Asking users who live in New York. How much does this matter? Is the commute from Brooklyn or Queens reasonable? If so how are the prices? The Bronx has a bad reputation (as a foreigner) but is that even true?
NYC real estate is pretty shockingly efficient. If you think you found a great deal, you are almost certainly in for a bad time.
Parts of each of the Boroughs are pretty sketchy. Again, the parts that are not: priced in!
The allure to going out this far is there's a lot of suburbs, parks, bodies of water, etc. but at the same time it's not a huge ordeal to visit NYC for day trips.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-12/nyc-conge...
The part of Brooklyn that I live in is somewhat cheap, and it takes me about 35 minutes on average to get to Lower Manhattan. I pay about $1600 a month in rent, sharing a 2 floor 3BR with a roommate. The people I know in the area pay similar amounts.
I went to high school in the Bronx; it has good and bad areas like everywhere else in the city, but I think its bad reputation is largely undeserved. My guess is that we’re going to see a lot of “rebranding” of Bronx neighborhoods to make them more palatable over the next decade.
(And note: all boroughs in NYC are both residential and commercial, so lots of people don’t commute into Manhattan at all.)
The subway is pretty fast, it runs 24 hours a day, and it gets you anywhere you’d want to go within the city. Bikeshare deals with the corner cases where a trip between two nearby-ish neighborhoods doesn’t have a good subway connection. The only reason I’d ever drive in New York is if I got a U-Haul for moving.
The Bronx has higher crime for sure.
Bronx still has a high crime rate; depends on where. Tremont and Highbridge are pretty rough. Lots of the Bronx is still as safe or safer than, say, East Harlem (in Manhattan).
It's very common to see small groups of kids traveling on the subway alone to get to school and they are perfectly safe.
Cultural events in New York city span all 5 boroughs, by the way. Central Park and "downtown" are by no means the cultural heart of the city. Have you even lived in New York???
Of course the state of the subway is a reflection of the city as a whole rather than an isolated issue, and that's true everywhere in my experience.
I was mostly in LIC and Manhattan though. Maybe it's not so dirty in the other boroughs?
Then when the pandemic hit and NYC was devastated, they were practically holding group orgy parties to get each other off about the fall of the city.
Then when the city started bouncing back it became "Well no, it's bouncing back as a dangerous crime ridden hell hole."
The "NYC is dangerous" thing is literally just conservative cope for the failed collapse during the pandemic.
Yes, the mega events are at Lincoln Center, Broadway, the Met, but that's very much like saying cultural TV is only on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.
This does vary depending on the train and the station (I might recommend a tourist to avoid some stations on the J train at 3 am), but overwhelmingly most of the subway is safe at night, and more comfortable than during the day since you can actually get a seat. I ride it late at night, and so do many people I know.
So you've never been to Port Authority...