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    CleverUsernameAndy Cush
    6/09/16 11:43am

    But do I get to keep my private entry? I don’t want to be forced into smalltalk with people of average income......you know, people who make a paltry $100k/year.

    Ugh....poors.

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      Mount_PrionCleverUsername
      6/09/16 11:44am

      We wrote basically the same thing at the same time. 8)

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      XrdsAlumCleverUsername
      6/09/16 11:53am

      We joke about this, but there’s always someone who shows up to defend the poor doors, as if building entrances are exclusive amenities.

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    Low Information BoaterAndy Cush
    6/09/16 11:45am

    If I were rich, I’d probably live in Andalucia. Tapas, wine, soccer, culturally enforced daily naps, not smelling like pee; seems pretty nice.

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      EvenBaggierTrousers4Low Information Boater
      6/09/16 11:47am

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      Low Information BoaterEvenBaggierTrousers4
      6/09/16 11:49am

      I'm counting on Brexit keeping all the chavs out.

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    Will Save Us From Trump's MadnessAndy Cush
    6/09/16 11:47am

    They way I see it- if you cannot life in a cool city like Manhattan, create your own “Manhattan.” All over the country, small towns and cities that were previously not particularly interesting are becoming fun, vibrant places to live. Omaha, Marfa, Detroit, Asheville, Fayetteville WV, etc.

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      CharitybWill Save Us From Trump's Madness
      6/09/16 12:23pm

      You can also cheat by naming your town the name of anyplace that you actually want to live. Living in Manhattan, Paris, London, etc. is cool but so is living in Manhattan (Indiana), Paris (Texas), London (New Jersey), Kuala Lumpur (Delaware), or Tokyo (South Dakota). Frankly you won’t be able to tell the difference after getting blotto at the one bar in town that stays open past 6:30 pm.

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      EvanrudeJohnsonWill Save Us From Trump's Madness
      6/09/16 12:46pm

      I love when they try to class up a shitty strip joint by naming it something related to New York or LA.

      In Detroit, there is even a strip joint named Trumpp’s.

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    stuckinthegreyswithyouAndy Cush
    6/09/16 11:46am

    You can get a decent one bedroom apartment for $400/month.....if you want to live in Jefferson City, MO.

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      CatdogWhispererstuckinthegreyswithyou
      6/09/16 11:51am

      Two story (three of you count basement) two bedroom townhouse for $500 if you wanna live outside Charleston, WV. Plus toothless redneck neighbor woman who puts a pool in the shared front yard and wants to use YOUR water to fill it! You can’t put a price on that...

      Act now and receive our bonus offer of the deafening sound of 17 year cicadas filling every tree for 100 miles!

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      Sid and FinancyCatdogWhisperer
      6/09/16 12:03pm

      I was couch surfing in Annapolis when they had the 17-year cicadas. It was a disgusting, overwhelming plague of biblical dimension. (Biblical in that I was fornicating with the cicadas.)

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    Collapsed ConversationAndy Cush
    6/09/16 12:42pm
    Calculated against the accepted wisdom that one should make about 40 times their monthly rent in yearly salary

    Remember in the good ole days when it used to be one-quarter of your salary should be your target rent? Since then it’s gone up to this 40x figure, and sometimes I hear 1/3 of the monthly salary, which is the worst of the three.

    However in NYC all these figures don’t even apply, when you have most NYers spending 2/3 of their income on rent.

    http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYC…

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      TheAJxCollapsed Conversation
      6/09/16 4:17pm

      My wife and I make that much money (I’m in school, she’s working). With 40% of our income going to Uncle Sam, State Sam and City Sam, we are not able to save a single penny. The 40x is just the hurdle to get by, not a smart hurdle for becoming better off in the future.

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      Collapsed ConversationTheAJx
      6/09/16 5:01pm

      NYC is the worst place to live if you’re trying to save. Its only saving grace is the fact that the subway is not terribly expensive (that’s relatively speaking - my commute from the burbs into NYC costs over $300 a month).

      Owning a place would be the way to go, but many people can’t afford it. If you’re lucky enough to be able to live in NY with family members, or your in-laws, that might be one way to save enough $$ to buy your own place.

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    Sean BrodyAndy Cush
    6/09/16 11:50am

    I don’t think you’ll be able to incentivise developers to invest 100s of millions into something and settle for half the possible return.
    The cost of building something high end versus affordable is not that great.
    Design, acquisition, site, structure, facade, MEPs, and so on are largely the same no matter what the selling price of the apt is.

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      SJDubyaSean Brody
      6/09/16 10:38pm

      No, you can’t, and really, in something as widespred as housing, you can’t escape supply and demand. If you require high levels of low income or rent controlled housing, it creates scarcity in the mid-price market, which pushes prices up further.

      It’s pretty simple in Manhattan because the developments are so large- if you’re doing 50 units and have to set aside 10 for low income housing, the other 40 will not only be priced high enough for the profits to be the same, but generally a little bit more because of the developer taking on more risk. You’ve basically assured that no more low-to-mid income units will be in that building, which then influences the prices of other similar sized units in the neighborhood.

      Loosening zoning restriction tends to lower the over prices, but that’s the opposite of how New York (and San Francisco and a few other cities) always react.

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    Ray FosseAndy Cush
    6/09/16 12:25pm

    I live across the street from a newish luxury building here in Manhattan that has a truffle “showroom” (for lack of a better word) in it at sidewalk level. Ooooh, truffles! The truffle place hosts fancy little dinners to promote their uber-expensive, pig-located fungi, and you often see an assembly line of people through the window, canning truffles when you walk by. Anyway, truffles, in case you don’t know, give off an extremely pungent odor - it nails you in the face out on the sidewalk - and the people in the building who have invested in their multi-million dollar apartments are furious because the smell is seeping into the rest of the building and the property value has dropped! If this isn’t the makings of a white privilege blues song, I don’t know what is.

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      WhatthefoxsaysAndy Cush
      6/09/16 12:15pm

      The decrease in rent is horseshit. It comes from “incentives” where landlords offer you a free month, tacked on to the end of the lease. But what they don’t tell you is that they will jack up the rent when you try to renew, and a lot of people will pay because they don’t want to go through the hassle of moving.

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        Mount_PrionAndy Cush
        6/09/16 11:43am

        Clearly we need more luxury buildings with separate poor people entrances for the tax dodg—er, affordable housing units.

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          toothpetardAndy Cush
          6/09/16 11:57am

          One of the benefits of being rich is how cheap everything gets.

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