My daughter has lived in Brooklyn since she graduated from an Ivy, class of 2011. She has a liberal arts degree. She found a job where she started in the mid 30’s. After two and a half years she’s broken 40 but not by much. She works about 60 hours a week. Her last review made her a manager so she gets no overtime. She works in an industry that caters to luxury so the company is setting income records. The money is all flowing to the top. It’s an employers market and the starting salary the company now offers is lower then it was when she started because there are so many college graduates looking for anything resembling a job.

She lived in Park Slope for the first two years, sharing a two bedroom, fifth floor walkup, attic apartment. The entire apartment was maybe 20 x 20 ft with a good part of it of limited use due to the slant of the roof. Rent was $1,500 a month including utilities. It was a great neighborhood though and she really enjoyed her time there.

The apartment building was sold to a luxury developer and the rent was raised to $2,300 a month. The new owners really just wanted the building empty so they could gut it and change it to luxury apartments. We walked by there this past weekend and the place was boarded up.

Her new apartment is a legitimate two bedroom in a clean but very old building on the edges of Boerum Hill. The neighborhood is okay but you need to be aware that two blocks away it starts get dodgy very quickly. The rent is $2,200 + utilities. Her and her apartment mate looked for two months to find the apartment. It was the only thing they could find that was affordable but wasn’t a filthy dump. The leases on the old and new places overlapped by a month and a half but they had to look early because the inventory is so limited.

Real estate in NYC has gone crazy. Manhattan prices are driven by international buyers looking for a place that’s safe. One bedroom apartments in Manhattan for less than a million are becoming scarce according to the NYT. Brooklyn is priced at what Manhattan was a couple of years ago. The downtown area of Brooklyn has been very popular because of the availability of mass transit to get people into their jobs in Manhattan. As you move out from downtown Brooklyn the commute time increases quickly as subway lines spread out and express trains make less frequent stops. Two to three hours a day on a subway commute becomes old very quickly.

NYC is a great place but unless you have some equity in the place you work you’re very likely not going to be able to afford to have the life you think is waiting for you there.