I’m glad they mentioned Boston. Although so much smaller than NYC, I see Boston as very much an NYC wannabe. It’s going in the same boring, overly affluent direction. It’s no fun anymore.
Pittsburgh, I still like. Pittsburgh reminds me of Boston in the70s/80s. It has character, and there are places you can live even if you don’t have a fancy job. It’s diverse in all the right ways. But it will eventually be like a bland cookie-cutter shopping mall and look like NYC with 3 rivers.
Boston is close to completely devoid of a middle class. There’s the ultra rich who can afford a $3500 rent on a studio apartment, and there’s the ultra poor, who shoot each other nightly in the greasy neighborhoods.
I read this artical and it seemed to take forever.Its quite long.
It might have been “great” in the mind of the author but it was an armpit since the 70s and last time I was there it was just a really CROWDED armpit.
The arts that are not an armpit are Disney-fied to the point where you could be at a Disney park and not know the difference.
I think this person is comparing the NYC of the movie “On The Town.”
It is true internationally too, London, Paris and Rome are now all pest holes that market themselves as the world's elite. You just aren't supposed to know about the no-go zones.
We left Seattle 7 years ago. Every day - EVERY SINGLE DAY - I walk into my living room or onto my deck, and look out at the five acres of lawn surrounded on all sides by forest and thank God for where we live.
And the total price was a third the price of a three bedroom rambler in a middle class suburb of Seattle. This includes a brand new house (when we bought it).
And the annual property taxes are less than one month’s Camry payment.
We are completely done with the cities. Been there, done that.
Good article, but can someone explain the difference between a condo and a townhouse as it pertains to Manhattan? Thanks.
The artist Vik Muniz did Close one better, providing three dozen images of various friends, relatives, and cultural celebrities dressed up, reported the Times, like “normal people,” including “the restaurateur Daniel Boulud holding a bag with a fish tail sticking out; the designer, actor, and man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia”; and Mr. Muniz himself, “in a Rockwell-esque scene of him tripping, spilling papers from his briefcase,” as well as his son, dressed “in a tiger suit, like a Times Square mascot on lunch break.” Isn’t it marvelous? The artists are depicting themselves and their celebrity friends imitating us, waiting for a train and doing all the perfectly ordinary things that we ordinary people do!
When I read this the first thing I thought of was Marie Antoinette milking a groomed and manicured cow !
A long rant by an aging lover of the State.
No, living in NYC has very much degraded and I'm really doubtful it can make a comeback. Not with its appetite for all things libtard.
This is what happens when you make war on the middle class and their values.
He misses out on the improvements that have also come, especially in the quality of life. The New York of the 1970s was riddled with crime and it got much worse in the 1980s with crack cocaine. I was there. It was a Living Hell. Remember the movie Escape from New York? It was inspired about the actual horrors going on in the city.
I’m not a “city” person, give me suburbia and the open space of Upstate NY without the liberal politicians running the state and the high taxes and we’d be all set.
The modern American city is a cookie cutter, leftist, globalist, narcissistic/self-important, multicultural entity to its country’s true identity and founding. The center city leftist “utopias” are surrounded by the moat of sh*thole ‘hoods.
NYC was better when Americans lived there.
New York is still all too ‘real’ in one horrible way...it wreaks of piss all summer long. And now even more so since Mayor DeCommie-O has decriminalized it
I'd recommend that the author move to one of NYC's neighborhoods that are still crappy like the old days. There are still plenty of them.
Sort of wish that some of these libtards would wake up and realize that Trump is actually doing them a huge favor by shifting the economic focus from Wall Street to Main Street. For decades all of the money has been flowing from flyover country to these big cities, much of it not even in the hands of the local populace, but instead foreigners, and this causes the type of “the rent is too damn high” hollowing out described in the article.
The irony here is that these enlightened folks are the direct cause of this gentrification that they so stylishly rail against.
We educate our children at all these colleges and universities and right away, they want to move to a trendy area of town, where they can have a nightlife and Uber here and Uber there. They want to hang out in a bohemian hippy-dippy coffee shop where they fire up their MacBooks while sipping a coffee-based concoction that takes 13 syllables to order.
So what happens? The neighborhoods they move to start to gentrify. A Starbucks over here, a Trader Joe's over there. Then a Whole Foods. Then blocks and blocks of eclectic restaurants and shops that cater to the young urban professionals, many of which make six figures writing code or designing phone apps for some high-tech startup. Nobody under the age of 30 will be caught dead riding a yellow NYC taxicab that they have to hail in the street. No! They want to punch up Uber of Lyft on their app and walk outside "just in time" as it pulls to the curb. "My own private limo driver - how cool is that!"
Not saying any of this is a bad thing. But it seems that the ones driving the gentrification are the very ones who are loudest in proclaiming their opposition to it.