Cost of living, mostly just rent.
Why would I choose to live and start a business in NYC when places like Seattle, Portland, Austin, Chicago, and DC all have drastically lower costs of living?
Why would I choose to live and start a business in NYC when places like Seattle, Portland, Austin, Chicago, and DC all have drastically lower costs of living?
And then think about the tremendous amount of culture here -- plays, restaurants, music, groups of people, and so on, on a larger scale and with more diversity than anywhere else in the world except perhaps London. This might not all make a big difference for you, but it's the reason a lot of people choose to live in NYC.
If you enjoy certain characteristics of urban living -- dense, progressive, diverse, bustling -- NYC is peerless.
Plenty of cities have these characteristics that have a much lower cost of living than NYC.
I love NYC. It's a great city, probably the greatest city on earth, but there are plenty of other options out there.