How much are people earning there to make it financially feasible to pay all this money in rent? They are not even paying to own. I have no idea how much one needs to earn to be able to put anything at all aside with this type of rent payment.
NYC Rents
Clarissa's Blog 
No wonder Young Single Childless People in NYC is a whole genre.
Nobody can afford to live there without four working adults rooming together.
ethyl
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There’s got to be some massive gain that I’m really not seeing. Is it feeling like you are 20 well into your forties? Which is a doubtful benefit if I’ve even seen one but why else would one subject oneself to this?
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The City Is Forevaaaaaah!
I’ve had more than one cousin move off to NYC to… I dunno, experience the phantasmagorical aura of starving next to Broadway or something. Everybody but them knows they’ve got no future there, but they can’t be reasoned out of it.
ethyl
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Methylethyl
What ever are you trying to say — that the exiting fabulous single girl life of “Sex And The City” is horseshit ² ;-D
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There’s a whole swath of TV shows and popular novels featuring the Young Single Childless People in NYC lifestyle. A distinct genre, with some fairly rigid rules: nobody is straight, nobody is married or has kids, the only people allowed to be in longterm relationships are gay, everybody’s some kind of artist, and the closest anybody gets to a regular job is barista or working in a bookstore… so nobody has any discernible means of actually paying for the NYC life they are living, except the characters who admit to being trustafundians.
There are some fairly minor plot variations, but the important moral at the end of each novel (I never watched Friends or Sex in the City so I don’t know about those, only that they are solidly in the genre) is that no matter what happens, living in NYC is the greatest, because the city is always changing and can never possibly get stale or boring. The most important things in life are to be constantly entertained, and never get bogged down by permanent family attachments. People are disposable, but The City is Forever.
And… whatever. There’s lots of genre fiction out there that I’m not into: westerns, hockey romances, gay werewolf love stories, English boarding school dramas, zombies… but there’s clearly a lucrative market out there for these things. Somebody enjoys them.
The thing is, all those genres have a clear set of stereotyped style guidelines: you can tell what it is by just glancing at the cover. Some outliers you may need to read the flap copy. But it’s never really ambiguous: if you pick up a zombie historical romance, you know before you ever open the book, exactly what you are getting.
YSCPinNYC isn’t like that. There is no standard cover style, no preferred font, and if you read the flap copy on the book, every one of them is pretending to be Literary Fiction, even though they’re all the same story with different decals on the inside. So I have an extra special loathing for this genre because it’s *everywhere* and it’s pretending not to be the genre fiction that it is. Because NYC is too good to be shelved with the dime novels or something.
I just want them to pick a uniform style, or get something equivalent to the harlequin imprint logo, so I can avoid them.
ethyl
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It’s pretty easy to get cheaper rent than the median in any city. The median rent in my city is much lower than in NYC, but still significantly higher than any apartment I’ve ever considered. If you can’t afford 4k a month, you have other options, albeit still more than I’d wanna pay.
That said, there’s a reason cost conscious New Yorkers often end up moving to Ohio. A lot of the people currently living in NYC can’t really afford it. Some of them are young women being sent extra money by their parents. Those without daddy’s money have to make tough decisions and maybe come back to the Midwestern state they were originally born in lol.
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The median rent in my city is also much lower than in NYC. But if you go more than about $200 lower than the median, you will definitely find yourself in a sketchy neighborhood, an antique mobile home, sharing a wall with a domestic violence case, or dealing with your apartment-neighbors’ weed/rodent/cockroach problem. And your landlord will probably not fix anything without a carefully-worded registered threat letter, and will definitely keep your deposit illegally.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
ethyl
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