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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

... but a small apartment costs $4000 in NYC which would cover the payment, gas, insurance and everything on two or three big SUVs. Without some revolution in the cost structure of urban life, "transit friendly" is going to look like going from the frying pan to the fire for most people.

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According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year [0], and that's just for one car. So New Yorkers can put that extra $1000 per month towards housing. As a New Yorker, $4000 is pretty high. You'd typically see that in hot areas for 1br's with in-unit w/d. Most people, including myself, do not pay that much.

Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.

[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...

> According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year

You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.

> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.

As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.

(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)

True. But I'd say that all that proves is that there's so much demand for not needing to own a personal automobile! And yet, cities aren't like private businesses; they don't do what's in demand. Instead of spending millions on public transportation, they spend billions on more roads to suburbs because that's what they are used to, and why the hell not? What good will come to elected officials from millions of car-free millennials streaming in from all over the country? That will just jack up rents, because, let's face it, no one city can absorb the demand anyway. My home city, Portland, put in modest light rail and painted some bike lanes, which caused some new people to move in. That pissed everyone off, and all transit development abruptly stopped. Desirable city == pissed off locals, and the locals vote!

So we have shitty apartments in Manhattan where the land is 99% of the cost and countless, cookie cutter suburban hellscapes.

>But I'd say that all that proves is that there's so much demand for not needing to own a personal automobile!

It really doesn't. NYC isn't $ARBITRARY_SUBURB except without obligatory car ownership.

A better comparable is to consider rents in an outlying section of Queens that is far from transit and compare that to Manhattan.

For that matter a person could very much live car free in a minor city like Binghamton or Ithaca NY if they work at a place that is well served by transit.

I totally disagree. Density and transit are the defining traits of NYC. What's something else NYC offers that you can't find in a similarly sized, but spread out, population? Keeping in mind that the population of NYC is about that of the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, or the entire state of Washington.

UN HQ, Wall Street, potentially one's family, etc. Cities just aren't fungible. There are way more reasons someone might prefer or be pushed towards one or another besides the traffic or transit.

Hell, if you're listing off important US map pin-points, you can't beat DC. But people would still rather live in NYC (according to the market). But even if NYC had the most destinations, that's just another way of saying "density", which is my entire point.

And I'm not talking about personal differences, like family. Paris isn't a world class city because my mom lives there. I get that individuals have reasons to live places. I'm talking about populations, not people.

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