where to live in nyc ?

Making an educated guess or two, I'd go with my jokey comment: the rates downtown are going to drop much faster than uptown because of the attacks. It'll inconvenience you depending on where you are (like I said, subways are permanently gone in certain areas, and will take years to rebuild, especially since the structures have been extrodinarily weakened in spots and excavation is nearly impossible without very delicately shoring it up - could break walls and flood entire subway system if done wrong, the joys of building your city on a SANDBAR ON A FAULT LINE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN)...on the other hand downtown is nice and the walking is always really nice in the summer/spring. Plus like I said it depends on where - clearly Battery Park is going to have no transportation besides buses, but like Soho isn't going to cause you a transporation issue at all, besides possibly overcrowding (which is really a big deal right now, even at completely "dead" times the subways are full). On the other hand, I think in terms of "general quality" I think the best places to go are further uptown - there's more transport making it easy to GET to these places downtown, close to everything. Where I live on the Upper West Side, it's as easy as hell to get to anything I want, even now that the 1/9 line has been indefinately shut down past Houston. For some reason, ALL the subway lines run through the west side from midtown to lower upper, so it's just really convenient - but you'll pay for the convenience.

I mean, my personal experience is that a lot of people sublet in my neighborhood all summer, but they're expensive sublets. Perhaps this year will be different, but in terms of cheap you're better off not in my area, which is a shame cos that's what I know most about, I have a hard time advising you in specifics besides that.

If you want to go cheap you can always sublet something in Queens and then just take the subway in and out of Manhattan. :)

I wouldn't move to Brooklyn unless I was paid to, quite frankly. That "quality" you speak of is all over the place in my neighborhood as well, and I suspect in many Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Bronx neighborhoods. It's a great big folly to think people in Manhattan are all in gleaming high rises with no trees surrounding them and anonymous neighbors.

cheap relative to manhattan terms of course. :)

right before i moved out of astoria (queens for those not keeping up), my landlord was about to bump my one bedroom up from 780 a mo. to close to 9. now, that's not terrible, but i also lived not in a nice new apartment building but a semi-run down one filled with ex- cons and immigrant families living 10 to a bedroom. queens can be very nice. (it can also often be very skeezy...more skeezy than manhattan in certain ways. although not as skeezy as most of the bronx.) but i would definitely expect to pay what you would pay for a decent apartment in any other major city (barring say, san francisco) for a semi-okay one in a nice part of queens.

Jesus, Ally ... this comment smacks of a pretty self-centered gentrifying impulse. See how you're sort of implying that housing black people is "a giant waste?"

Well, we can either go back 400 years in explaining this, or just take the easy route. Harlem has, over the past half-century, housed a predominantly black and predominantly lower-income community. When that changes -- when the neighborhood "gets better," as it's in the process of doing, those people can no longer afford to live there. No one disputes that the neighborhood becomes, in many ways, a "nicer" place, but that certainly doesn't help the people who used to live there.

Allowing a neighborhood with the architecture and history of Harlem collapse into urban blight IS a giant waste.

Sure, absolutely. But why are you implying that Harlem is "collaps [ing] into urban blight" when the precise opposite is going on right now -- when the gentrifying forces are just starting to dig into it? There's also your use of the word "history" there, which is spot on -- it's precisely that black cultural history that Harlem in particular stands to lose through this sort of process.

But I didn't make my earlier post to complain about gentrification, which is a much larger issue. I was just momentarily upset that Ally should refer to Harlem's current situation as a "waste." Apparently it's a waste in the sense that not every possible dollar is being squeezed from it, hence the rush to correct that. But there are thousands of people living up there who would argue that they like it just fine, and won't really care how lovely it gets once they've been priced out.

It was just an odd subtext for a post, something along the lines of "Middle-class white people aren't getting anything out of this land? How wasteful!"

Someone took their fucking oversensitive pills today - do you want black people (and HISPANICS, considering a huge portion of Harlem's population is NOT BLACK) to live in degraded poverty conditions? It is a giant waste of space - you have minimal shopping, virtually no jobs, and delapidated buildings filling up a beautiful area that could very easily be renovated with the city's help and a few businesses taking a chance (some of which have already). If you think it's fantastic for people - any people - to live in those conditions, good on you. I happen to think it's a waste of space and that the area deserves to be fixed up. The "who lives there" doesn't even enter the equation and quite frankly, fuck you asshole for even implying that renovating buildings = middle class white people. I don't think that's a very pleasant conclusion to jump to and quite frankly that smacks of self-righteous oversensitive bullshit.

Let's have the city pump some cash into Harlem like it's done with about 8 trillion other areas of the city and fix the place up. A huge portion of Harlem is rent stabilized anyhow, so unless the renovations are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per building, the tenants aren't leaving anyhow (a small understanding of that might've helped before you jumped in - it's next to impossible to get rid of rent controlled tenants), and if you renovate the retail side of the neighborhood you create jobs and higher economic stability, giving more money to the neighborhood.

Next step, the Bronx. Or is wanting the Puerto Ricans and Cubans in South Bronx to have better conditions and nicer buildings smacking of middle class white racism?

Oh, the Queens thing: Erm, Astoria does not = Queens, Astoria is a tiny, recently trendy neighborhood in a huge borough. Go slightly more east and you'll pay half of what you pay in Astoria.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on Manhattan real estate; that's your job. I was only taking issue -- in question form, mind you -- with the assertion that any area at all where people live should be termed "a giant waste of space." But since I'm apparently an asshole, let's dig into this:

The arguments that you've made, above, are precisely the same arguments that have been made about the displacement of low-income communities in just about every major U.S. city over the past half- century. And it has never worked out that way for the people who actually lived in those neighborhoods. You can go around Oakland and find black store owners who can produce promissary certificates giving them buying rights to storefronts in San Francisco, which they were ostensibly meant to return to after all of those wonderful renovations had taken place -- certificates which mean absolutely nothing, as they'd all been priced out of the neighborhoods and probably wouldn't have been able to cater to the newly-upper-income residents even if they hadn't been. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a private-industry urban-renovation project that wound up helping the low-income residents of a neighborhood in the least. Loan programs, or federal "empowerment zones" -- yes. But private real estate speculation helping people without money? I think I'd have a heart attack if I ever saw this.

Secondly, while I may not be an expert on Manhattan real estate, I do know there's a difference between rent-stabilized and rent- controlled, something you gloss over above. It would not take more than a year or two to price someone out of a rent-stabilized apartment, as I understand that system -- especially if the person isn't swimming in discrete spending funds in the first place. Unless you're saying that most of Harlem is, indeed, fixed-rent -- in which case I'd posit that where there's money to be made in, as you say, "the next big neighborhood," it's my guess that someone will find a way to get around that problem.

Furthermore -- it's really, really dumb to say that I'm asking for people to live in poverty or squalor. To say that is to willfully disregard the whole argument I was making just for the sake of having something pithy and simple to say. My contention, rather, is that you're not going to change people's income levels unless you address a whole lot of underlying issues which we need not even get into, so making their neighborhood's "nicer" -- more expensive, in the private- speculation sense that we're talking about -- likely won't accomplish much apart from displacing them to possibly worse neighborhoods. I'm not arguing that Harlem or anywhere else in this world should be shitty. I'm just saying that I'd prefer for any improvement that takes place to actually improve the lives of the communities that inhabit those areas -- not open up the rental market and provide cheaper apartments for people who would otherwise be living in Chelsea or Park Slope.

I suppose, in ten years or so, we'll see. But if you can show me any situation where private real-estate speculation has benefitted renters in the area being speculated upon, I will go buy a hat and eat it.

But all of this is completely beside the point, which was my original contention that it's just not nice to call a place where people live "a giant waste of space!" People live there! It's not wasted on them, even -- maybe especially -- if they live there because they don't have a lot of other options! That's all I was saying, Ally -- that's all. So please don't sit around calling me an asshole. I mean, I know you're all pretty so people probably let you behave like this all the time, and I know you find it funny to cultivate that and call your blog Bitchcakes, etc., but at some point, it begins to seem awfully stupid to spew bile at anyone who doesn't completely defer to your personality and points out that one thing you said -- one little thing -- might bear correction or restatement.

How about if private real estate speculation forces someone renting in Harlem to move to, say, Sacramento and buy a house? Renting a place in Harlem is a sure way to stay poor.

Not in Williamsburg.

The next trendy area will be Bed Stuy seeing as how it's already between Williamsburgh and Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill -- two nice, comfortable areas. Harlem will be huge very soon, because it IS a waste of space, but it will take longer to get high-class/not deadly. Stay out of Clinton Hill, please, and keep my rent down.

Astoria is lovely -- I have friends up there, but it lacks verve.

And living in Jersey is just as close as living in Brooklyn or Queens and just as easy to get out of, only in another state.

The Heights I Iove to pieces -- in the way you love the first person who touches you. But can't afford it.

I would suspect Manhattan real estate prices to drop slightly in the tall-building areas... midtown and downtown. I hate the whole Canal St/Tribeca/SoHo area, even tho some swear by it.

That used to be my reasoning for suspecting that the low-income displacement of city gentrification might at least be better than the "white-flight" urban decay phenomenon -- I was considering that living in poverty in spread-out suburbs should be preferable to concentrated, high-crime urban poverty. But watching this sort of thing happen in Chicago over the past ten years, that suspicion hasn't been much solace -- there appear to be different but just-as- unfortunate downsides to suburban poverty as well. And there is, of course, the nagging suspicion that thirty years from now, the process will only be reversed, another great trade-off of wealth placement from city to suburb. The only things I've seen effectively solve these problems are sustained commitments to community development -- as opposed to community replacement -- and things like the Gautreaux Program here, a court-ordered integration program that moved something like 7,000 families from housing projects into middle- income suburbs. (Most of those 7,000 families seem to be doing as well as their neighbors now, which should make all of us happy.) An end to unofficial redlining wouldn't be such a bad development, either.

I didn't mean to hijack this thread with a gentrification debate, though. I was honestly just pointing out an unfortunate subtext and implication in Ally's "waste of space" phrasing.

* and dont tell me that you should be able to say what the FUCK you like and that you dont need to 'choose your words carefully' and that i shouldnt be a FASCIST SCUM BITCH or something. i think you do need to be very careful with words, at all times because they are v. powerful. a bit like handling radioactive waste: handle with care. (that stuff is dangerous, right? thats something else i dont know about)

Kris: Well, you wouldn't be looking at a $250,000 house, that's for sure -- let's allow that you're looking into a modest $80,000 place in a lower-middle-class suburban neighborhood. (And keep in mind that the below isn't meant as a complaint or a blame-placing -- just a picture of what this situation would probably be like.) This brings your 10% payment down to $8,000. But let's even assume that your $1700/month Harlem renter is making $2500 a month -- which is more than I make in a salaried position. This leaves $800 a month discretionary for everything -- including kids, if you have them, health insurance or medical bills, since our example person is probably isn't getting benefits, food, clothes, everything. This person would have to make the pretty Herculean effort of possibly supporting a family on $400 a month in New York City for 20 months just to get that $8,000 together, let alone the costs of moving.

Let's assume that's accomplished, though. Now you have two even more Herculean tasks. (a) You have to find a new job in this new place you're moving to, one that pays you even more than your last one, because you're probably going to need a car now, too. And you're going to have to do this without whatever social network you had at home -- most notably, if you're a single parent, you won't have friends or relatives to look after your kids. (Tack on more money for child care?) Add to that -- and remember, this isn't a complaint or blame thing -- the fact that you may well be black, and you may well be a part of the black culture of Harlem, and you may well be moving to a place where that culture isn't looked upon as completely wanted. I don't mean that you'll have crosses burning on your lawn, just that there's going to be some social adjustment to do, and this can make the initial movement -- job-seeking in particular -- difficult. Sure, all of the above are things that people do often, but they're difficult even when you have savings to work from, and they're going to be even more difficult if you're not as educated or finance-savvy as middle-class people grow up being.

But now more importantly: (b) You're probably going to be a black person looking for an $80,000 bank loan with a 10% rate in a not- completely-hot neighborhood based off of a salary we've already established to be around $30,000. Again -- pigs completely soaring out of my ass. "Equal housing lender" notwithstanding, banks are looking for secure, high-volume loans -- there's a whole litany of loan practices that make sure money goes to big nice places and not poor-ish people trying to get old little homes in cheapening neighborhoods. Assuming you could get the loan, your rate would most certainly not be 10%.

I say all that just to paint a picture of how displacement is not necessarily as simple as just moving along to somewhere nicer. I can't claim to have been through anything like this, but the above strikes me as one of the most stressful, impossible tasks anyone could ever wish not to have to go through.

Regarding the NAACP as a lending institution -- they just don't have the money for this. It's not that massive of an organization, really. And their focus -- as opposed to what you're mentioning with the Nation -- is not to have to support black people themselves, it's to push for public policies that help make it so this sort of thing isn't so problematic in the first place. (And let's note here that this is problematic for anyone of any race.) As you mention, the Nation is more involved in this sort of thing -- but that's partly a function of their rhetoric of black self-sufficiency. When they do things like this it's undoubtedly helpful, but it's also depressing and pessimistic to imagine that black people themselves should shoulder the entire burden of recovering from a long history of economic oppression.

Which brings us to the 400 or 500 or however many years. This rhetoric isn't meant to "help" anything on its own. It's part of a larger argument, an argument pointing out that we shouldn't be blaming black people as a whole for being poorer or less educated than others -- there are centuries of reasons for precisely that circumstance. What does help is when that's taken into account in devising public policy, and things are actually done to try and reverse some of that -- things, as I mentioned, like federal or municipal investment programs that try to improve decaying urban neighborhoods not by turning them into condos but by drawing in business investment, keeping them safe and clean, giving people job training and career counseling, etc. Things that actually make them better for the people who already live there.

That's my gentrification argument, which I'll note again was completely separate from my original comment to Ally.

Now, BNW -- I'm not disagreeing with you about how Ally probably meant this. I'm guessing she looked at "gorgeous" buildings in a neighborhood that had fallen into disrepair and thought to herself, "This area could be lovely if it was just fixed up." She has every right to think this and to say this. All I was pointing out was the necessary back end of that statement -- the fact that turning Harlem into "the next big neighborhood" that people like Ally find gorgeous and want to live in by necessity involves the displacement of many of the people who can now just barely afford to live in those buildings precisely because the neighborhood's not so developed. All I was pointing out -- the only fucking thing -- is that while the neighborhood might not be serving the gorgeous-architecture needs that Ally might have for it, it's serving the basic housing needs that many of its residents have for it, and turning it into "the next big neighborhood" will most likely involve substituting those Ally-needs for those Harlem-resident-needs. And it's even simpler than that -- she called a neighborhood where thousands of people live a "waste of space!" She didn't say particular abandoned buildings were a waste of space, and she did not say that the neighborhood could be better and it's a shame it isn't -- she called people's homes a "waste of space!" And while I don't know Ally, I'm pretty fucking sure she'd take offence to anyone calling her neighborhood a waste of space -- as well she should, because she fucking lives there!

All I was doing was pointing that made that comment, she was -- consciously or unconsciously -- disregarding the very lives and needs of the people who live there. I could imagine myself doing that, to be honest -- but I'd hope someone would call me on it, and when they did, I'd probably say something along the lines of "Ouch, I'm sorry -- I suppose that's true." I'm not sure I expected anything of that sort from Ally -- no offense to Ally, necessarily -- but I didn't think I'd encounter much resistance to the idea that she spoke without considering the situation of anyone but people like herself.

I grew up on the Upper East Side (and moving away from it was NO ACCIDENT!), but I can see m'self, the Missus and the li'l offspring returning to that wretched riff of real estate soon, once we outgrow our hepcat downtown digs. I'd rather live in the character-less wasteland that is the UES than have to leave Manhattan, that's why.

I'm about to conclude that large cities are all big clever jokes on the people who live in them, honestly.

Oh right.

Still though, it would be nice to see more than ZONE FUCKING TWO during my trip to an entirely different fucking continent. And don't tell me I can get a train cause I know that, but I can't exactly ask the guy to stop for a ruminative break on a railroad trestle for a swig of night train and a few ill-advised cartwheels.

-- TOMBOT (whit...), February 25th, 2004 2:46 PM. (later)

< obscure unfunny punk joke> Wow, Tom just made the Dils' "I Hate the Rich" even more concise. < /obscure unfunny punk joke>

Planning on relocating to NYC by the end of the year. Any recommendations? A friend of mine who lives there recommends me to start off in Astoria and if possible look for a smaller place in "the city" (Manhattan) rather than a bigger place in Brooklyn (2nd best), or Queens.

even amid this borderline depression, my understanding is that the entry-level cost of moving to manhattan is about 1M. NYC residents, is that the case?

astoria is nice and convenient and generally a good value. not sure why you'd want a smaller place in ""the city"" unless you have a lot of money to spend.

the entry-level cost of moving to manhattan is only 1M if you live a NYT-quiddities of the ruling class lifestyle, which is admittedly a lot of people in manhattan.

1M being represented in any way as "entry-level" for Manhattan is ridiculous

http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/dr_evil_one_million_dollars.jpg

hahahaha

yeah, you don't need $1M for NYC unless you're planning on Manhattan or something like Brooklyn Heights and want to live "the life," as it were.

as for a "smaller place in manhattan," i agree w/ others -- don't know why you would really need to do that. astoria and long island city are both easy commutes into manhattan, as are other parts of NTC (not to mention hoboken and jersey city over in NJ).

then again, if you've got the money to burn then i guess anything may be a doable option.

hm. well, in related news, it's my understanding that a loaf of wonderbread now costs $28.00 in miami.

http://realestate.nytimes.com/sales/new-york-ny-usa/1000000-1000000-price

sobering. 1M gets you, basically, a 2/2 at 1K square feet.

you get used to it b/c of living/working there, but to someone not from the NYC metro area i can definitely imagine that they'd be shocked about how little $1M will buy you in Manhattan or other upscale portions of NYC. the easy answer back in the day for such folks was, "move to NJ/putnam county" but as i said that's back-in-the-day stuff.

pre-real estate crash, it was not uncommon for people to live in Philadelphia and commute into their NYC jobs. and what $1M could get you in Philly is only a bargain compared to what it would get you in Manhattan.

on the other hand, a really good friend of mine got a steal for an apartment in Harlem (WELL under a million). she went through some sort of HUD program plus some had some real hell re getting the necessary approvals and loans and shit. but she did it, and she closed last week.

whoa wait I'm not actually thinking of buying yet I was thinking about renting... unless it's a terrible idea...

what's your price range? where will you be working?

renting in manhattan ain't cheap, either. that's why so many younguns (and not-so-younguns) have roommates. so even there it may be better to consider something other than manhattan.

unless it's a terrible idea...

renting is fine, I think all the apartment-sale-price answers were related to the $1M question