The people on the TeeWee were just doing a piece on the new 76-story Frank Gehry-designed apartment tower in NYC. I'll admit, it was a slammin'-looking building with spectacular views, even if all the views were full of New York City*, but then they mentioned rental rates...
Broom closets down low start at $3k a month, and a two bedroom with a view goes for fifteen grand. A month. To rent.
I have a question: If you're shelling out $15,000/mo. to rent a two bedroom apartment, how are you going to have enough money left over to support the kind of drug habit it would take to make you think renting an apartment for $15,000/mo. is a sensible idea?
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*The views are spectacular, but they're all full of New York; if I'm laying out fifteen large a month, I want to look out my window and see Russell Crowe and unicorns, not a junkie knifing a hooker.
Honestly, I'm not sure they even make that many drugs.
ReplyDeleteBut if they do, I'm sure Keith Richards has done them.
Here in NJ I work with people who commute FROM NYC. They claim to love it living there despite the costs. I don't get it and live as far west as possible while still able to get to work in an hour.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you sub lease the other room to another clueless schmuck for $14000/mo?
ReplyDelete"OMG, it looks even better than it does as a listing on my iPhone!"
Best
Our tax dollars ST work keeping walstreat flukes that should of lost their shirts could keep spending stupid money on high rent and blow.
ReplyDeleteJosh
That explains why so many New Yorkers move here to Florida and try to instruct the clueless masses here in how to run our lives, and we constantly hear about how they "do it up north/in New York."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the whole building will be occupied by the poor and downtrodden, those being the people that the likes of Gehry want us to all support. No doubt he'll discount the price so those people can live in nice, comfy apartments with luxurious views.
ReplyDeleteHate it as we may, NYC is the financial epicenter of America, and there is, indeed, that much money floating around there. Rents don't seem that out of line... a friend doing a 3 year rotation in NYC paid $3,800 a month for an entirely ordinary 700sf 1BR apartment on the Upper East Side, no drugs involved (yes they did bump her pay while there to account for the cost of living increase).
ReplyDeleteThat is just hilarious.
ReplyDeleteOr as the captcha puts it, mervias.
Ah, yes. The fruits of rent control -- above-market rates for new living space.
ReplyDeleteM
TW: bericha... sound advice.
Well, bear in mind that that $15,000 per month is denominated in New York dollars whereas, in the rest of the free world, the rent would be about $800 per month.
ReplyDeleteI base that estimated exchange rate on the unending tsunami of New Yorkers who sold their 1-bedroom rathole for three quarters of a million dollars and moved to Florida to live like royalty. (and act like it too)
The views are spectacular, but they're all full of New York; if I'm laying out fifteen large a month, I want to look out my window and see Russel Crowe and unicorns, not a junkie knifing a hooker.
ReplyDeleteFerret,
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that New Yorkers, Californians, and Bostonians aren't made to change their cash for American dollars at the border...
I'm going to try this one again. I might even check my spelling.
ReplyDeleteOur tax dollars at work keeping Wallstreet flunkies that should of lost their shirts spending stupid money on high rent and blow.
Yes that was what I was trying to say the first time.
:-)
Josh
Ahh, I had about 400 s.f. in the L.E.S. for a grand a month. 6 Floor walkup and if you put your head out the bathroom window the Empire State Building was easily visible. Then I moved to America.
ReplyDeleteI think they put something in the flavored bottled water and double mocha lattes.
ReplyDeleteGerry
For fifteen grand a month, the apartment or condo or whatever had better do everything for me, from cleaning my dishes to working my day job.
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteYou've got it wrong, it's the hooker knifing the junkie! ;)
Gehry.
His schtick is using a piece of crumpled paper as his inspiration.
Bilbao was impressive when it was new and fresh and a good representation of what is possible with new tools influencing composition. The Experience Museum looks the part, falling ice and assorted pieces notwithstanding. I have, however, gotten over him.
In another hundred years, Wright's Fallingwater (among others) will still be there, looking as perfect as it was conceived, grown out of the rock that was put there by the forces of nature.
I can't say the same for much of Gehry's oeuvre. He's a fashion statement in the age of fashion, and will largely be discarded like last season's haute couture.
My two cents.
Way back when, in the mid 90s, we had this kid show up at Ft Lewis and get assigned to the S3 section. Only he wasn't a kid, despite the PFC stripes: He was about 30. Former assistant editor at some publishing house in Noo Yawk Shitty, where he'd been paid something like $100k/yr. Someone commented on the disparity in pay, why did you enlist, etc. I laughed, having an inkling what was coming. Yep: "My annual rent was $105k/year."
ReplyDeleteOther weirdness: He couldn't drive, never learned. The Army just naturally assumes that everyone knows how to drive, get your license before you enlist.
Got pissed when people treated him like a PFC instead of an adult who had been living on his own in Noo Yawk Shitty! for ten years, then started acting like a 19 year old PFC, and got pissed when he got in trouble for it.
And don't ask him about Seinfeld...
The RENT is TOO DAMN HIGH!!!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5SwyTvAHw
LOL- the idjits pay it, so they deserve it... I only DRIVE through NY when I absolutely don't have time to drive AROUND that damn state...
ReplyDeleteUh... it's pretty hard to drive around NY state in a car.
ReplyDeleteEvery New Yawker knows that cars are yellow and have a light on the roof!
ReplyDeleteNew York. The state where your pistol is an assault rifle and you can't smoke in a park. It's like San Francisco with frostbite. Fail!
ReplyDelete"In another hundred years, Wright's Fallingwater (among others) will still be there, looking as perfect as it was conceived, grown out of the rock that was put there by the forces of nature." Don't you mean Fallingdown? Sure, it looks pretty but its a drafty, decaying, dump.
ReplyDeleteSitting in my nice warm 1,400 sq-ft of paid-for house, with about thirty blue quail in the front yard being appreciative of their daily dose of hen scratch. Clear day, nice view of the Chisos--towering far more above me than any lousy little 100 floors...
ReplyDeleteY'know, taxes and insurance at around a hundred a month seems like all the overhead I need.
And my view is better...
Crummy politics aside ...
ReplyDeleteI heart NY, though I don't know how long I'd want to live there. Only been twice. Lots happening there. Always something new. Really vibrant culture - not just art, but business, too. That's probably why most of your Marvel superheroes are headquartered there.
Chicago - love the sports and museums, but there isn't as much culture, the weather is worse, and the whole vibe is less pleasant and optimistic. Worse politics, too.
@Old NFO: I am reasonably sure that NY State's totalitarian views on efirearms were one of the driving forces behind the FOPA'86 transit provisions. Without which it would be legally impossible to get from south of the hudson to anywhere in New England without getting into a boat - and likely an ocean-going one at that.
ReplyDeleteWV: adeck - yup, and ocean-going boat has one. At least
I made the inattentive mistake of going through some freeway-tunnel on the way from DC to Connecticut and wound up in NYC. My first thought was how to un-do the horrible error, but it was nearly impossibel to get out - like they way they design Casinos in Vegas, once you're over the threshold it's hard to get out. My '60 Karmann Ghia was almost swallowed by a giant pothole in the middle of the road that SUV's were slowing-down to negotiate like some Urban Enduro Trail, bigger than my car itself - but I was driving like a crazed madman and juked heavily between a moving van and a cab that was scared of my hideous paint-job and snaggletooth bumpers and just dropped a rear wheel into the corner of it... I found a sign pointing to my escape and left never to return. Not if you paid me money.
ReplyDeleteThe views can't be spectacular if they contain a city-scape, only tropical islands and mountings and things like that are spectacular.
You can drive through Canada... well you usted to be able to with out a pass port. i will leave it up to other if this is worse or better than just driving threw up state NY.
ReplyDeleteJosh
I doubt it's all that easy for an american to transport fuirearms through Canadia. I am open to a surprise, however.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I can't even imagine.
ReplyDeleteFor $15k a month, if you saved up for a year and a month, you could buy the house I'm living in, outright. And you wouldn't be in New York. It's a win-win situation.
I thought they all moved to Kalifornia so they could turn a pretty good place to live into a toilet. Nice to know some of them went to Florida-got to spred their manure around. That way we all know what kind of assholes were dealing with.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet you can get an apartment with a view of this tower for a lot less.
ReplyDeleteNYC is a spectacular human achievement.
I hate the gunlessness and a lot of the other aspects, but still it's stunning overall.
Like this building. Think about it, a place to live in almost a thousand feet tall.Not for a king, but for people. Granted it's expensive, but our forbears have made a country where there will be a waiting list to fill it.
(And I like it. It's not yet another glass box.)
Rome had its problems, too.
What kind of rents are normal in USA? I'm paying 400 euros a month for a room and a kitchen, 39 square meters and a balcony, and this is cheap city owned housing (that would be about 540 dollars/419,79 f2). And it would be something like twice that for a similar apartment in Helsinki.
ReplyDeleteI don't much care for cities...but, NYC is a financial and cultural engine. It is the belance of having both cities like NYC, Portland, Chicago, SF, Houston (but not perhaps Miami, Phoenix or LA) and a massive rural region with numerous natural resources that allows all of us to work for numerous odd little (or not little but very flexible) companies, live in the rural regions, and chatter on the internet about hating the city.
ReplyDeleteEurope has the cities but not the land and its resources, many countries have the land and the people, but not the cities. Frankly, I have no wish to live in a country that has no cities...they tend to look like much of Africa and South/Central America.
Marja,
ReplyDelete"What kind of rents are normal in USA?"
It's hard to generalize. The cost-of-living disparities between two US states or regions can be as wide as two different countries in Europe. According to a search tool I found, the average 2BR apartment in Indiana rents for $700/mo, while next door in Illinois, the average is $1,100, and back home in Georgia it's $832.
Here in Indianapolis, apartments in some of the most chi-chi locations, such as a downtown high rise or right along the canal, will run $1,500/mo for a 2 bedroom.
(Oh, the above rates are for ~1200ft².)
ReplyDeleteMarja:
ReplyDeleteI pay $560 a month for a 1-1/2 bedroom, 860 s.f apartment in Houston TX. I use the smaller bedroom/nursery as a home office. Granted, it is not in the best part of Houston, but the gangs have been run out and crime has dropped since they cleaned out the drug den across the freeway, utilities are cheap and shopping is close, so I stay.
cap'n chumbucket
...sorry for the multiple comments, but this rental tool I found is kinda neato. I looks like you could get just a bumpin' 2BR back in ATL in a Midtown or Buckhead high-rise complete with concierge and hot and cold running champagne for ~$2k/mo.
ReplyDeleteI live in NJ, and have some friends who would rather have been homeless in NYC than in an apartment in NJ. Granted, they were barely old enough to legally buy beer at the time... But there really are people like that (it was a direct quote).
ReplyDeleteMove out to Jersey, and prices drop precipitously (though the really close-in stuff like Hoboken can be almost as much as something on Manhattan Island). The 2BR garden apt we quit to move into my house was right around $1K/mo when we left, with convenient mass transit into the City, 2 public golf courses within cats-throw (and the deer on our lawn to prove it), and plenty of really good ethnic restaurants all around. However, it was in jersey (see above).
Ian Argent,
ReplyDeleteSee, I like city life just fine, but not enough to put up with the onerous laws of NYC or Chicago or Boston or SF.
I can live a vie as Bohème as I want in Broad Ripple or Virginia Highlands and still be able to CCW.
@Tam: From previous posts, I figured where I was (and still am, I just moved sides of town) living was not quite dense enough for your urban tastes (I can't get ethnic food after midnight), and not rural enough for your rural tastes. I was thowing an example out for Majra and others.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, come to think, it's probably pretty close to Broad Ripple in terms of density, at least as how you describe Broad Ripple. A few less hippies, though, and a lot more soccer moms.
NJ still boggles me a bit in terms of density vs distance from NYC - I grew up in NoVA. Whereas I live in a 1920's era "tudor" in a town that was a bedroom community for NYC at the time it was built due to the railroads, the parts of NoVA at the same distance are just overrun by McMansions now and were farms when I left NoVA 20 years ago. But it takes longer to get from NYC to my house than it takes to get from DC to those McMansions...
I rent a 3bed 2.5 bath 1500ish sqf (about 140 m^2) for 850 a month, with a full basement and attached garage.
ReplyDeleteA little steep for what I'm used to, but it works.
What Les Jones said. "A great place to visit...". And I was born there.
ReplyDeleteStill, I get down when I can, for Broadway Overload to the point of sensory and/or serious wallet damage. And if I want a good steak and a fine red ale at 4:45 a.m., or Thai, or anything else, it's within 2 blocks of the Manhattan Club.
Sailing Flushing Bay out of City Island, a New England fishing village misplaced next to the Bronx (there's this insanely great little French restaurant there in an old Captain's mansion that rents rooms upstairs for about $145a night, and you're only a 12 minute cab ride over the bridge to the city and to downtown Manhattan.
Sadly, a lot of the old N'Yawk machisimo is gone. Per capita, it's the safest large city in the U.S., one of the safest in the world. Subtract the parts of it where tourist never go (and return alive) and it's ever safer.
I've discovered that no woman alive can resist Canal Street down in Chinatown. Every pocketbook is a war trophy to be paraded in front of the girlfriends at home. Not the ripoffs, but the ones you see in the hidden rooms with the diamond plate walls and stairwells, guarded by large, muscular young Chinese men with baseball bats.
Let a lady flash a real $2,000 Chanel bag to her pals back home, replete with tales of the Chinese lady leading their group through a quarter mile of back alleys to a small sandwich shop, through a hidden wall to a secret fortress, and a haggle that started at $600 only to finish at $45 or $50. I promise another trip will be in the offing, soon.
Let the ladies also hit the perfume, jewelry, and leather goods merchants on the way out, and they won't mind at all the little side trip to the U.S.S. Intrepid museum, with everything from MiG-15's to SR-71's, and a hanger deck with TBM's, SBD's, and Hellcats. And the very quiet moment when you stand on the monument in the deck there where 69men died and hundreds were crippled saving their ship.
Plus the chance to wander a Fletcher class tin can, swing the 40mm's and cal.50 Ma Deuces, then wander through a nuclear missile boat for hours.
Throw in a few good shows and some long-term unsustainable rates of partying, with massive breakfasts in the Brooklyn Diner as the sun comes up and the pillow calls, and I'd call it a worthy weekend away.
Speaking of good steaks, I was sitting in the pub in Rosie O'Grady's a couple of New Year's Eves ago, watching Rod Stewart, who is older than me for God's sake, waiting for his 21 year old wife to give birth by getting an underaged chippy with fake I.D. wasted enough to come home with him. It didn't take much.
ReplyDeleteIt does engender a certain sophisticated Weltschmerz. Tne good with the bad
@Tam
ReplyDeleteThe woman and I have been thinking of moving to ATL because we can get a house for the price of a one bedroom flat here (We were paying 1,400 for a 2br outside Philadelphia.) She grew up in Stone Mountain and was shocked at the averages up here.
Only two problems.
-Inlaws
-It's the ninth ring of hell in summertime.
@Michael: True, ATL can be ridiculously hot, but consider that Philly isn't just the ninth circle -- it's the crack between Satan's asscheeks.
ReplyDeleteMichael,
ReplyDeleteYeah, the summertime climate is, as P.J. O'Rourke put it, "like a locked van stalled in the Sahara in August", but you don't have to shovel heat.
And as far as CoL differences, heck, you can rent a 2BR/2BA in the same high-rise as Elton frickin' John in ATL for <$3k/mo.
Yeah, the summertime climate is, as P.J. O'Rourke put it, "like a locked van stalled in the Sahara in August", but you don't have to shovel heat.
ReplyDeleteNever been to Louisiana in the summer, I see. ;)
Ok, maybe I exaggerate. A little.
Rent in medium sized Nebraska town:
ReplyDelete1100 ft2 5 year old manufactured home, 3 bed, 2 bath, dishwasher, washer, dryer, high efficiency central air, large lot, trees, two small treated lumber decks, quiet neighborhood in a 60,000 person town with neighborhood watch.
$500 a month including trash pickup. electricity about $70 a month, water about $25, gas about $30. Costs a little over $600 a month in if you don't include cable or internet.
Oh yeah, average wage for a worker in this town... $10 ~ $15 an hour. Economy of scale I guess, but we do have honest to goodness manufacturing here, probably because of the above mentioned labor rates.
A junky knifing a hooker? Now that fascist mayors have replaced socialist mayors, the crime has gone way down.
ReplyDeleteBTW, if Chicago is Mordor, would New York be Thangorodrim?
JohnW,
ReplyDeleteNo, no longer fallingdown. A huge restoration was completed several years ago to shore up the sagging cantilevers.
It may still be drafty, but the original intent of the place was for a summer, weekend getaway for the Kaufmanns...and they seemed to love it.
Regardless, Wright was to say later that it would look fantastic as a ruin.
'agrityr' [verify] subject is difficult to imagine, than NYC occupancy. It has always been crowded, expensive and tight living quarters for the average citizen. The compensation, of course, is being IN The City.
ReplyDeleteThe museums alone,make that worthwhile on a temp basis. The multiple-layered food culture is another. And I'm not even noting being young and/or seeking entertainemnt.
However, tho' capitalism has raised up the Geary and it's inhabitants, and capitalism has spread the spoiled scent of wealthy Kali-fornians and rich NYC'ers to our formerly scenic climes of the Rockies, or Carolina-s, or Sub-tropics, it is a most unfortunate corollary that they export their day-to day views of the world to these places, as well.
This morning's Sunday Paper Color Comics Doonesbury cartoon, is a direct reflection of that 'detached from the masses' outlook. The resultant gulf of wealthy ignorance and imagined superiority over the peasantry makes the ol' Liberty Bell thunk, rather than chime.
I don't have any answer, having no better economic solutions than to continue with the open possibilities a capitalistic society provides. Yet the near exponential growth of protected privilege [and the implementation of it's political assumptions over all of us]which has happened since the mid-20th Century, nags me evermore.
It's sorta like some Brit PBS show, where the Nobility has withdrawn to an estate'd and mansion'd strata, replete with the obligatory labor, servant and artisan classes in picturesque roles. Only with no Shooting Parties.
And no guns, for you, peasants.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PS:
Sadly,according to structural conservators, Falling Water has major structural probs; but it is nonetheless damn near a spiritual value.
I dunno, Got Any?;)
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteGarry Trudeau can simper all he wants, but the legislative tide in America is sweeping inexorably in the other direction, and has been for ten years now. The only other self-organized movement that has been anywhere near as successful as Gun Rights has been Gay Rights, and they didn't have to go against the prevailing opinion of the Media.
By the end of the current legislative session in Wisconsin, there's a good chance that Illinois will become the only state in the union without some form of CCW. There may even be an additional one or two more states with Vermont-style, I mean Vermont-Alaska-style, I mean Vermont-Alaska-Arizona-style carry.
I realize that when you've spent the first several decades of your life on the defensive, getting stomped by the other side, it's hard to get used to being on the winning team, but we've pretty much been on a roll for fifteen years straight, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
"you've spent the first several decades of your life on the defensive, getting stomped by the other side"
ReplyDeleteLOL, Tam, and quite true, for -- 'long time gone' as one Gabriel Du Pre would say.
It is nice, now, to see the payoff from those decades of resistance and effort by the Good Guys, but politics appears as an unpredictable pendulum, in my thoughts.
We have a lot going for us, now. However, the influence of self-anointed 'educated' wanna-be-ruling classes, and the raw power of ignorant self-righteous wealth are trump cards to played at the critical time.
A least one pretty good scholar on the subject, with whom I've spent some BS'ing time, feels that the teeter-totter effect will always be ongoing, with advances,losses, and temporary stalemates on both sides.
However, have to admit that 'our side' has made a huge improvement to our position, in the last decade or so. May it always be so.
"...the raw power of ignorant self-righteous wealth are trump cards to played at the critical time."
ReplyDeleteThe Joyce Foundation has pretty much single-handedly kept every nat'l antigun organization afloat for years now, and they have nothing to show for it.
May it indeed always be so. ;)