What $1 Million Might Get You in Manhattan

Woke up this morning at 8:28am, and I couldn't go back to sleep. It's MLK Day, and Victor and I are both off today (I'm actually off all week--I'm heading to Philly with a friend tomorrow and then to Chicago on Wednesday to meet my new niece). After lying in bed for 10 or 15 minutes, I got up finally and showered. I looked out the window to see if it had snowed. There was a light dusting on the concrete space that serves as an urban garden and separates our rear apartment and our landlords' apartment. (The plants, which are restricted to concrete planters decorated by our landlord with stones or ceramic tiles or a variety of other objects--from a plastic Statue of Liberty to a portrait of the Virgin Mary--have been covered with plastic or moved into the basement for the winter). Snowflakes still swirled in the air outside my 2nd-floor window, but I think they were only stirred up by the wind. I flipped on NY1 to check the forecast, while I was making coffee (we hadn't put the heat on downstairs and it was so cold I wore sweats--the thermometer on the wall showed it was in the 50s inside).
Temps are supposed to fall into the teens tonight. It feels like winter finally, and I'm already ready for spring.
Over brunch yesterday at Home, in the West Village, my friend, S., a single (widowed) mother of an 11-year-old boy, told me she has been looking at apartments to buy. She's been renting a spacious, 2-bedroom ground floor apartment in a doorman building in Battery Park. For two years, $500 of her monthly rent was subsidized by the government, part of a plan to get New Yorkers to live near Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks (her apartment building is across West Side Highway from the site of the WTC). But the subsidies have stopped now and her rent went up another $100 a month this year, so she's ready to move. That, and her son attends a private school in Gramercy Park, across town and up about 30 blocks, and the school bus will stop picking him up after this school year. So she wants to move to Chelsea, which would keep her close to work, and her son a crosstown bus ride away from school. She thought she had a decent chunk of change saved for a down payment, but the apartments she's seen so far were much smaller and older than she'd imagined, she told me. I'm not surprised--nor am I looking forward to the day when Victor and I start looking for a place to buy. It's now nearly impossible to find a one-bedroom apartment--not to mention a 2-bedroom--in Manhattan (well, anywhere below 100th Street, at least) for less than $800,000 these days. The average price of a Manhattan apartment breached $1 million last year. And there's no indication that Manhattan real estate prices are going to come down anytime soon.
We're holding onto our place, which we rent, as long as we can. If our landlord and landlady would sell it to us, I'd buy it in an instant. Though I don't think we could afford it now (not if they charge market rates anyway--prices in Williamsburg have shot up, as well, since I moved in with Victor four and a half years ago).
It's daunting really. I can't imagine leaving NYC. But our friends have been moving further and further from Manhattan as they've gotten married and/or pregnant; well, with the sole exception of one friend, whose new husband does M&As on Wall Street. They moved into a 2-bedroom apartment last summer in one of Trump's new buildings on the Upper West Side, complete with four concierges, celebrity tenants like Kristen Chenoweth and Kathleen Turner, and monthly maintenance fees that are comparable, if not more than, what my husband and I pay in rent each month. For us to afford a place like that anytime soon, we'd need to either sell a book (or our first-born), win a lottery, or switch careers. Now there's an incentive to start that book.