>Literally so many people want to move here, but you look on all of streeteasy on a given day and there’s like 500 apartments. In a cities of millions.
I'm currently in my mid-30's. Throughout all of my 20's, I thought it would be a blast to live in NYC. Then I had a good stretch where I visited it a whole bunch of times, hanging out with friends and family who lived there, and you know what I noticed? Unless you were an older family member who owned a home/apartment, every younger person was renting and the topic of conversation among locals, both locals who knew each other and locals who just met one another, was about where they're living, how much their rent is, what kind of battle they had to go through to get the place, what kind of battles their friends went through to get their places, and then they'd compare the different amenities they had or didn't have. I watched these same conversations - some of which were told like war stories - play out again and again and again and again.
Then, you get into the whole issue of bed bugs, how prevalent they are in NYC and how much of a nightmare it is to deal with them, and you realize that life in NYC is largely spent just trying to figure out how to have a place to live, and it suddenly feels incredibly stupid to bother to try and move there. The nightlife and entertainment and culture, as cool as they are, just aren't worth it if you're constantly hassling with such a basic need.
But that's just me. /shrug