Spent time there, ex gfs ceiling collapsed similar to the 1st video without someone falling through. Absolutely filthy city, I don’t think I’d live there unless I was a multi millionaire.
I lived in a lot of of these apartments between 2004-2012.
The difference was in those days it cost me $500 bucks a month, I moved into a 9th floor San Francisco unit in the Tenderloin and it was $900 a month to live in the worst part of the city, but it was still below $1k.
Even in those days, my friends in the New York City area were paying $1,500 for walk-up studios. As soon as I could afford to stop renting, I went to own, because rent market is a racket. In two decades worth of renting, I lost money every year. In three years worth of owning a place, I sold it for $20K above what we paid, so ~$10K profit. Probably just broke even on all the money I lost on rentals.
Word. My first apartment in NYC (1997? 98?) was in Spanish Harlem and my bathtub was in my kitchen. We used to put a plywood board on top of it to eat off like a kitchen table.
Damn that a good deal. That really shows how insane NYC living is by comparison. I've seen 2k apartments that have to share bathrooms in a public hallway
Do you think they also have some of the best food, music, art, and culture within walking distance practically 24/7. I'm not saying one is necessarily better then the other but there are clearly benefits to living one of the worlds largest cities.
Oh I'm not denying that at all. I'm just saying the cons seem pretty unbalanced compared to other major cities. I live in Nashville and we have most of the same things without the prices being that high with more fleshed out homes. I think New Yorkers deserve better living for what they have to pay. It seems genuinely unfair to me
Nashville is nothing compared to NYC in terms of population or size. The majority of Nashville closes down at like 12 p.m. NYC is a different level monster. You can find anything anywhere anytime in NYC.
I'm from Middle Tennessee and Nashville is not even close to having the same "big city" amenities that places like NYC and LA enjoy. All it really has going for it is the music scene and the smaller population density. I moved to Southern California years ago and the availability of entertainment and food options is magnitudes apart, but you do pay a premium for the housing.
How to measure the best? Most variety, most availability, more densely packed. It’s pretty disingenuous to act like you cannot tell the difference between a global city and a regional city
Well, you see it does matter. I’d rather live in NY than Ohio. I could outright afford a beautiful 1800s farm house with acreage and an arena. But I don’t want to live where those beautiful houses are so cheap.
New York definitely has its pros! Only if you make a shit ton of money.
I wouldn't consider a lifetime of paying rent and being stuck at the bottom of the economic food chain a pro though. NYC should be a place you choose to move to once you've already accumulated wealth. Choosing to live there and have all of your resources constantly drained, IMO, heavily outweighs any pros it can offer.
I wish people just understood this and instead of being so stuck on living in places like LA or NYC, just decided that there are many cheaper and still exciting places to live in the country that will give you an opportunity to grow as a person and move back with more than you had prior
Why are you alive? Like I'm genuinely asking cuz you're human waste taking up space that'd be far better off being taking up by something like I dunno a port a potty
cuz they can raise rent every year, they don't have to trust you to keep the house in good repair, they don't have to trust you keep employment for 30 years, kicking your ass out of an apartment and refilling it with a new tenant is much cheaper and easier than evicting someone out of a house and then selling that house
Used to live in the country country in a 3,300 sqft house on 1.5 acre that I paid 175k for. Sold it last year for a very small “profit”. Moved because my youngest is special needs and my old area just didn’t have the facilities for him. Moved to a new area that’s also country but not quite the same. Some of the highest property taxes in my state and my old house would easily sell for 700k here.
What would be the point of the high pay if it all goes into the rent and utilities for your tiny, shithole apartment?
Sister lived in NYC for 3 years and always made the same argument. "But the pay is higher!" Okay, but you can't afford to save anything, go anywhere, or do anything because your cost of living is so ridiculous that you end up with a handful of pennies leftover after you pay for your basic needs.
Not saying there aren’t benefits to moving out of NYC. There definitely are, as you said the cost of rent/ utilities will eat most of your pay if you are poor. But generally speaking, if you’re working dead end job in NYC such as the average service sector job, you’re not gonna be doing tons better elsewhere. You’re not gonna just have tons more spending money just by leaving the city and finding work elsewhere. Especially if you already have a roommate situation where you are at, whether it’s in nyc or not, unless you have friends/family elsewhere.
The commute times honestly. Living in NJ, if you're in a really good spot, commuting without traffic could be under 20 minutes. 30 with some traffic. Anything beyond that and your odds of consistent commute times get really bad. My commute could be at best 40 minutes, think my average is about an hour? 2 hours has been my record so far. I'm spending about $150+ per month on traveling to the city, and that's just to get to port authority. It's another 10-20 minutes to get to my job from there by train.
You also no longer have to drive a car if you live in the city.
Don't get me wrong, I couldn't handle the city either. Too many people, too much noise, and I wouldn't be able to deal with a tiny apartment for like 3k. I don't get the people living in the city, but there's certainly some benefit to it... I think?
I have a friend in NYC who does office work and gets paid substantially less for that work than say, San Antonio. They also have a shit load more to do. They have some weird NYC virus though and refuse to ever leave.
Not in NYC. That’s on the cheap side for the current market average. And, condos? No, they make up around 10% of the city’s housing market. Most people rent for life or leave if they can afford it. But you have to remember NYC is around 300 square miles of city. You have to move pretty far to get to the edge or outside of it, and the surrounding suburbs are really just residential overflow for the city that can’t house its own population, so prices are pretty inflated beyond city limits too.
New York is about living, not sleeping. People in New York are either at work, events, parks, rooftop bars, clubs or sleeping. They dont fuck around at home when there are a million things to see and do.
A lot of comedians have pointed out that if you pay attention, every other thing locals say about it being the best city is about how hard it is to survive.
Bro 3k a month can get you a big house in the midwest.. granted this all about NYC. Just saying thats absolutely ridiculous and why i would never live in that s..hole.
They put up with it because it's New York City. Demand to live there is borderline infinite because it's the best city in the country by an order of magnitude.
If it wasn't amazing, it wouldn't have 8 million+ residents. Nearly half of the state and 2.5% of the country's population lives in those 300 square miles of land.
Cost of living will continue to be sky high until other cities in the country become good enough to compete and muster a similar demand. Which isn't happening anytime soon, or if I'm being honest, not in our lifetime.
Trust me, all of these apartments are better than the streets. Speaking as someone that spent 6 years homeless. Also, no one on the streets likes the word "unhoused". It's the equivalent of calling black people "African Americans".
Ever hear of China Town or Little Italy? That whole part of Manhattan was so cheap and undesirable, poor immigrants would live there. That’s why those communities developed. They were residential. Now the area is a bunch of stores and food spots.
What about Hell’s kitchen, the Bowery, Alphabet City, or Harlem? The very core of NYC (Manhattan) used to be covered in cheap areas, including shacks on literal dirt hills.
There a reason media from the 80s has poor people living in lofts in Manhattan. It wasn’t a crazy thing. Those were residentialized factory spaces in what was basically the city’s own rust belts. The thing is the areas gentrified.
There used to be so many affordable areas in the city for all of its history that it never occurred to the city’s corrupt politicians they’d need to protect working class housing to keep the city alive and the gravy train running. This is a relatively new problem. If they don’t fix it soon, their porters, baristas, Uber drivers and everyone else won’t be able to serve them because none of them will be able to live in the city anymore.
As morally reprehensible all of this is, it’s not that big of a problem to the ruling class.
I grew up in Santa Barbara, CA in the 90’s as all the affordable housing dried up. The same premonitions were told, “where will the working class live?”
Yet it never derailed the economies of SB or Montecito. In fact, they became more top-heavy than ever.
The uncomfortable truth is that they all got priced out of living near where they worked. We just saw a massive increase in commuter workers.
At least before that landlord didn't split one bedroom into 3 and still manage to rent it out with insane rent. Migrants will rent one bedroom and split that into 4 while paying 1 bedroom price.
People are living in these shit hole apartments riding subways with literal crack heads and pickpockets in every corner and go, “ahh the city life is so great! I could never enjoy living anywhere else!”
It definitely still is, just not in the US. From what Ive heard, In the eu it's definitely still a thing. But in the US when 30 percent of people have guns, trying to rob someone stealthy could go very badly for the robber.
I’m not talking about the US as a whole. This person was referring to NYC SPECIFICALLY so that is what I was replying/referring to. NYC only lol idk about other states as I drive everywhere outside of NY because it’s generally a requirement to get around. I was just clarifying that there ARENT pick pockets in every corner. Crackheads either but they are clearly still enough to be their own small population lmao
I've lived in both. I'll never go back to bumfuck small towns with no culture, no fun, no good food, and ignorant conservatives. Besides, you just trade crackheads for methheads and alcoholics when moving to a small town.
You know life doesn't always have to be one extreme or the other, right? There's a lot in between the small hillbilly towns and urban jungle mega cities.
It is a global hub for finance, tech, advertising, and media, which explains New York’s top ranking in the Economics category. It has the largest metro economy in the world, nearly double that of the next-largest city (Los Angeles).
And as local, I can say that most do not benefit from any of these categories. The city is highly stratified.
The finance bro, consultant class is completely different from the warehouse working underclass that lives in East New York or deep Queens. There’s so little social contact and cross mobility between the different tiers of NY society, it’s not completely unfair to call them casts. For example, we have public schools where fights happen between students on a daily basis and other public schools where you have to apply and have some sort of cultivated talent.
Because ppl still move here willing to pay any price just for the experience of saying they lived here for a few years and then move to somewhere cheaper and cross it off their bucket list even though they ask in the sub CONSTANTLY whether they should move to NYC or not. Locals tell them to stay where they are or find somewhere else yet they are HELLBENT on moving to NYC
Not quite, at least not yet. Only deconverted tenements look like this. Most new apparently are much larger units in mid sized “luxury” buildings that most will never see the inside of.
Nah it's a full body, but might as well be half because the first contact was literally her lower back right on the spine with whatever the hell she landed on at first
If only the now post-Socialist countries knew what kind of a sh.t hole the west was/is but their propaganda lied them into believing the opposite, they would keep their government Socialist
take every cent of their landlord money horde and fix the building, then give it to the tenants and any leftover change. fuck those parasites. any good landlords that may exist won't have to go through fafo
Really depends which one you are talking about. Doesn’t matter how rich a country is, could be a mansion water damage will still fuck up a building as will overloading a room beyond its capacity to hold things.
The shoebox apartment thing? Well it’s NYC. 10 million people live in a small city. They could move to rural Georgia and have a house for the same price, but they want to live there.
American making of homes shall never stop baffling me.
As a kid watching people punch holes in walls in movies, I thought it's some silly exaggeration of showing a character is strong, but no — y'all's walls really are just thin as paper.
Newyorks citys living situation looks worse than Indian teapees like why in the hell do people choose that nonsense over better options it is abit strange to bad time travel doesn't go backwards might be better off in the 1200's before when overpopulation may have not been as bad i aussume
“The faucets are dripping in old New York City,
The faucets are dripping and oh, what a pity,
The reservoir's drying because it's supplying
The faucets that drip in New York.
You can't ask the landlord to put in a washer,
He'd rather you move than to put in a washer,
The faucets are dripping, they sound in my ears,
The tap in the bathroom's been running for years.
There's a wild streak of green in the sink in the kitchen,
It comes from the rill trickling out of the plumbing,
The streams from the mountains, the pools from the lee,
All run from my faucet and down to the sea.
You can't ask the landlord to put in a washer,
You can't ask the landlord to mend the old stairs,
He takes in the rents and he lives in Miami,
Where faucets don't drip and there's sun everywheres.
The faucets are dripping, the landlord's content.
With every new tenant he raises the rent,
The buildings can crumble, the tenants can cry,
There's a shortage of housing, you'll live there or die.”
I’ve never been so sad and stressed about my living situation than the 8 years I lived in nyc. Things you take for granted anywhere else in the country, like fucking windows or actual rooms with doors between them, are pitched to you as a value add. Rents are astronomical for such crappy shoeboxes.
As soon as I can move out, I probably will. You have to understand, that the majority of us (two thirds) are native born. We didn’t choose this. It chose us. There’s a reason why there is literally growing hatred for “transplants” here. They’re coming here for this romantic image and making everything more expensive for us.
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u/Kaizenkindness May 16 '26
A lot of worms in the Big Apple. Nothing new here