears.
I mention all of this because I’ve had several people say ‘you never want to buy a rental car because you don’t know how it was treated’.
To a point, that’s true.
However, the rental companies do inspect the cars and perform scheduled maintenance.
You don’t know that about an ex-lease car in addition to not knowing how it was driven.
I looked at several ‘GM Certified Used’ ex-lease Malibus, and frankly my opinion is that either the certifying dealer lied like a rug to GM in order to get them certified or GM’s standards are lower than JD Byrider’s.
On all of them, the interiors had peeling paint on the radio bezels, water and coke stains in the upholstery, worn tires, and when I looked under the hood of the 2005 Malibu the salesman was trying to push me to buy, the tops of the strut towers were covered in thick rust.
Not to mention the strange rattle behind the dash.
By comparison, the strut towers on my 1992 Olds Cutlass Ciera were almost rust free.
The same dealer had a certified ex-lease 2007 Pontiac G6 for $10k with 30,000 miles that I considered buying until I saw that the car had been in a front end collision when I read the CARFAX report on it.
From what I’ve seen, the ex-rentals are in better shape than the ex-lease cars.
roseyv
As someone who was born in NYC and has lived here most of her life, just a word of advice to anyone dumb enough to be spending $3,375 a month on rent in the first place: first thing you do when you get fired? Move your ass to Bensonhurst. Or Canarsie, or Staten Island. Or some less-desirable part of Queens. Seriously. Your savings will last you about fifteen times as long as if you stayed put. Plus, since you’ll almost certainly have to move eventually anyway, you may as well do it immediately, before your credit rating is shot to shit.
Snark Based Reality
How the hell does one swing a $1750/month apartment on $40k worth of income? I make far more than that and there is no way I could swing $1750 and I have no other serious expenses.
sparky
former brooklynite here. always refused to pay manhattan rents, and then left the city altogether when my greenpoint neighborhood caught the greed virus. brooklyn used to be an interesting place to live. now it’s just a post-college playground for recent arrivals, unless you are talking about places like Park Slope, which want to pretend they are the West Village.
edit: excepting places where the locals still hold out: Bensonhurst, Canarsie, Flatlands, and down Ocean Parkway, along with the other hoods. i ’bout fell over laughing when i saw that hipsters were moving to Bushwick.
Xenos
@Glocksman: I had a similar experience with a Kia Sedona a couple years ago. Enterprise sold it back to the dealer with less than 20k miles on it, tires sucked but otherwise in excellent shape. 1/8th mileage depreciation with 1/3 price depreciation. Nowadays you would get closer to 1/2 price depreciation.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Xenos:
Nah, some idiot I work with, posting on a workplace political discussion forum.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Sure sounds like it could be Cole c. 2002, though, doesn’t it?
Wile E. Quixote
@Da Bomb
What is the real-estate mantra? “Location, location, location”. When I bought my house in Burien (a suburb of Seattle) eight years ago I paid $345,000 for a 2,300 square foot house, 3br, 1.25 baths on a 10,000 square foot lot with a view of Puget Sound and Mount Rainier. One of my co-workers told me that I was insane to spend that kind of money and that if I wanted to work in Kentucky that I could have gotten the same house, minus the view of Puget Sound and Mount Rainier, for $25,000 dollars. I said “yes, but then I would be in Kentucky, and after having spent the summer of 1985 there courtesy of the US Army and several business trips there I’m willing to spend a few hundred thousand dollars so I don’t have to be there.” So you can those the New Yorkers who are paying north of 3k a month in rent that you can get cheaper apartments in Houston and they’d probably say, “Yes, but then I would be in Houston.”
itsbenj
well I wouldn’t waste too much time feeling bad for these yuppies. I live in Brooklyn, and struggle to pay my monthly $850 rent. people living in Tribeca in places that cost 5 grand a month – they have plenty of trinkets and valuables they can liquidate if need be. these are RICH people. but if they have lived foolishly in the meantime, they will find that they couldn’t even manage my lifestyle on the budget unemployment will afford them. they’ll still be making $100 more per week from it than I was when I was on it. they’ve just never had to struggle before, and they all freak out and make a big to-do about it as they adjust and see the scariness up close & personal.
Caramia
Stuy Town apartments are now starting at $2.290/month and Peter Cooper at $2,599.
itsbenj
I love how there are people who “move out” of NYC because they think too many “hipsters” live there, like a bunch of silly grumpy old men.
And NYC was somehow not like that, when, again?
Pffft, I live in Greenpoint now, and rents are going down. People are moving out. The boom is over, you grumpy silly people can come back now, y’hear?
And no, when you first lose your job, moving should not be what you think of first, unless you were paying a ridiculous amount in the first place. Moving is one of the most expensive things you can do! It costs a ton, especially here, after you pay 1st month, last month, deposit, brokers fee (yeah everyone brags about how they avoid them and they’re all liars and they all pay them) and the moving equipment and assistance – its a huge expense. Not recommended for anyone on a normal income.
mp1900
@gopher2b:
Just recently read an article about nurses getting laid off.
http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/top/446920
Stefan
So you can [tell] those the New Yorkers who are paying north of 3k a month in rent that you can get cheaper apartments in Houston and they’d probably say, “Yes, but then I would be in Houston.”
Exactly. The1100 sq. foot two bedroom, two bathroom with granite countertops apartment for about $920.00 a month is around the Galleria Area. My smaller, more expensive apartment in NYC is around the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, Prospect Park, MOMA, Broadway, Wall Street, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Webster Hall, Carnegie Hall, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, SoHo, the East Village, the Frick, the Guggenheim, Chinatown, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, Columbia, NYU, the Museum of Natural History, and more bars and restaurants than man can comprehend. You get what you pay for.
tammanycall
I’ve lived and rented in both Manhattan and L.A. and the price points are about the same in comparable neighborhoods. But I’ve heard the most expensive U.S. city to rent or buy in is San Fransisco.
Semi off topic but: to the Hollywood renter, I know a building manager in the lower Hollywood Hills area and he recently told me that prices have dropped about $100 last month and he expects them to drop again this summer. Units in Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park are still priced too high for market demand, so if you can wait it 2-3 months, you may be rewarded. If that’s too long a delay, have you thought about Alhambra?
Anything affordable near the beach is generally a matter of luck, as most landlords consider proximity to the water an excuse for the worst kind of price gouging. Happy Hunting!
/end So Cal Real Estate geekery
grumpy realist
heh, I ended up paying about $3K/month for my 1-bedroom apartment in London. Half of the top floor of a Victorian mansion. Out near Heathrow in the goddamn flight path of the goddamn Concorde. And everything else I had looked at was pricier.
What really freaked me out was I was paying twice what I’d been paying back in Tokyo…
hal
“Exactly. The1100 sq. foot two bedroom, two bathroom with granite countertops apartment for about $920.00 a month is around the Galleria Area. My smaller, more expensive apartment in NYC is around the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, Prospect Park, MOMA, Broadway, Wall Street, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Webster Hall, Carnegie Hall, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, SoHo, the East Village, the Frick, the Guggenheim, Chinatown, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, Columbia, NYU, the Museum of Natural History, and more bars and restaurants than man can comprehend. You get what you pay for”
Right, but if all of your money is going to rent, how can you afford to go to any of these places, except when they are free? What’s the point in living somewhere just to live be in that place, but not be able to actually do anything because you can’t afford it?
Nancy Irving
Note also that Peter Cooper Village is (or was in my day, the 1980s) a modest middle-class housing development.
Calouste
Wait, a $5,700/month appartment and in no time you owe $20,000 in back rent? Some one was living a bit too close to the financial edge. Saving money. It works.