Manhattan apartments are subject to a lot of the same price forces as commercial equipment. Their cost reflects the ready access to money making opportunties.
From the article, the conversions in Manhattan are producing apartments that rent from $3,500 to $7,000 per month because the conversions are too expensive for lower-end housing. There's presumably some trickle down supply effect but these conversions are not producing affordable housing directly.
Many apartments (condos in the rest of the country) in Manhattan are structured as co-ops with huge monthly obligations. The sales prices are lower because you can easily be committing to $2000 a month in payments to a co-op board. The total monthly outlays bring the numbers back in line.
An apartment in a condo in NYC will be about $100k+ per year in fees and taxes. Dozens of people will be employed in the management and maintenance of the building.
I've also got the impression that consumption of various luxury goods and services in NY is highly coupled to bonus season in the financial sector. Millionaires from Kansas etc are likely to consume such services like Broadway, Bergdorfs etc year around because there are a lack of equivalent services back home.
this might seem obvious, but it doesn't really describe the situation well. things are expensive in manhattan because it is expensive to live in/around manhattan. even the lowly mcdonalds employee gets paid about twice as much to work in manhattan as in peoria. if you buy something that doesn't require local storage/labor, it will cost the same as it does in the rest of the country.
So you are assuming most ppl who live in NYC live in an apartment with an elevator and a security guard, on the upper east side/midtown/chelsea. Unless you are running in finance and high-society circles, no one gives a crap that you live in an apartment that costs over $2500/month.
If one is resourceful(and most starving artists/actors/entrepreneurs are) you can find apartment shares in plenty of neighborhoods for under $800/month. It's not luxurious but living in those circumstances is no less worthwhile.
> I'll note too that I'm a bit skeptical of the $3000 / month charge for micro apartments; even in Williamsburg, new, conventional one-bedroom apartments were $3200 – $3,5000 / month last summer.
Yeah, that seems unlikely to fly. I was paying $1700/mo for my place, on the ground floor in Alphabet City (11th between B and C, specifically); not the most desirable place in Manhattan, but definitely not a cheap area.
Manhattan is expensive because of wealth inequality. Every year you see a huge number of neighboring apartments get merged together to have a single bigger unit, where huge numbers of people still can never afford to live there.
I'd also point out that Manhattan would still be a very expensive place to live even with lower real estate prices, as a huge number of the buildings have very high maintenance costs.
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