Via Memeorandum:
Manhattan apartment sales plunged more than 50 percent and the average price dropped 21.4 to 24 percent from a year ago, as the U.S. recession forced many who own a piece of the Big Apple to eat humble pie, several reports said.
The average price of Manhattan apartment in the second quarter slid to $1,312,920 down from $1,669,729 a year earlier, according to a Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate report released Thursday.
Those numbers give me chest pains.
Just Some Fuckhead
Even more chest pains when you understand that middle America has been forced down to $10/hour sustenance jobs so those fuckers can rake in the kind of money it takes to afford those places.
AhabTRuler
Wait until you go grocery shopping in Manhattan. That will give you chest pains.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
No kidding. It’s insane how much housing costs, both there and in the outlying areas. My friend is a nurse, and is married to a surgeon, so they’re doing all right. They work in New Jersey (I don’t know what city), and even then, had to get their house waaaaaay the hell out of town because there was nothing even remotely affordable (that wasn’t an utter dump) near their work.
SGEW
Those numbers give you chest pains? Crikey, man: imagine what it does to us Manhattan residents. Chest pains ain’t in it.
Mike P
I’m live in Manhattan now and I’m living in a 3 bed-1 1/2 bathroom place that goes for about $4800 a month. Good times.
geg6
Thus the reason I live here and not in my favoritest place in the whole world. NYC real estate is insane. I don’t know how anyone who doesn’t work for Goldman Sachs survives there. I’d be living in a cardboard box under a bridge on my lowly public university salary. How do blue or pink collar workers live there?
linda
ooohhh, a manhattan real estate post…..
prices are expected to drop at least another 30%; and frankly that’s fine by me. manhattan’s completely unaffordable for anyone without a trust fund; neighborhoods in brooklyn, too.
also compounding the problem for the developers is many new apt developments coming online and no buyers; there was a recent story about a new brooklyn development accepting homeless families in a deal with the city (although i am hoping someone follows up on the connection between the builder and his city contacts).
Jim Pharo
By George, I think you’ve got it!
Cheap real estate is a good thing for many more people than expensive real estate is.
Less expensive everything is good for many more people than more expensive everything: labor, cars, credit, etc., etc.
Think of the market imbalances that our ruling elite has created: inadequate housing stock and unemployed construction workers; inadequate sources of energy and excess labor, land, etc.; inadequate supply of credit and crazy prices for credit.
I may not have all of this quite right, but cheap Manhattan real estate is a democratic good: better for more people than expensive real estate.
JK
You should visit here for a week to get the full effect.
NutellaonToast
But think of the money you’ll save on gas!
SGEW
We either:
A) Find very, very small studios or “one-bedrooms” that are rent stabilized and cling to them like barnacles, or;
B) Refurbish shitty, shitty “loft” spaces (read: industrial crap holes) in the Boroughs into rickety co-ops, and live with as many roommates as possible, or;
C) Inherit.
Also: homelessness.
Brick Oven Bill
If you look at graphs of tariffs vs. time and wealth concentration vs. time, you find that tariffs went down to next to nothing in the years following WWII. Wealth concentration accelerated during this time period and is now extreme. These are ‘those powerful few’ that the Washington Post sells access to.
Re-instituting significant tariffs (10% immediately, rising by 5% per year for 5 years, to the historic rate of 35%), would raise federal revenues and spur domestic production and jobs. It makes no sense that we are not doing this. ‘Those powerful few’ are very powerful, and yield higher rates of return for themselves by lowering labor costs through Globalism.
The good news is that, in my town, you can still buy a 16oz draft beer for seventy-five cents. Ha ha ha. You even get free popcorn.
linda
How do blue or pink collar workers live there?
they don’t.
grumpy realist
This is why I’ve always said you need $100K/year or more just to start being middle-class in Manhattan.
Very weird. (And I’ve lived in Tokyo and London as well.)
asiangrrlMN
I love NYC. It’s my favorite American city. I will never live there because of the insane prices.
OT: I had a dream last night that involved a Balloon Juice gathering. You all look much different in my dreams than you do in my head.
Michael D., and that’s juuuust enough to cover the drinks.
Michael D.
@AhabTRuler: Our company gives you $50 to eat while traveling. $75 if you are in Manhattan.
burnspbesq
@RedKitten (formerly Krista – the Canadian one):
Word. I was in the leafy, affluent bedroom suburb in New Jersey that I grew up in last week, for the first time in a while. There are a lot of amazing houses for sale, but even with the current state of the housing market, I couldn’t afford to live there unless I hit the lottery. And I’m in the income bracket whose taxes y’all want to raise.
burnspbesq
@Michael D.:
So, you get breakfast at McDonald’s, and you get one slice of pizza from Ray’s for lunch, and you get the $5 special from the halal cart on the corner of 53rd and Sixth for dinner, and you’ve got $55 left. Win!
ronin122
@Brick Oven Bill: I….agree with you? Should I be concerned?
In all seriousness though, I do think we ought to raise tariffs (work with trade with China, too bad not with Mexico thanks to NAFTA), though the free market worshippers would scream “soc1alism” louder than you heard from those tea-bagging parties.
SGEW
@asiangrrlMN: Also, it gets rather hot during our summers here; probably way too hot for your northern cold-lovin’ soul. Spend a day here during late August when the humidity is 8000% and our murder rate skyrockets, then get back to us on favorite cities.
dbrown
This is so full of it – I saw some episodes of Friends and someone who worked at a coffee house shared a place that had two large bedrooms with at least 500 sq.ft. living room and even had a huge balcony! Better still, there wasn’t a single homeless or poor person walking the streets… and not even a black … wait, there was once a black woman and hot. See, NYC is a great, cheap place and no bad people even walk the streets. What’s wrong with $1,600,000+ for an apartment? Even a waitress can afford such a place with a roommate.
Bill E Pilgrim
@asiangrrlMN:
Are you sure you’re not dreaming now, and that was the real part?
Bill E Pilgrim
@dbrown:
True, and I’ve seen Woody Allen movies where part-time barely employed writers all live in fabulous Upper West Side three bedroom apartments or gigantic SOHO lofts.
I never found one of those when I lived there but I figured I just wasn’t cinematic enough.
SGEW
@dbrown: From what I’ve heard, the film 10,000 B.C. depicted the Epipaleolithic lifestyle more accurately than Friends depicted contemporary New York.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Brick Oven Bill:
What the bloggers at Balloon Juice don’t know is that we’ve replaced BOB with Folger’s crystals. Let’s see if anyone can tell!
LD50
Okay, I think your subconscious is telling you you’re spending too much time here.
Bill E Pilgrim
@SGEW:
Actually the Paleolithic resembles parts of New York more closely than Friends does.
jrosen
I don’t want to give away a secret but…Jersey City, where I moved 2 years ago (for family reasons) after 30 years around Boston (not one of the cheaper areas either), is still somewhat affordable…not unlike Watertown and Somerville that border on Cambridge, MA. The bus and PATH trains can out you in Midtwon Manhattan in 20-4- minutes (depending on traffic in the tunnels. I have a 1000 square ft. condo for 1200/mo, including taxes. The aforementioned bus stops on my corner, and if I drive the Lincoln tunnel is 10 minutes away.
There are also units here in JC Heights that have gone empty for at least a year and two new townhouses just went up on my block. so I guess that reals good be made. The only major headache is parking. My chest pains come from finding a parking place late at night, but then I get good exercise walking from a distant spot, or racing to beat the ticket cop on “street cleaning” days. (That is a great legal racket…the “street cleaner” is a big machine with whirling brushes that cleans the street by throwing all the dirt up onto the sidewalk…and the ticket for not moving your car is $42. IN Somerville that only happens once a week.)
SGEW
@jrosen: (sorry; can’t resist)
Futurama, I, Roommate, 1ACV03
[Scene: Suspiciously Fantastic Apartment.]
Fry: Well, I give up. What’s the catch?
Landlord #3: Oh, no catch. Although we are technically in New Jersey.
[Scene: Planet Express: Lounge. Fry, Bender and Leela sit around the table.]
Fry: Not one place even remotely liveable.
Leelee for Obama
Back in 1994, when I worked in Manhattan, I looked at a few apts. and some of them I could actually afford. It was going to be my then 16 yo Daughter and I and we’re small so that wasn’t a big problem. The problem was, the RE mgrs. wanted huge income levels to rent to you, even though I could prove I’d been paying more than their asking price for several years on a lower salary! They told me to get a roommate! So, then I looked at more expensive places that we liked, but they cost so much, I would have needed three jobs to pay for them, and at that rate, I might as well just lean on a wall between shifts, amirite? I wound up living in Jersey City-really old brownstone with more rooms than needed for very reasonable rent. Of course the Landlady was certifiable, but it worked for nearly two years.
I would live in NYC in a heartbeat if I had serious ducats. I love the City that much.
Svensker
@jrosen:
What part of JC do you live in?
Max
Those numbers make me feel better about the rent I pay to live in Oakland. SF is still way overpriced. But, for my money, more sunshine, better hiking trails, nicer weather and (more) affordable housing makes the East Bay miles ahead of the penisula. Now, if we could only get Oakland’s crime under control…
Ed in NJ
@jrosen
have you been to the new beer garden in JC yet? Zeppelin Hall on Liberty View Dr.
I think we might check it out tonight. My wife is from Jersey City. She lived 7 blocks from Newport Center and the PATH and I can attest to the affordability and proximity to the city. As a matter of fact, to this day when we go into the city, we just park at Newport and just take the 5 minute PATH train right into midtown.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
Ditto to that first bit — when hubby and I went there for our wedding and honeymoon, it took us all of one day to fall head over heels for the place. We’re determined to go back often, now that we’ve realized how short a flight it is (less than 2 hours from Halifax to JFK.)
That’s funny that you had dreams of the BJ crowd. I have as well — I once had a bizarre dream in which I was married to John and we were arguing while going down a river in a canoe. I wonder what Freud would have made of that one…
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
The PATH kicks ass. When we were there, a friend was meeting us in Hoboken to take us to Maru for dinner, and we were going to take a cab from our hotel on 34th. She advised the PATH instead, and we could not get over how insanely quick and cheap and simple it was. I shudder to think how long and expensive that cab ride would have been.
asiangrrlMN
@SGEW: Yes. I would hate the heat. I was there in the summer, though, and I still loved it. It’s weird. I hate crowds. I hate people. I hate loud noises. I instantly LOVED New York City. Still, I don’t think I could live there for more than a year or two, even if I did have the money.
@Bill E Pilgrim: Love your comment about B.O.B. I have no idea if I’m awake or asleep, so maybe y’all are just a product of my overly-fertile imagination.
@LD50: Heh. That was my first thought upon waking up. “I have got to cut back on the BJ.”
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Krista, your dream was obviously about the quality of American beer.
Alan
What about property taxes? I don’t know anything about NY but I imagine, at that average, the property taxes alone would price many out of the market.
Brian J
I believe a few of the characters on “Friends” subleted a rent controlled apartment from a grandmother. That, combined with no families to support and roommates to live with, makes it seem more believable.
But yeah, those rates are nutty. I do wonder, though, how much of it is due to the truly pricey areas shooting up the average. Not that it is cheap regardless, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few multimillion dollar Park Avenue places skewed the numbers a little.
Nylund
One basic formula for living in NYC on a meager salary is to find an apartment with X bedrooms and a living room. Build a wall and turn it into an apartment with X+1 bedrooms and no living room. Then, find X people to live with you. The higher the value of X, the lower the cost per person. If you’re the ringleader of the operation, you make sure those X people pay a lot more than you do.
For many years I had a $2,500 “two” bedroom that I had converted into a 3 br. I charged $925 each for the two rooms and paid $675 myself. That was still a huge chunk of my salary, but I managed.
Also, if you’re cool with ceilings that are collapsing, bedrooms with no windows, or the occasional mouse, roach, etc. you can get something cheaper.
my then-girlfriend got a great deal on a place because the shower opened directly into the kitchen, as in the swinging plexiglass door opened right into the kitchen. There was no bathroom. Small room with a toilet off the hall. No bathroom sink (since no bathroom), you had to use the kitchen sink for brushing teeth, etc. Otherwise decent little place. She and her roommate probably still paid $800 a month each for a place with no bathroom. But hey, they got to keep their living room!
Joshua Norton
It’s even more ironic when you consider that the Guilded Age mansions on 5th Avenue cost less than that.
What Alva Vanderbilt paid for her Richard Hunt designed French Chateau would now buy a studio in Trump Tower, maybe.
MazeDancer
Alas, if you’re thinking of being a single person, without 5 roommates, it won’t be much of a start. Taxes, city, state, federal, let’s say 37.65 percent, will reduce your monthly net to around $5200. Lop off minimum of 2K for housing. (And that’s a teeny shoebox) You’re at $3200. Hundred bucks a day in NYC barely gets you food and transportation. Forget 401K contributions, or If you’re self-employed, your health insurance is between $700 – 1K a month. You haven’t paid any utilities, but those are high. Especially during A/C season. Forget a car, that’s 500 a month for the garage. Dinner out, for nothing special, easy fifty bucks. Special, is $80 to 250 per person depending on the wine. Broadway? One of the reasons to be in NYC, of course, But insanely priced. West Side Story (which is only so-so, by the way) is $120 a ticket.
With extreme bargain shopping, and sticking to only the cheapest possible options on all things, staying at home in your shoebox, or and taking walks and having only one museum membership for entertainment, you would not starve on $100K salary. But you would be worrying about money all the time.
A good learning experience for a kid. But not for grown-ups. Which is why single grown-ups without other means don’t move to NYC anymore. And many have to leave.
Cost factor is why NYC is actually very parochial in many ways. People don’t take that many creative risks anymore. Can’t afford it.
jrosen
@Svensker
I live in Jersey City Heights, rwo blocks south of the Union City Line. The bus to Port Authority stops at the corner of JFK Boulevard, which is my cross street. There are 8 units in my one story building, which also features 200 sq. feet per unit of storage space in the basement.
My son and daughter-in-law moved here from Washington Heights when he graduated from law school and began working in the Wall Street area (actually One Liberty Place, across the street from the WTC, to which he was on his way the morning of 9/11) ; they started in the Hamilton Park neighborhood and just bought a new town-house a little closer to the Grove St. Path Station. They made me a grandfather 2+ years ago and being retired and single, I moved here so I could see her (my grand-daughter) as often as I want to, which is easy since on a good day I can be there in 10 minutes.
Or in Manhattan in about 25.
Brachiator
@SGEW:
Hah! I have friends in Manhattan who won’t even talk to people from New Jersey, and who refer derisively to the BBQ, people from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens who come over for weekend fun.
Yeah, prices will come down some, but prices on a desirable island will always be expensive. And the heart of major cities are never expensive. Social ist Paris? A recent visitor noted that a cheeseburger cost $35. City of London? Don’t ask. Tokyo, Mumbai, Rome. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Jim Pharo — Cheap real estate is a good thing for many more people than expensive real estate is. Less expensive everything is good for many more people than more expensive everything: labor, cars, credit, etc., etc.
Cheap wages better than high wages?
Brick Oven Bill — If you look at graphs of tariffs vs. time and wealth concentration vs. time, you find that tariffs went down to next to nothing in the years following WWII. Wealth concentration accelerated during this time period and is now extreme. These are ‘those powerful few’ that the Washington Post sells access to.
As is typically the case, you make stuff up.
jrosen
@EDinNJ
Sounds good but I don’t (can’t) drink. Enjoy!
John Hamilton Farr
I went to Macworld Expo in NYC once. Ungodly heat & humidity, sweat was literally squishing around in my shoes. Used to live on LI, would take the train into Manhattan, not bad. Fascinating multicultural scene in NYC, culture, beautiful weirdness, etc. — incredible city if you like that sort of thing. I certainly understand why many people do!
Me, I opted for northern NM after the Eastern Shore of MD: population density, 14 people per square mile. I will never again live in a city. Nothing beats what I’ve had here, elk running through the snow outside one of the places we lived for a while, 90-mile view from where we are now (in town!). Occasional bears. A 20-minute drive takes me to a 10,000-ft. mountain pass, more hiking in mind-boggling pristine wilderness available than I can possibly complete in several lifetimes. Life is short, Nature has much to teach. This is my spiritual landscape.
(Oddly enough, Taos is such a difficult & intense place to live, people talk about going to Manhattan to chill out! I kid you not.)
Bill E Pilgrim
@Brachiator:
You must have been referring to this woman.
What keeps running through my mind reading this whole thread is just how cheap Paris is, for a major cultural and economic capital. You have no idea…..
$35 hamburger? Heh. Well I guess you can get thousand dollar dinners in Manhattan too if you don’t know where to look.
Brick Oven Bill
You are a singular numbnut Brachinator, nevertheless I have taken the time to provide you with this graph of tariffs over time:
Tariffs vs. Time.
DougJ is the one who posted some chart of wealth concentration over time, which seemed valid, so bug him about that one. Or perhaps wealth has not become concentrated since WWII.
Brachiator
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Nope. Not at all. A local talk show host who loves France and Paris took his family there on vacation. His teen daughters, unfortunately, are in a phase in which they refuse to try anything remotely adventurous, so they insisted on eating American food.
The burger was from a modestly priced restaurant, the quality of the beef was very good, and ironically, part of the reason for the high price was that it used real Cheddar cheese, which of course has to be imported.
By comparison, a good steak dinner in the same restaurant was $32.
parksideq
I don’t understand the notion that you can’t enjoy the benefits of NYC without living in Manhattan. It does have its merits (not the least being the ability to say you live in “the city”), but as a newly minted Brooklynite I must say that living in an outer borough (EDIT:Staten Island notwithstanding gives me pretty much the same access to the perks of Manhattan, without the still-insane rents that I’d face if I moved there. Of course I’d love to live in the city a la Carrie Bradshaw, but I’ll accept the trade-off of being able to afford both rent and food.
Granted, until I pay off my student loans and get several pay bumps I won’t be able to afford living by myself, let alone buying a condo or co-op, but that’s nothing unusual here, as already noted by several people. And it sure as hell beats still living at home in upstate NY where I was “overqualifed” and therefore unemployed.
ETA:
Nicole
Property taxes are quite low in NYC. One of the reasons real estate is so overpriced.
The NYCHDC has a website that lists various housing lottery programs here. For low-income people there are 80-20 buildings, where 20 percent of the apts must be rented to low-income tenants. Those buildings are usually luxury, with amenities. My husband and I got our place through a middle-income lottery program that puts buildings up in areas the city wants to gentrify and rents them to middle-income. It’s the only way we could afford to live here. Only in NYC could the middle-income also need housing assistance.
parksideq
@jrosen:
When I’m finally ready to move into a place by myself, I’m highly considering making the jump from Brooklyn to JC. I’d probably rate living there, in terms of morning commute and affordability, as on par or better than anything I’d get within the other 2 outer boroughs (sorry, Staten Island residents).
Bill E Pilgrim
@Brachiator: Ah. Well, you can find strange prices anywhere I guess. Fast food places sell burgers for 5 Euros, and the swankiest place I’ve seen it was like 15.
Here’s something a quick Google yielded.
The point in any case is that Paris is c h e a p. I used to say half the price of London but for years I bet it’s been a third. London’s adjusting downward now so not sure at the moment.
I’ve lived in Manhattan and believe me, this is the other end of the spectrum. The city is just as fabulous, IMO, but at a third of the price.
sparky
@MazeDancer: exactly. speaking as a refugee from a hipster section of Brooklyn, the room/freedom to experiment in the five boros is gone, swept away by the boom. just as manhattan is a playground for the wealthy, Brooklyn is now a playground for 20-somethings. in both cases, the volume of people who feel the need to be where the action is displaces any other use out of the area.
it’s possible that all those ersatz modern condo lofty places (Bloombergvilles) will be inhabited by people other than those holding C- MBAs but i wouldn’t hold my breath. eventually NYC will be Orlando, but with better food.
edit: though, i will say it’s not all bad. i sure appreciated the drop in assaults having been assaulted several times in the ‘hood.
burnspbesq
For a giggle (or, depending on how you think about these things, to break out in a cold sweat), go to http://www.weichert.com, plug in the zip code 07450 and the price range 500-750K, and see what that gets you in one of the nicest suburbs in the NY area, a town that has fantastic schools and is a 45 minute train ride from the Hoboken PATH station.
Brachiator
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I haven’t been there in years, but friends agree with you that Paris is not as bad as other places.
And one survey of expensive cities ranks London number 1, New York number 5 and Paris number 10 (London is the most expensive city in the world while Swiss cities are home to highest earners).
But another site, that looked at apartment prices in 2008, ranked prime central London as highest, with New York in second place and Paris in fifth place (Most expensive cities in 2008).
And a recent Forbes magazine piece on expensive cities notes the following:
Sigh. Manhattan is one of my favorite places in the world. And a recent NY Times article on the perfect hamburger makes me want to visit there again soon.
Svensker
@jrosen:
Nice!
Lived in Hoboken for years and spent a lot of time in the Heights and Hamilton Park (used to sing at St. Michael’s from time to time).
Been trying to convince some family they should move out of their $3K/month small 1 bed in Manhattan and go to JC, but they’re not budging. At this rate, they may be able to buy something in Manhattan for a song anyway.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
This whole thread is making me appreciate my house a lot more. We’re on 3.5 acres, with over 500 feet of riverfrontage. I shudder to think what that would cost in a city (should it be available) or in a suburb.
Brachiator
@RedKitten (formerly Krista – the Canadian one):
For some reason, this little memory popped back into my head: When my family moved from Texas to Los Angeles, I was surprised to find people my age who did not know how to ride a horse. When I started hanging out in New York City in my student days, I was surprised to find people my age who did know how to drive a car.
Some years later, a friend who was clerking for a judge was proud of her apartment in Manhattan, even though it was ridiculously overpriced and had no real kitchen. But it was near Central Park West, as I remember.
D-Chance.
Looks like Sarah! just took the next step in her 2012 presidential bid. Unloading her Alaska duties onto the LootGuv now means she doesn’t even have to pay lip service to the “ball and chain” job that’s keeping her semi-tied down.
IOW, Sully will have another MCLXXIV additions to his “Odd Lies” series over the next 3 years… /sighs.
Jay C
Try actually having to live in Manhattan – you’ll get pains in places you’d never think even could hurt!
Dave_Violence
It’s all a matter of perspective… $300k will buy you a studio or “one bedroom” all over the place in Manhattan. Food prices aren’t bad at all, either. Milk was $3.09 a gallon at the Rite-Aid last week. Gasoline is very expensive – but who drives? We have fast food here, too, and it’s comparable to anywhere else. And don’t forget all the restaurants in the East Village where you can fill up on less than $10 (7A, for example).
It’s only expensive here if you live expensively. Salaries are, however, pretty damned big for under-30 finance people. Doctors and lawyers do really well, too. Bottom line: if you’re smart and know how to make money, you will do very well here.
Buying a $1million+ apartment, well… Adam Baldwin was selling his place a couple of years ago and it looked like a bargain (about $1,000 per month in maintenance for a doorman building – wow!).