New York City right now is a city where people are often
stuck in place. Not because they lack ambition or a work ethic, but because the
juggernaut of high real estate prices
is making life difficult.
I work in an office where most of the people who work there
that live within the five boroughs have a commute that is at least an hour on a
good day. My commute to work is an hour and
fifteen minutes under the best of circumstances and can be significantly longer
when things are at their worst. We would all love to live closer to our office,
which is in the Flatiron district, but none of us can afford to live nearby.
Even the New York Times, whose primary audience is the more
affluent New Yorkers among us, ran a story about retirees who would
like to return to the city but can’t because real estate prices are becoming so
outrageous.
When I first moved back to New York and was looking for an
apartment in early 1998 one of the places I looked for a studio was Wavecrest
Gardens in Far Rockaway. They had beautiful studio apartments with ocean views
for about $500 per month. There were some drawbacks that kept me away (it would
have been a long commute to work and a coworker who moved there said he saw
people smoking crack in the stairwells),
but the apartments were beautiful and affordable. If prices had simply kept up
with inflation, a $500 per month apartment in 1998 would cost roughly $740
today. A studio at Wavecrest Gardens now lists for roughly $1,000 per month
today. So rents have moved up at more than double the rate of inflation over
the past sixteen years. And for areas that are more fashionable, the increase
has gotten even steeper. Parts of Astoria and Williamsburg list small studio
for upwards of $2,800 per month, and probably more in some places.
I consider myself very fortunate. I have a steady job with a
good salary and my family is healthy and does not want for food, clothing, or
shelter. But if we were to try to move to a larger apartment to house our
growing brood we would have to take on considerable debt to remain in the same
neighborhood, and would not find a place much larger than what we have now for
what we could afford.
I have many friends who are bright, hard-working people
trying to raise families in safe neighborhoods with good schools. They are not
looking for handouts or set-asides. They can’t afford to stay where they are
and can’t afford anything else in the area. Some friends and family have fled
to New Jersey, some are considering leaving the Northeast entirely, heading to
wherever they can make a sound living and provide for their kids.
New York is a place famous for attracting creative people,
but creative people need affordable places to live and New York is starting to lose is
creative critical mass. Artists and writers don’t need to have the same
geographic presence they once did. In the digital age it doesn’t matter if
you’re creating your work in New York or Detroit or Tuscaloosa. Most of the
Western world downloads its content from the Internet, and traveling to a
geographic center to get your work recognized is not as necessary as it used to
be.
New Yorkers don’t mind paying a premium to live in the
center of Western civilization. And New York is not an anti-capitalist place.
It’s the most capitalist place on Earth in many ways. New York is a very tough
place to get ahead but at the same time is famous for providing more
opportunities than anywhere else in whatever your field of choice. If we want
to continue to be that way, then something’s got to be done about the cost of
housing. You have to get people to live here and stay a while before they can
accomplish things.
If it doesn’t make sense to stay in New York, the middle and
working classes will be gone and what will be left wont’ be pleasant for
anyone.
