Real Estate Madness

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:01 PM Permalink

On one of my walks, Mr. Vidiot and I, on a lark, went into an open house. The house was fairly unremarkable by most standards. About 3500 square feet plus a cellar. Smallish lot, 22x100, good location. Owner's triplex with garden rental. 2 working fireplaces, central air and heat. How much you wanna' guess it's going for.

G'head. Guess.

Wrong!

They're asking $2,375,000. And this is in Brooklyn, not Manhattan!

They figured the monthly nut, with 25% down, would be nearly $12,000 PER MONTH! WTF! If you just figure that the housing is 50% of take home (and it really shouldn't be more than 30%, honestly), that means whomever buys it the old-fashioned way needs to be TAKING HOME $290,000. Which means their salary has to be upwards of $500,000. Who makes THAT kind of money?

Now, the only people who can afford such things are movie stars, Wall Street creeps and anyone smart enough to have bought a cheap condo in the 80s who can now sell that condo for well over a million and use that for a down payment, thereby reducing the monthly nut down to something manageable.

That's it. People who make this city interesting -- young artists, brilliant students, the best and brightest who are just starting out -- are priced right out of the market. Hell, the rental, which was just a really nice ONE BEDROOM was estimated to bring in $2,200 a month. Now, technically, Mr. Vidiot and I could do $2,200 but why would we want to suck up more than half our salary in rent? Even if Mr. Vidiot got a professorship at NYU tomorrow, he'd not be making more than $150,000 year (and that's generous for a starting professor, believe you me.) How can we afford to have a home here? WE CAN'T! And unless the market tanks to a pre-1980s level, or unless we're willing to live in Brownsville Brooklyn and wait out the 10-20 year gentrification process, we can't make a home here. NYC will lose us, and many like us.

At some point, NYC will become what we all feared it would become when Giuliani started his "clean up NY" thing: a sort of Disney world for the rich. They'll be the only ones who can live here while their maids and doorman will be pushed farther and farther out until their commute, post peak-oil, will become untenable. Those rich NYC denizens will convince themselves that NYC is still interesting while they suck down their prozak and zoloft. When the reality is that NYC will become this whitebread, boring hell-town. Seriously, the lower east side used to be WAY cool and now, the bars and restaurants are all the same, the people who go to them are 20-something New Jersey residents and there's no point in going really since dancing is illegal anyway. Might as well stay home, suck down your own scotch and listen to music that isn't the techno drivel that's out there today.

Bitter? Sour grapes? You betchya!