The problem for me, as a long time NYC resident, is that there's no other place in America I want to live even with work from home as a possibility.
I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply greatly.
The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles into the city.
> I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America.
Coming from New Hampshire: this is just fantastically untrue. NYC is about one hundred times more violent than where I live. It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are. I think most people don't realize how badly it affects them, or how violent cities are versus "the rest of America".
edit: NYC has 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people, which is 45% more violent than the USA median (4.0). I have no idea how 45% more violent got a reputation as "safer than the rest of America" but it's not true.
The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to you.
In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from (edit: downtown) Manhattan and you'd really have to go out of your way to get there. Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise. By comparison I also lived in SF where the bad parts are unavoidably located in the center of the city and I've witnessed multiple violent crimes over a similar time period. The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience.
> In NYC the most dangerous areas are pretty far out from Manhattan
East Harlem (part of Manhattan) is as dangerous as the Bronx and is very different from the Chelsea where you live. Manhattan is not a uniformly safe place. Also, NYC subway is filthy, disgusting and sometimes plain dangerous. Car traffic is worse than before COVID. There seem to be more cars on the streets, for people are avoiding subway and are using cars more often than before.
East Harlem is a relatively small neighborhood, the Bronx is an entire borough. There are parts of the Bronx that are both significantly more and less dangerous than East Harlem (Mott Haven and Riverdale come to mind, respectively).
None (or at least few) of the folks you’re gonna see on HN are going to be in the income bracket where they’re going to be living in East Harlem. It’s about half an hour from the places where things happen, at least, and might as well be an outer borough for most intents and purposes, given transit times, even if it’s technically within the stated geographical limits of Manhattan.
This might have been true 25 years ago, but all of South and East Harlem has been experiencing steady gentrification for the last decade. Most of that is coming from young families, from my experience living in South Harlem.
(There are lots of attractions to the neighborhood: old buildings, pretty side streets, good food, convenient access to museums, and one of the most reliable subway lines in the system.)
Former Harlem resident chiming in here as an additional, concurring datapoint.
I didn't fit the traditional Harlem demographic (ex-FAANG employee, startup founder, etc) but found the neighborhood to have solid access to the rest of Manhattan, an increasing number of amenities, proximity to Central Park, and an overall appealing character compared to the increasingly sterile areas of Manhattan
If/when I move back to NYC I would certainly consider living in Harlem again.
"Where things happen", aka Manhattan? Tbh, Manhattan kinda blows these days. It's more or less a sterile, disneyified, yuppy, consumerist grazing ground from 100th down, with the exception of alphabet city and Chinatown. But even Chinatown's changing, unfortunately. Feels like the old Chinatown Fair shutting down was a signal.
Idk Manhattan has a few solid areas that have held up over the years, but I personally try to avoid it unless my boys and I have a skate session or heading to a museum.
Also, the commute from the boroughs really isn't bad. If you really need to get to Manhattan you're probably looking at 45-50 min on average, which is whatever... unless you live in bumfuck nowhere where there's not a stop within a mile or two.
Point being? It's likely you got friends throughout the boroughs and not just Manhattan, unless you just came here for a job. 45 min one way, 1.5 hrs both ways, is nothing. Especially if it means seeing the people you love.
It's more or less 30 min minimum to get anywhere regardless of location and there are beautiful and interesting spots all over this city, not just Manhattan. Why not explore?
I’ve lived in nyc for 20+ years, moving from a country that is “hundreds of times safer”. I’ve never felt unsafe.
As others remarked correctly, aggregated numbers are useless and not representative for the avg person. If you truncate NYC’s crime numbers by stripping out high crime areas such as Brownsville or the South Bronx, crime here is shockingly low. Even more so if you correct for crime that would be er affect you unless you’re in some sort of drug gang (many of the violent crimes are gang on gang crimes).
Also saw folks here mention East Harlem — I assume that’s a joke?! That hasn’t been a “dangerous” neighborhood for 35+ years. It’s now a very sought after area esp. for families, and it’s got plenty of artisanal BS stores that come with gentrified areas. I can’t afford to rent there.
Brownsville is still dangerous? For some reason I thought they were calming down there and East New York was the dodgy place now in Brooklyn.
And Yeah Harlem seems to be on the up and up.
>"The NYC crime rate varies wildly by neighborhood so I don't think its very useful to compare city-wide crime stats. For example, the felony assault rate is literally 10x higher in parts of the Bronx than on the UES. If you live and work in safer neighborhoods the city will appear to be very safe to you."
This makes no sense. It's a mobile city. You can live on the UWS but have to go downtown to see a doctor, or work in midtown but commute in from the Bronx or Queens to go to work. The vast majority do not live and work in the same neighborhood let alone work and live in the same nice and safe neighborhood.
>"Anecdotally I lived in Chelsea and worked in Union Square for a few years and never witnessed any real crime, violent or otherwise."
Not only is that a walking commute but there is literally not a single bad block between anywhere in Chelsea and Union Square.
>"The neighborhoods in a city you pass through on a day to day basis really matter in terms of defining your experience."
Yes exactly, where do you think all of the service workers that are back bone of the city travel through on their commute, often at night? Hint, it's not Chelsea.
I think you and GP are on the same page. GP isn’t saying that life in the city is safe for everyone, the point is that it is safe for some, depending on where they frequent, how/where the commute, etc.
If I was thinking of moving to somewhere in NYC, I would want to know just that: could I live there safely? If someone answers that topic with “well, many people are exposed to crime, and it’s really unfortunate, and change is really desired”, that’s all true, but that doesn’t answer my question. If one were to tell me “yes, it can be fairly safe if you have the means to live here, and commute over there, and mostly hang around this place”, that doesn’t somehow minimize or deny the plight of those who are less fortunate. These are two separate topics that are both worth discussing.
Edit:
I now live in Dallas. I don’t know about crime stats at the moment, but if you’ll allow me to speak of how safe I feel in the city: I would say that there’s no way to live in Dallas (assuming you want an active social life that involves music, drinks, shows, etc) that feels safe. The usual hangout spots in Dallas (e.g. Deep Ellum) are right next to shady overpasses, sections of street with vacant buildings with busted out windows and broken street lights. So much of the city is in a state of disrepair. I feel like I’m gambling with my life if I go anywhere remotely interesting in Dallas.
When I lived in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn, I could walk to the coffee shop, or go to dozens of great restaurants and shops, get late night tacos or pizza, and never feel like I was in a sketchy area. Granted, I was privileged to have the means to live where I did.
If someone then asks me where I would prefer to live on the basis of apparent safety, I would say Brooklyn. If I was then asked if everyone feels safe in Brooklyn, I would say “no” — if you live in a low income, high crime area, you’re not going to feel safe — and that’s an unfortunate reality for many people. Both things are simultaneously true.
Except crime is also random. The person that was shot on subway in May was an investment banker who lived in a nice area and had means. He was simply on his way to brunch on a Sunday morning:
That's gotta be similarly true for a lot of major cities though don't you think? Vancouver, BC is broadly quite safe, unless you drive, have a car centric cycling route, or walk down certain streets in the downtown Eastside during particular times of the week or day alone
But a city is the sum of all its residents. Saying that the well-off parts of the city are safe and ergo, the city is safe reeks of incredible privilege - that crime is okay as long as the people who suffer from it are the poor.
There is a massive difference between "an overall very safe city with a few small dangerous neighborhoods/areas" and "an overall dangerous city with a few small safe neighborhoods/areas".
I suppose that's true, but is it as true if there's literally only one area that most people should probably be much more cautious in for objectively more intense safety reasons or unpredictability?
Whats up with Manhattans South Precinct (the roughly square section south of Central Park? For just about all of the categories of crime on this map, it consistently ranks as the worst area in the whole city across all five boroughs. Seems weird for this to be happening in a core section of Manhattan itself.
That precinct has Times Square as well as multiple train and bus stations (Port Authority, Penn Station and Grand Central). So tons of people passing through daily, many of whom are easy crime targets like tourists.
My understanding is NY state prisons bus felons being let out at the NYC bus stops here as well. Many of them have no where to go other than homeless shelters and tend to cause crime again.
The implication there is that the areas with fewer tourists have higher true rates of crime than the official stats, which makes the overall case worse...
But other places also have underreported crime. In a place where police take 30 minutes to arrive it might not be worth it to call the police for some minor things.
100x is shocking, so I explored a bit. Over 2010-2020 Amherst PD reported ~5 violent crimes per year[1], in a town of ~10000, or about 50 per 100000. NYPD reported ~49k per year over the same period[ibid], on about 8.3m residents, or about about 590 per 100000. So about 11x difference in per-capita reported-to-local-PD crime.
I'll admit I'm surprised it's still an order of magnitude, I share GP's sensibility that the cities are generally much safer than perceived
NYC gets dozens of millions of visitors annually, in addition to people commuting in daily and people transiting through the city. So, while the number of crimes is high, the number of people actually in the city at any given time is multiple times the number of people who reside there. Probably the total number of people in the city anually is 10x the people who live there.
I'd also factor in the numbers are higher also because policing is very robust. I can't think of any other city where I saw a cop nearly as often as NYC, they're everywhere.
Anecdotally, I never felt unsafe there. Although where I grew up crime was rampant, common, and expected- so comparatively NYC seemed really safe, and it wasn't hard to avoid high risk places/situations. I do think people hype up the crime numbers, and forget to consider the variables present in a megalopolis which aren't present in smaller cities.
> I'd think the average number of people there each day is much closer to the relevant number.
Yes, and that "average number of people there each day" would include all the non-residents/tourists in the city. Which is a non-trivial number at all for NYC.
Yes, of course it would count them. But that number will be much much smaller. If the average visitor is there for a week, then a million yearly visitors only increase the daily population by 20k. You'd expect a crime increase equivalent to 20k residents or less.
So if there really is an 11x increase in crime, along with a 10x increase in yearly population, that's actually a huge increase in crime on a per-person per-day basis.
Too late to edit, but I should emphasize a comment down thread that this is a crude, worst-case estimate of the difference between OP's town and NYC. Don't take this as 'NYC is 10x more violent', take this as 'The difference is at least 10x _smaller_ than stated'
"Violent crime" is not a consistently defined or tracked category across cities, so it isn't comparable. The NYPD has a notoriously... loose definition of "violent crime", to the point where it counts things that no reasonable person would be thinking of when they hear that term.
For this reason, researchers typically use homocides to make comparisons, because that's consistently defined and tracked across jurisdictions, and because it's harder to manipulate those statistics when recording.
NYC - particularly Manhattan - has a much lower homocide rate than other places.
Very fair point, my comment should be read as a worst-case estimate of the comparison. In homicide terms, GP's town averages ~2 per 100k (although they haven't had one for the last few years) while NYC averages ~4 per 100k.
I am not surprised. NYC gave up on violent crime. It's Democrat's policy. Same as in Chicago, SF, Los Angeles, and many other Democrat-run cities.
One of the reasons I left NYC. I'm now in one of the safest neighborhoods, we have virtually no violent crime, except from the occasional visiting criminals.
Even according to this, murder and manslaughter is significantly up in the last 2 years.
But you're also ignoring the fact that in other parts of the country these crime rates are 1-10% of these numbers. NYC could be much safer, if the right policies were applied.
No doubt it could be safer but I'm asking you to explain how NYC gave up on crime. In 20 years the crime rate looks like it went down maybe ~45%?
I believe the south has the highest per capita murder rate which is mostly Republican led. It's states with lower education and higher poverty that have high murder rates. I think blaming Democrats or Republicans is misguided. We're a country pretty evenly split and there's no place that's a panacea.
For some reason no one wants to blame a lack of education, poverty or a lack of opportunity on crime (per your above statement). Everyone wants to get into these weird, esoteric arguments about what might have cause the crime rates that aren't germane to the actual, easily identifiable problems... most likely so no one has to try and solve those issues.
Isn't manslaughter up all across the US in the last 2 years... attempting to use a pandemic as a stat and then say it's a trend is on the border of unethical.
Crime is up after the lull that was the COVID lockdowns. Less crimes occurred when everyone was at home and the economy was essentially halted. Great argument.
People use these sorts of stats in Seattle to pretend that crime hasn’t gotten worse in the last few years.
The reality on the ground is much different, most people just don’t bother reporting crime, because it’s not worth the effort and the police probably won’t come anyway.
In what year did the stats become garbage then? If they were always garbage then crime has gone down. Do the stats become worse each year while crime goes up?
When the DAs in Democrat-run cities stopped charging criminals. I think there's a case in Seattle where one guy assaulted 23 people, one at a time, and they just let him go over and over again. No charges.
So the current Seattle district attorney is a current Republican and an ex-Democrat. So crime should get better then? Is she materially better at her job after switching parties a year ago? Do you see how weird the logic is to blame Democrats for all that goes wrong?
I know this sounds insulting but you seem like seem to have bought into a narrative of them versus us. There are ills on all sides, we are all humans who are mostly trying to make it through. Yes, there are people that are terrible at their jobs and cause harm. Yes, they are in both parties. If there was a third party they would be there too. Sure, vote and support people that align with your values but life is not a binary thing.
The current Seattle district attorney had been just 6 months at her job. Do you think it's reasonable to revert the effect of the previous 12 years in such a time frame?
You don't make your point then. The most notorious crime-enabling DAs are Democrats (Gascone, Boudin, Bragg, Schmidt etc) yet you pick a Republican DA who managed to upset an incumbent Democrat in one of the bluest cities because even there people got fed up with crime and point at her, saying that both parties enabled crime because in her 6 months she didn't clean up Seattle.
But you're sharing propaganda instead of crime stats. So all you've done is repeat a Republican party "talking point", which in the context of crime over time is nonsense.
Plenty of evidence of DAs in Democrat-run cities not prosecuting violent criminals.
In Portland mobs fully control the streets, drag people out of cars and beat them, they threaten people, while police is just standing and watching. This is on video, not propaganda.
So you follow-up propaganda with hyperbole, and pretend that extreme outliers are somehow a normal representation.
There's also plenty of evidence of Republican-run cities locking up innocent people, or conservatives attempting a violent coup during a transition of power. It's a silly game.
I’m confused. Your previous post said you pay attention to crime stats, but you reference a video before you pull a crime stat citation, and you also don’t link to said video.
Indeed. I come from a rural village where I could leave my bicycle unlocked over night at the center of the village and it wouldn't get stolen. When I moved to a city, one realization I made was that cycling is just a lot less convenient if you have to worry about your bicycle getting stolen. Also I can't leave my home door unlocked when I go somewhere (and thus have to remember to take the keys with me).
I think small stuff like this just adds to your total anxiety without you even realizing it. It's really sad how difficult it is to live in extremely safe, small villages like my childhood home nowadays.
I mean, Kryptonite literally has a 'NYC' line of bicycle locks.
When researching getting a lock for a personal scooter NYC always comes up as ground zero for problems with theft, to the point where much of the advice is to not even lock it up but bring it inside.
Yup. that's been true for decades. Literally, I lived in Manhattan for a while in the 1980s and never even considered leaving my bicycle outside, either at home or at work locations. It was ordinary to see stripped frames still locked to a post, some just appeared, some sitting for many weeks. Crime has risen and fallen significantly since I left, so I have no good relative comparison, other than that this is not new.
That’s not a “city” thing, it’s a “New Yorker” thing. People in Tokyo routinely leave things unattended in public, including valuable and easily carried things like laptops.
I'm not sure that's true. I think people are generally more honest that people assume. It's prudent to assume it will be stolen, but I suspect most of the time, accidentally leaving something somewhere for a short while would be just fine.
Sure but in how many cities would people be comfortable leaving a laptop unattended? I don’t think many. It’s pretty unrealistic to use that as the bar for NYC
Its an american city thing really. The same thing would happen when I live in big cities on the west coast and in smaller cities in the midwest too. In the midwest was where my friend got a window smashed for their micro usb cable that couldn't have been more than $2.
This is what I love about my tesla (I wonder if other makes do the same) -- when I get out and walk away, it rolls up the windows, locks the doors, and turns on security camera all automatically. I don't have to think about it. It does remove some background anxiety (did I click the lock button on my remote? did I leave the window down?)
A lot of this is simply a raw population effect. When I lived in Austin, I got in the habit of locking every door I went out of. Now that I live in rural Alabama, I frequently leave the house doors unlocked. I've forgotten to close the garage door for a day or so. My truck is frequently unlocked.
Statistically, where I live now is the same or significantly worse than Austin. But with the lower population, there are simply fewer incidents.
There are big city fixes for this. For example, most big cities offer bikeshares with docking stations all over the most popular places. So you can just use one of those bikes and not have to worry about theft.
In SF those aren't very cheap, and you also replace the anxiety of "will my bike be stolen" with "will there be any bikes left when I need one?" and "will there be any docking stations available near my destination?"
I use bike shares opportunistically, but they are not a reliable mode of transport.
CitiBikes in NYC are a bit different than in SF. Honestly, bike theft is an anecdotal thing and it’s def a problem in New York, but I definitely think it is worse in SF.
As a pure anecdote, my husband had his bike outside in Prospect Heights for 3 or 4 years literally not moved. It had a lock but he didn’t even use the bike. It got weathered and abused and after literal years, I think it was finally stolen. In Seattle, where his has been broken into multiple times in a locked garage in our luxury building, I have no doubt that an untouched bike would have lasted a few weeks at most.
But that’s all anecdotal. I can say that in the 5 years or so that I used the CitiBike system, I never had a problem either finding a bike and the pricing was also more than fair. I frequently would take a bike from near Union Square and ride across the Brooklyn Bridge home on nice afternoons. I never once had a problem getting a bike or returning it to its drop off place near my apartment.
And the app/locator lets you know the status of bikes at any time so you can know if there is a bike at a specific site or not.
This might have changed in the last few years, but if anything, the city had a hard time convincing people to use the bikes. The system is a lot more efficient than the Lime bike/scooter setup that a lot of other cities like Seattle have (people in Seattle also don’t know how to use bike lanes and use the fucking sidewalks like assholes, because Seattle).
In NY I’ve yet to see this happen. Rather it’s an issue of , is there anywhere to dock the bike. The outer boroughs are also experimenting with Electric Scooters.
This is not a fix. It's exactly the sort of extra thing I don't want to deal with when I'm cycling.
It really feels more careless to just ditch your bicycle on the side of the road and forget about it than lock it. I admit it's not a big thing, but as I tried to convey, small things like this add up.
At least in NYC, there are bike docks - you don't just leave them wherever. This was quite controversial because I think each bike dock(which supports about 20 bikes) takes up 1-2 street parking spaces, so drivers were up in arms that these bike docks would destroy street parking in NYC..
Yeah but they're somewhat less convenient, you never know the quality of the bikes or whether there will be one available, and over time it's usually far more expensive (I literally just did this calculation for myself in DC, took about 6m of daily commuting to be even and then after that you're saving money). Luckily I work in a neighborhood crawling with cops so there is very little risk when I lock my scooter outside, but I definitely don't take it to other neighborhoods and leave it outside (I've had some funny conversations checking it with the coatcheck at events after work).
NYC is generally safer than the rest of America. NH is typically the safest region in the entire country. But the truth is that there are high numbers of relatively rural areas that are substantially more dangerous than NYC. Also, I think that crimes/mile is fairly un-instructive because of how much the legal boundaries of a city shift/as well as the amount that a person will travel in a given location (I live in NYC, and probably live/work/eat within a 1.5-2 mile range).
> NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.
I don’t know. I never felt generally unsafe in New York if I was out late at night (after midnight or 1am) and walking alone to the subway or whatever. Part of it I think is that the city “never sleeps” so you don’t get the feeling of being alone. There’s always other people around.
(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)
In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.
I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.
There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.
I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.
I think this is where statistics fails me. You (and a couple sibling comments) are responding to my comment with your experiences to the contrary, and I—never having lived in NYC—just don't have access to that.
This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.
I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?
The "spikiness" of crime in NYC is extreme. I lived about two blocks away from a housing project which had a low but steady rate of assault, rape, and even the occasional murder. You wouldn't know it on my street and I never felt unsafe. I think the density of the city and relative lack of car mobility makes crime extremely non-uniformly distributed compared to most other cities (where everyone drives).
I grew up in Indianapolis, where the violent crime rate is 8.7 per 1000. Growing up, we had plenty of trips to Columbus, OH (16.6), Detroit, MI (21.8), Cincinnati, OH (8.9), and, yes, Chicago, IL (9.9).
Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.
My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.
NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.
I’ve heard this stat before, but comparing to large cities.
NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.
The problem with any of these comparisons is that cities are very heterogeneous. In Boston, the Back Bay != Roxbury and in NYC, the West Village != the South Bronx. However, at least absent a doorman, I probably wouldn't leave a door unlocked or an accessible window ajar the way I routinely do in my (only) semi-rural home in New England. When I visit people in cities, I have to consciously remember that they'll be unhappy if I am casual about such things like I am at home.
I mean…or it’s that some of us have lived in New York for decades and not experienced even a little bit of violent crime. Born and raised New Yorker here.
Now look at dangers in general and not just crime and the picture is very different[1]. Judging by the total number of deaths from external causes, NYC was the second safest metro area in the country behind only Boston.
Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.
I think that overall crime rates can have severely skewed reporting. Homicide rate in NYC is 5.5 vs US average of 7.5, But manhattan's is even lower. The last time the city reported the borough by borough breakdown (2019), had a homicide rate of 3.2.
I've only ever heard the claim made in reference to other large cities, not suburban, rural, or exurban parts of the country.
Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime
It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.
I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.
>"NYC is generally safer than the rest of America."
What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that it's safer than the entire "rest of America."
And while this reminds me of XKCD: Heatmap[0], the density of crime also matters when it's where you live, and the actual proximity you are to frequent violent crimes.
Also in NH, and I would say my perception is the opposite of your facts.I've spent lots of time all over the city at different times of day/year across decades.
I would still say Manchester, Rochester, Nashua ETC are 10x trashier and more neglected than even the most run down alley in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.
I think that would be stretching it, but yeah, everywhere has good and bad. I walked a lot of SF at night when visiting for work and went to some less than savory places that felt no riskier than the worst of Rochester, but that’s a low bar.
That said, I shared a Lyft to the airport pre-dawn one time and where we picked up the other rider was a little more exciting than I would ever want to be.
Presumably OP was just talking about Manhattan or something, maybe even Manhattan below 110th st, and not the less nice parts of the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn that they never go to.
I had similar thoughts. I live on the west coast and feel so safe that I don't even lock the front door to my house, ever. I wonder if OP feels safe enough to always have their front door unlocked.
I wonder how much people think the typical flimsy locks on a residential door will actual stop someone who goes up to the door with the intention of entering. It would almost require someone to want to enter but iff the door was unlocked, which seems like a poor strategy for a burglar.
Locks won't stop somebody who wants to get inside no matter what. They will stop somebody who would not mind casing the house, waiting till it's empty, entering without attracting any attention and walking out with loot, which is a "safer" crime than knocking down the door or breaking a window. Breaking and entering is a crime by itself, carries minimum sentence in some jurisdictions. As I understand it's because it's hard to convict somebody who walked in, took stuff and sold it for anything other than trespassing. How do you prove they stole the missing items unless you catch them in the act or have video surveillance inside?
If people lock their doors all the time, burglars probably prefer to avoid the houses with unlocked doors (because they are more likely to be occupied houses).
> Whether or not you lock your door has more to do with cultural attitudes towards risk
> People in rural areas don’t lock their doors for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening? Having lived in a rural area and in a few cities, my experience is the latter. No one wants to be robbed.
Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
> Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
I don’t think that refutes their point that they don’t care. Having come from a rural area myself, the decision was to drink at home or a friends I was staying over at rather than drive drunk. They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
> They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
I also come from a rural area and I think you're missing some detail in the individual calculus. The chance of negative consequences drop so precipitously in some areas that, coupled with poor transportation options, it becomes primarily an individual risk in their eyes. They don't see a big issue with being over the limit when it's a road they drive everyday and encountering even a single vehicle on the way back is rare. It's not a lack of caring, it's just a different calculation.
I've never drove drunk (or even buzzed) and I'm not defending the practice, just trying to explain their point of view.
They're suggesting caring less is the primary reason for rural people driving drunk. The primary reason is a lack of transportation options. Caring less is a byproduct of that, not the reason they do it in the first place.
I see how you can interpret his comment that way, but I view it differently with the inclusion of cultural attitudes. The fact that some people started doing it because of lack of transportation made it into a cultural value.
Being called a pussy for instance for not wanting to drive while smashed isn’t a result of a lack of transportation.
> Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening?
Neither, they just take fewer mitigations in response to the same level of risk because of cultural habits.
America in general (both rural and urban) has a very high crime rate by developed world standards. I grew up in <redacted> which has a lower crime rate than 99% of America, including the parts where people brag about how it's so safe that no one locks their doors, and everyone locks the doors to their houses and cars anyway, because that's just the cultural norm.
I’m in a rural area. I wear my seatbelt, along with everyone else I know. I don’t even drink. The only people I’ve ever known that have driven drunk were dumb teenagers. I lock my door, but I not only kept my high school car unlocked - I left the keys in it.
For two years I did that, and the only time it was “stolen” was when my friends skipped class, used it to drive to the bakery for some doughnuts, and deliberately parked it elsewhere as a prank. Do you really think that’s how it would have worked out in any major city?
I remember it being major news when a few houses were burgled when I was a kid.
Now, the biggest town in the county? Crime happens there all the time. It’s only 20,000 people but a lot of them are…lower rung.
I think that’s the real difference. When I walk in a major city or even that town, crime might happen to me. In the 20 mile radius around my house it’s very unlikely, and I very rarely see a cop unlike in NYC.
You are less likely to be murdered in NYC than the average rural area. I don't know where you live and it's possible that your rural area is safer than average, but in general the myth that so many smug rural Americans subscribe to that the typical rural area is safer than big bad New York City is just totally, completely wrong.
Right, but that was when I was a kid. I'm 34 now and I don't recall hearing of any other burglaries in that area. Just as one neighborhood in NYC can't be compared to another, you can't mix all rural areas in to one "typical" zone.
>for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area. Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
I can't find similar numbers to yours for any definition of 'violent crime' I found numbers for, but assuming they're true, it's still missing the point. Amherst is a wealthy community in a wealthy, low crime state. It'd be like pointing to a border town to make the opposite argument.
NYC has a lower homicide rate than America, and that is the only category of crime that is mostly consistently reported across jurisdictions. Every other category of crime basically varies by an order of magnitude from place to place depending on accuracy of reporting.
What about Manhattan? What about lower Manhattan? The reality is that NYC is large and there's bodies of water separating huge parts of the city. Talking about crime in NYC seems really silly because you're going to be talking about tons of neighborhoods that you're just never, ever going to end up even close to.
We are already talking about Manhattan (New York, NY), it is where these numbers are from, and what the OP article is about.
Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28), and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than median, though.
New York county(or borough) is Manhattan(for the most part), but that is talking about the city of New York, which includes Manhattan, Queens, Kings(~Brooklyn), Bronx, and Richmond(~Staten Island).
I wonder how many people think New York City is only Manhattan and not the 5 Boroughs together. For anyone who see this, yes it includes the “suburbs” that exists within all of the outer boroughs (even the Bronx!)
Funny...one of my favorite pastimes as a new yorker was collecting New York esoterica...a fun related one(relevant to my "for the most part" parenthetical in my original post) is the fact that Manhattan is an island and a borough, but part of the island is actually connected to the mainland in the Bronx.
Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered a part of Manhattan borough...
Yes, but using the same data, NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median. We are venturing deeply into "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics" territory.
Actually, how trustworthy are those stats as a measure of actual crime or safety? I think this effect might actually push the difference to be a bit more extreme; at least several years ago I know the NYPD had a scandal about systemically under-reporting or downgrading crimes. Has this _actually_ improved since then, or did they just "discipline" a handful of people? Do other law enforcement agencies have similar problems?
However, I do also think an important question is "safe for whom?"
Depending on your race, sexual orientation, gender presentation, etc, rural American communities can foster their own distinct unease. Those are the places where you keep your head down, self-censor, try not to draw attention. When is the absence of reported crimes in a state which is 92.8% white "safety" and when is it something else?
Where did these numbers come from? You linked to a screenshot of a spreadsheet, but not its source.
From a random search, I got 2.8 violent crimes per 1,000 people citywide, which means all 5 boroughs. For just New York county (Manhattan), the most official statistic I could find is 4.57 in 2019[2].
> It is so thoroughly not the same that I can usually tell when people come from cities simply based on how nervous they are.
I think, at least in today's culturally polarized environment, there are a lot of people who would be understandably nervous and on guard traveling to rural America, and it has nothing to do with what crime looks like in their home city.
It's also worth noting that Manchester, NH, which is where an Amherst resident is likely to spend a non negligible amount of time (nearest shopping mall, hospital, etc), has a comparable (slightly higher violent, much higher property) crime rate than NYC.
I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.
One thing this thread has reminded me of is that for all the lip service conservatives pay to toughness and manly traditional gender roles, they certainly seem to live in abject terror of being the victim of a crime.
Someone's feeling of safety/nervousness has more to do with a variety of different variables that are unique to them, the place in question, and the situation they're in.
Personally, I'd rather be alone on foot in NYC than alone on foot in some small town where I'd stand out. Maybe because I grew up in a city and have traveled to many places, maybe because of my characteristics that make me feel vulnerable when I'm the outsider in a less diverse area, or maybe because I've lived in a city far more violent than NYC- so for me the things I visit for are worth the possible risk of crime.
NYC isn't even on the top 50 most violent cities in the world, which is quite a feat when you consider how things used to be there in the 80s/90s.
Maybe your very specific neck of the woods is very rich and safe but I don’t know why you felt the need to butt in and make the conversation about you, OP never claimed that NYC was the absolute number 1 safest place in the country.
Just to provide a 3rd party reaction here: it sounds like you've circularly reasoned yourself into a trap of your own making. You don't want to live anywhere else because you like NYC. Because no other city is exactly like NYC, you aren't interested in living anywhere else. The reason it's "circular" is because there are cities with good transit, good arts, great food, have a tech scene, and even have financial districts and you'd be surprised to find out how well diverse cultures get along in a log of smaller towns across the US (far fewer racial/cultural over/under-tones) and how safe they are (safer than NYC). Yeah, no other place is the center for any of these things save SF being the tech nexus and maybe having better renditions of some types of cuisine. So if you have to be in the center of the world, then yeah, you're not going to find other centers of the world.
For me, personally, I'm disappointed by how few world cities the US has. NYC and Chicago are really it. My silly benchmark for what makes a city a world city is that it operates 24hrs a day (at least parts of it). Chicago barely does but I think it counts. Everywhere else in the US just dies past 10pm and especially past 2am.
It's a weird metric to say that late night nightlife is critical for being a global city, instead of say, huge percentages of the population coming from foreign countries. Airport access for direct flights, ect.
Miami also meets every single one of these metrics and has later night life than NYC. New Orleans has 24 hr night life. Vegas too.
Los Angeles has a higher foreign born population than NYC.
That seems like a silly criteria. How many people really care about doing things at 3:00 AM? We're talking about a small niche of shift workers and childless young people.
Las Vegas operates 24 hours a day if that's what you want.
Have you lived in or visited a world city? The feel and vibe is very different. It's why New York is called the city that never sleeps. When you get dense enough, there's always something to do and people out wanting to do it or at least wanting to serve it to you.
Not sure if you've heard the term before but it's a real thing and it doesn't just mean "party zone": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city. More or less the effect of being a world city that's an economic/financial hub is that you have an emergent 24/7 network of services operational to support it.
> except in a few specific areas
Yeah that's what I meant. I don't mean "the whole city is awake". I mean that there are amenities available in certain areas more or less 24/7, because of the density, there is a critical mass of 2nd and 3rd shift workers, and other "off-hours" workers who have different schedules and make use of it.
London is #2 in your list, and barely any of it qualifies by your definition. You won't find 24 hour services in most parts of London. You will find a downtown with a 24 hour pharmacy and a couple 24 hour drive thrus in my small town outside Seattle (and no 24 hour drive thrus or delivery within city limits).
You've got a very cosmopolitan view of what the world is. You should consider changing that.
Why do you sound so angry? You've totally missed my point and really sounds like you just want to argue for the hell of it zzz. It's fine if you don't understand what I'm saying but why the grief? I literally live in the middle of nowhere, incredibly cosmopolitan I know, and also have access to 24 hour gas stations and a few fast food joints. I have lived in an Alpha- city (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...) and visited multiple Alpha and Alpha+ cities, and New York and London, though. And what I'm describing is not a "cosmopolitan view of the world", it's an observation that there are some cities which achieve a density whereby there is a sort of nighttime undertone of life that you can't really feel in less dense places. It's much more than "just a pharmacy and McDonalds" open 24 hours. If you've never felt it then I'm sorry, you probably can't relate. It doesn't mean my entire anecdotal experience and worldview needs changing... I don't even know how to do that because I'm simply relaying my experience not making any assertions about validity or worth of other places in the world. I'm fully aware most people in the world, including me, are quite happy not living in a world city. Sheesh...
I was in London recently - December 2019 right before Covid hit. Stayed at the W Leicester Square hotel, and was disappointed to see how many restaurants were closed early.
On NYC, it has the best subway system in the US, but by global standards, it is filthy, disgusting, and unreliable. Any criticism leveled at the NYC subway is countered by Newyorkers saying "but we have 24/7 service while city XYZ does not!" However that same 24/7 service is arguably a big contributing factor for the NYC subway's many ills.
Seoul, and perhaps Tokyo and Hong Kong and other cities, arguably have an even more hardcore workaholic and party culture than NYC, but get along just fine with subways that don't run 24/7 so basic maintenance and cleaning can take place.
It's not universally advantageous and I never said it was. I think you're missing my point. If someone is looking for a world city, there aren't very many in the US. I didn't say I am looking for them or that you should be looking for them. I am suggesting that the original commenter is looking for them and struggling to find them. My comment is simply that: a comment about how I'm surprised there aren't more world cities in the US.
You seem to care to the point of it trigging a defensive reaction on your part. I didn't know I was entering the hornets' nest. I had no idea this was a touchy topic for some people.
I think your last point is an interesting arbitrary distinction, if you're going to make one. While Vancouver is pretty well regarded as a NA city with pretty decent transit infrastructure and other nice qualities, it does basically close after 2am which isn't as nice as a night owl. Transit stops almost completely around that time too.
Edit: None of this comment was meant to detract, just a comparison in agreement to the city I'm nore familiar with. Maybe Toronto's different
I live in Brooklyn and feel the same way. Even if you discount all the empty luxury apartments held by foreigners who never show up, there are still tons of people who want to move here.
Why?, because when you have all these people crammed together - weird stuff happens and that's what makes NYC magical. We're constantly mixing together, in the subways, bars, restaurant, parks ,etc. You get to see firsthand all the humanity of this city. No other city in America has replicated that.
I won't argue/disagree with you as far as NYC's comparably higher degree of what you describe, but having lived in Philadelphia's core, there's plenty of the mixing magic happening in other cities, but it's definitely not "the same".
Philly is also probably the closest approximation to NYC in this way. Most other cities in the US are so segregated that wealthier neighborhoods feel like suburbs (looking at DC and Boston here).
I see Boston as the tech hub of the East more than NYC. New York obviously has a large number of tech jobs, but Boston and DC both have a higher concentration of tech; in NYC the big fish is obviously finance.
I discount DC a little because a lot of that is government and defense related (not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea).
Boston has a lot of diversity in tech, lots of health/pharma like Moderna, web companies like TripAdvisor and Wayfair, robotics like Boston Dynamics, tons of startups doing ai/ml, and it seems like every big company has a substantial presence here (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce…)
NYC has the second most number of people with software development jobs in the US outside of the bay area although the number is about the same as Seattle which is a much smaller region than NYC, and within NYC the majority of developers work at banks in back office roles.
Boston is definitely bigger for every other type of engineering though than NYC. Most non programming engineering jobs in NYC would either be for a niche startup or would have something to do with real estate.
I don't know how anyone who has spent considerable time around SV/SF, NYC and Boston could see Boston anywhere close to the others.
The Boston tech scene and culture (outside of physically being on the MIT campus) is awful. TripAdvisor and Wayfair, your examples, are two companies I would aggressively advise any friends from even talking to. While all the major players are there now it took them a long time to get there. Comp in Boston still lags NY and SF considerably, and in general Boston has always had a resistance to anything "new", it's politically liberal but otherwise a very conservative city. The biotech companies there have always been way more heavy on the bio than the tech. I've worked for Boston area tech companies multiple times , before and after the tech boom, and would never work for a Boston area tech company again.
NYC is on a whole other level. Not only do you have all the major players with much larger campuses there are far more startups and early IPO companies. There is the also entire world of HFT companies (Boston's finance scene is largely very old school investment management companies) which alone would be worthy of making NYC a techhub. I also disagree with your claims about the concentrate of tech companies. Tech related meetups and events in NYC are much larger, more active and have more exciting participants than in the Boston area.
As somebody with no dog in this fight (I live in the south east), I'd tend to agree with the Boston take.
Simply being in the orbit of MIT can have that effect, along with everything else you listed.
The issue with NYC from a perception as a hub of any one thing is that it's just so big with so many different things going on that tech just seems like one of many things going on there simply because of all the people.
MIT is part of it but Massachusetts is also home to a large number of other research universities including BU, Northeastern, Harvard, the UMass system, etc.
As you say, NYC (like Silicon Valley) has always been more concentrated in terms of technology focus.
I'd agree with this. Boston area has a lot of high quality post secondary educations that feed business and talent. I would argue bay area has some of the same dynamics (Stanford, UCB & UCSF amongst others).
Silicon Valley has a high degree of tech but also a fair bit of climate tech which shouldn't be discounted.
Yeah, the Bay Area is probably the one other place in the US that has comparable higher-ed quantity and quality to the Boston area/Massachusetts. Other good institutions are scattered around of course but they're more diffuse.
I think that there's a tendency on the part of a lot of people to view "tech" through the lens of web-related tech but obviously there's a lot more interesting/important work going on than just that--whether in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, or somewhere else.
The amount of top colleges in the Boston area is astounding. A school like Tufts (ranked #28 by US news) would be the crown jewel of almost every city in America, but it’s totally overshadowed in Boston.
Especially if you include Massachusetts as a whole it’s absurd:
Boston's interesting in that it feels more low-key than NYC or Silicon Valley. Most of the biotech companies feel a lot more secretive and I don't see as many public events.
The valley has a vibe in that everyone you meet is involved in tech work in some way and will talk about it to you or in public. It doesn't feel that way here, or you have to be a part of certain circles maybe. There are some small biotech meetup groups, but maybe they all do communication at the universities?
That vibe definitely exist, in Cambridge and Somerville, and maybe the Seaport, where the tech folks love to live. Everyone in Camberville seems to be in tech or tech adjacent.
A lot of computer-related tech (and defense sector) in the Boston area has historically been out in the suburbs, e.g. the "Route 128" companies. After Teradyne moved out, there was very little tech presence left in the actual city. That shifted with biotech/pharma and, more recently, with companies in the Seaport and Cambridge and the outposts of the big West Coast-HQd companies. But a lot of the tech industry is still well to the West and North of the city.
Indeed, the amount of VC dollars invested in Boston companies per years is 3x the per capita of New York's. So while NY may have slightly more total dollars invested, a much higher percentage of Boston metro area workers (something like 30%) work in tech. New York will never really be a tech hub in the same way as SF or Boston because tech plays second fiddle to other industries.
I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto and Seattle.
It really comes down to fear of change I think. Humans are very adaptable, and the same one can thrive in car-centric suburbs as they would in shoulder-to-shoulder metropolises. Given no constraints, you prefer city. But throw in kids (requirement for more space/better schools), or a dream job (passion), or a dying parent (obligation), or a lover.. and suddenly you're building a life in a completely different place. And it works.
At least I think/hope.. because outside of a busy city I am irritable and sad. But it sure would be nice to slow down on the treadmill/rat race a bit..
I have lived in San Diego. I have spent time in Los Angeles. I have spent time in San Francisco. I am not a stranger to large cities.
I can say with certainty I will never live in one of these places. I won't even live in Pittsburgh, which is an order of magnitude smaller than any of these places. There's no escaping people. There's no escaping politics or bureaucracy. There's no way to escape petty crime, crazy people, and noise. You can't see the sky at night, there's never any "dark".
Everything is orders of magnitude more expensive in a city. $5000/month rent? And people think this is "reasonable"? I don't even pay a third of that on a mortgage on a 2400sq/ft house. With a nice yard, decent neighbors, a good school, low crime, low taxes, the works. Our night-time intruders are turkey, deer, the occasional black bear, raccoons, skunks, and screech owls.
Do I have to drive to get anywhere? Yes.
Do I get the highest-paying jobs? Do I have immediate access to cute little bodegas and trendy little shops and night life? No.
But I can let my kids go outside and play at night. I can leave my doors unlocked. Nobody breaks into my car and steals my stereo. I can leave my house with my garage door up and all my stuff inside, and my neighbors will call/text me to remind me.
Is this an adequate trade-off? For me, absolutely yes.
I get why people like living in big cities. I will never again live in one myself, though.
> I get why people like living in big cities. I will never again live in one myself, though.
I totally get your take as well. In fact.. sounds like a really nice life that I hope to live one day.
But perhaps it's your stage of life & social context that makes the difference (it does for me). If you were single, didn't have many friends/family (or they were all in the city), or were dedicated to a career/passion whose nexus is in a city.. suddenly you might be running towards those people and institutions ;)
It's not all about the cute bodegas. The sheer number of single women in my demographic nearby is worth inflated rent for the next few years. $5k for a single person is some maxima, I'm living alone in a big apartment in a nice/safe neighborhood for $3k, 2 blocks from the train. The salary possibility in NYC easily covers the delta to smaller cities/towns.
That’s definitely not a given. I know a bunch of people that given no constraints they would live at the edge of a lake with the nearest city being 100+ miles away. But they get forced into a city by the need for a job, or the same constraints you laid out.
> I feel you here. I'm a relatively new NYC resident and worried that I'll be "ruined" forever. I've otherwise lived in Toronto and Seattle.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think NYC has that Toronto or Seattle don't have? And what are you thoughts on Toronto vs. Seattle? Personally, I've lived in Toronto (which I loved), and visited Seattle for a few days (which I liked, but hard to say from a short visit), so curious to hear what others who have lived in all 3 think (especially since I'm planning to move to Seattle soon).
Recently moved to Seattle from NYC. I'm enjoying Seattle, but it's a joke of a city compared to NYC. Seattle's public transportation—while improving with light rail—pales in comparison. Seattle is, overall, pedestrian-hostile. There are neighborhoods that are themselves walkable, but sidewalks will disappear when walking between them, or you'll be forced into situations where you're uncomfortably close to high-speed traffic (e.g. the Ballard bridge).
Seattle has enough good food to keep me relatively happy (even pizza and bagels), but for any given cuisine, you might have one or two good options. Getting to them probably involves driving, and they're probably not open late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021). Seafood here is great, though. I think Seattle wins in that single category.
I think NYC's biggest win over Seattle (and every single other city in the US) is the combination of quantity, quality, and accessibility. You have some of the world's best food, shopping, culture, and jobs accessible to you at all hours of the day via a subway ride (or in many cases within walking distance). The city is your backyard: you don't need a huge apartment because there's a good chance you won't really be spending much time there.
That said, after 10 years there I grew tired of that lifestyle and wanted to spend more time outdoors and exploring the west coast. If you really enjoy the outdoors—hiking, skiing, mountain biking, climbing, etc.—then NYC is vastly inferior to Seattle. I may find myself back in NYC some day because I miss the things that it's the best at, but for now, I'm enjoying doing something different. I think it's very easy to fall into a hedonic routine in NYC.
> and they're probably not open late or even open at all early in the week (maybe this is a pandemic artifact; I moved here in 2021)
No, it's a Seattle thing. One of my major peeves with this city (and entire region) is how hard it is to find places that close later than 9pm, even in the summer when the days are really long.
I think the outdoors culture here is so strong that people don't really care about having things to do late at night in the city.
Eh, I think it's kind of an "everywhere-since-the-pandemic" thing after all.
Atlanta is the same way and we used to have a HOPPIN' late night scene with SO many good late night spots, now it's almost a struggle to get something even like fast food after 9/10pm. That may be slowly coming back though it seems like.
I grew up in NYC and currently live in Seattle. The appeal of Seattle over NYC is the outdoors, substantially cheaper housing (you can get a 4br detatched house in seattle that's a 20 minute bus ride to downtown for less than this median apartment price), and better weather but yeah the food doesn't really compare.
This said, I think LA wins over NYC in the food department outside of the very high end michilin type stuff and certain specific kinds of ethnic food like italian.
>> Recently moved to Seattle from NYC. I'm enjoying Seattle, but it's a joke of a city compared to NYC
Don't live in Seattle, but my friends who do live there joke that someday the people moving there from NYC and complaining about the city they just moved to will figure out that the airlines fly routes in both directions.
They're all great and have something that the other two don't/can't have. I could go on for hours about each. Also this is a very personal/subjective question, so take with a grain of salt:
Toronto: It's Canada. Culture is different than the US. My friends and family are here. Since it's where I formed my personality, I like the people here way more. It's the only place I experience uncontrollable laughter in reaction to what someone said. The inner city is very cool without feeling like some over-discovered instagram location. In NYC every half decent bar or restaurant is packed with a lineup and costs 2x.
Transit is okay, not great.
But I hate Canadian suburbs, so to me the GTA is not hospitable (for me) outside of the rectangle of Humber river to Don Valley, waterfront to Eglinton. And income to cost of living ratio is so much lower compared to tech in the US, it's like.. minimum 10+ years of working life lower.
Seattle: A true gem of a place. Not overcrowded (yet, despite what people there say). Great music, bars, restaurants etc. You can get from middle of "city" to middle of wilderness in 1.5-2h, and be literally in a national geographic photo. Insane income:cost of living ratio (only slightly lower income than Bay/NYC, but cost of living significantly less).
Transit okay, getting better, but not too useful inside the city.
But it's a very monocultural place. So unless you find your "people" here, it can be quite boring/exclusive. I fraternized widely, but ultimately was left wanting for more socially. Also far-left politics are central to social culture here, so it's quite literally not a "safe space" to be anything but. I'm more of an "east-cost person", if that makes any sense.
NYC: One of a kind place in North America. Feels like you truly live _in_ the city, not just in your house/apartment with necessary excursions. It can be overwhelming with how many people there are and how densely they live, but to me that's something special. Cost of living is insane, but it doesn't buy you nothing. Subway system can feel archaic and let's you down often, but it also enables a special way of life for North America (car-less existence, a fixed 30 or 50 min ride from almost anywhere you'd need to go). A lot of double edged swords. The diversity of people is eye-opening. Toronto can feel more ethnically diverse - which is interesting in it's own way - but NYC is diverse in every other way too.
I'm quite worried about having kids in NYC someday. From what I hear the school system is ruthless. I don't want my kids to undergo such stress. I think Toronto wins out huge for raising children.
Having grown up in DC and New York, I would say more strongly that there's no other city in the USA that has comparable mass transit.
The way I would put it is -- in New York, it is more of a hassle to have a car than to go without. In all those other cities, while there is some mass transit, you will find yourself wanting a car.
What's pretty much unique about NYC, especially Manhattan, in the US is that there's no cultural expectation that a well-paid professional will own a car. By comparison, people can get by without owning a car in Boston/Cambridge--I did as an undergrad--but get out of school and a lot of your friends probably live in the suburbs/exurbs, you need a car to head off to the mountains, etc. Sure, you can rent and Uber up to a point but most people find it 1.) gets old and 2.) As a practical matter means they mostly just stay in the city because doing otherwise is too much of a hassle.
DC is still easier to navigate by car than by metro and bus, at least when I last lived there in 2016. Red line from MD would regularly shut down or have delays, and you were looking at a 2+ hour commute into the district. If you could get a parking spot you could reliably beat metro by about 10 minutes with much less variance. And you cannot navigate a circumferential route in a reasonable time, the purple line is the first to really attempt this and is like a drop in the bucket. If you live and work in the city it’s doable, but cross a river or the beltway and it’s really not. I had friends in Baltimore that could not get by without a car either, and they made a really dedicated effort. Mass transit in the US - outside of NYC - is just not viable at scale.
I grew up in NYC and I think it has a lot of problems that have prevented me from moving back there since college, this said...
NYC has the largest train system in the entire world, especially when you combine the various nearby train systems that aren't a part of the main subway like LIRR, NJ transit, path and Metro north (in China which technically is longer they count long distance commuter rail). The subway alone has more stops than any train system in the world.
eh, having lived in both chicago and nyc, chicago's transit system is pretty much on par with nyc to me. MTA is all built around going to and from manhattan and it can be a struggle if you have to do something else, like going from parts of queens to brooklyn. Chicago's hyperrational grid and busses make up pretty well for the gaps in the L. now the cabs in new york, nothing beats them (although these days more and more cabbies don't seem to actually know the city very well)
If you really like mass transit and want to live without a car, America is probably not for you. USA got rid of most streetcar systems a long time ago and rebuilding them from scratch in current NIMBY climate is basically impossible. And subways, which are much more expensive than ground transit, only make economic sense in several metropolises.
Try some European city with reasonable rents like Warsaw. Even the skyscrapers will remind you of Manhattan.
I love Warsaw and think I would personally really enjoy living there, but if the GP isn't willing to move to Boston, they're not going to like living in Warsaw.
Much smaller then NY, much more homogeneous, not a major world center of arts or finance.
There are very few cities in the world that check all the boxes he listed for NY, and they're all extremely expensive as well.
There’s no fundamental reason “America is probably not for” people who want high-quality, dense urbanism. The rent in NYC is a clear sign that there’s demand for it.
Building new mass transport systems like light rail in existing cities from scratch requires a lot of political momentum, basically willingness to crush the pervasive NIMBY mentality and overcome the pull of bureaucratic inertia. Even in European cities that never dismantled their light rail systems, inhabitants often fight back against line extensions, citing noise concerns etc., and are able to delay the construction for years or decades.
Plus such systems aren't cheap and usually require new subsidies on top of existing subsidies. You will still have to maintain the existing road system and bridges, their usage won't drop to zero or even a quarter of current traffic. Some people won't voluntarily switch to public transit ever, for all kinds of reasons.
Maybe this isn't "fundamental", but IMHO the hurdles to overcome are really high and I am not sure if there is any city in the US willing to try this and having the means to do so.
That's not true, there's demand to live in a specific part of NYC. I really cannot stand that urbanists say this sort of thing. Demand isn't just for walkablity, it's for the complete new urbanist neighborhood that was first formalized by the likes of Jane Jacobs and friends. It's about the unique one of a kind shops, access to really unique amenities that only exist in the city and so on.
There are plenty of walkable parts of NYC like the South Bronx that have far lower demand to live there than the suburbs in nearby NJ or hell the not so walkable parts of NYC like Staten island, south Bronx or the outer parts of Queens.
What people want is access to amenities in under 10 minutes of travel time, and under 20 minutes of travel to special events they don't go to regularly, as well as a short job commute. This can easily be solved by getting rid of euclidean zoning in suburbs and building out all American suburbs in the style of cities like Portland originally had been.
There is definitely demand, but America won't build that demand because the "silent majority" (homeowners who still are fearful of minorities and poor people) won't let that happen.
As someone who grew up in NYC, the only lasting appeal to me is family and specific ethnic culture that is much less in every city in the US that isn't NYC.
The apartment I grew up in, in lower manhattan, today would cost more than 20-30 times what my parents paid for it in the 90s, and it wasn't a nice apartment. There was no laundry in the unit, it faced a dark courtyard, the tempurature of the apartment was never that comfortable, had yearly huge bug infestations, but it was in a great location and was about 5 rooms more or less.
I think people just romanticize a life different than the one they grew up with. I certainly miss some aspects of the city culturally, but life on the west coast, I've had considerably better living arrangements ever since I've graduated college than the one I grew up in, and my parents were both professionals with graduate degrees, it's even worse for a lot of other people.
I grew up in NYC, in an even worse apartment. Despite no longer having family there, I would return in a heartbeat. I loved it and wish I could raise my kid there (in a better apartment, mind you)
If I could have a better apartment there I would absolutely consider moving there. The issue is that I'd have to live somewhere that would be considerably worse, and me and my partner make many times more than my parents did when they bought their place when adjusted for inflation.
I have a fantasy where a Robert Moses-type figure builds out super fast trains that connect Long Island, NJ, upstate New York, and effectively urbanize the entire tri-state area. New York becomes this super city where you can go from White Plains to the tip of Long Island in an hour. Housing becomes cheaper as neighborhoods that were previously impractical become feasible for New Yorkers. Car ownership drops in the outer suburbs as people embrace public transportation. Gentrification stays an issue but because of more housing, it's less brutal.
Unfortunately this is pretty unlikely unless there happens to be another political genius like Moses who also happens to love public transportation. Maybe an Andy Byford-Robert Moses combo?
I’d love to see someone brave enough to marge north east jersey and lower Connecticut into NYC and connect them with proper transit, pretty much merge LIRR, Path and MTA under one NYC administered transit system, then add some high speed rail along the old train lines.
Then make all public transit free and turn half of the roads into bus, pedestrian and bike only paths.
>"I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America."
Is there any data to back this up? The latest NYPD crime statistics, show a city with increasing crime.
"Overall index crime in New York City increased by 27.8% in May 2022 compared with May 2021 (10,414 v. 8,149). Each of the seven major index crime categories saw increases, driven by a 42.1% increase in grand larceny (4,116 v. 2,897); a 28.3% rise in burglary (1,239 v. 966); and a 26.2% increase in robbery (1,506 v. 1,193)." See:
You are clearly not alone. Skyrocketing rents are a symptom of more people wanting a place to live than there are available spaces. It's not like NYC is bereft of skyscrapers either.
NPR was talking about the lack of housing across the US today. Their solution was to get involved with zoning meetings and work to change the zoning laws.
My partner and I have been agonizing over this exact dilemma. We have an income number and an expenses number and when those cross a certain point, we've gotta go somewhere else. So there's a very good chance that we'll immigrate somewhere in a few years. But yeah, try as we might, we couldn't come up with another US city that either of us would want to live in.
To me, only other places that compare to NYC are Singapore and Sydney. Great food in Singapore, great weather (usually) in Sydney. The people can be a bit busy in Singapore though.
Certainly no NYC, but they ticked all my recreation, arts, food, people and transport boxes.
Unfortunately, they’re all so goddamn expensive to live in.
Singapore?? To New York????? Sorry what? Singapore is fine as far as a hot place with incredible food and good hotels to spend a few nights, but it’s also quite possibly the most boring major city I’ve been to outside of that and there doesn’t seem to be any cultural life beyond shopping - based on my own experience and that of friends who’ve lived there.
I could also take issue with comparing Sydney to NY, but I’ll let that one go ;)
In defense of sg, the only reason you said this is you never left orchard rd. You can experience worlds of culture just eating food at any given neighborhood coffee shop or going to a wet market in the morning. It just is a different culture, one that doesn't try to emulate America too much (hipster shit like live music or public art or things like that).
There is a certain kind of live music and public art that (honestly) tourists are looking for which the person I was referring to didn't see. There is "music" and "performance" that fit into the guise of culture but it isn't really for tourist consumption.
That said, there is live music and public art too, just since it isn't Singapore's culture but an import from the west, there's less of it (see my rant on western food).
EDIT removed "white" qualifier for tourist, my brain still thinks in US but really all tourists from wherever go to the malls and idk promenade but miss the kopitiams and markets because it's just not in the touristy areas.
Not American, live in London. Not to get into a pissing contest, but I can go to Ridley Rd for a wet market and still have any amount of cultural stuff to do. SG does have the food, but it’s a company town entirely driven around (conspicuous…) consumption. Less shit Dubai.
All that said, I like spending a few days there - again, the food! - but I’d rather be in Bangkok or KL for longer, e.g.
If you're comparing NYC food to Singapore I don't know how you could say sg food is great.
The staples (Chinese, Indian, Malay) are good and probably better, but western food is not great. A few are mediocre and some are great, but the great places lack variety and selection, that is you usually get only one good thing from a given stall or restaurant.
My girlfriend, the first time she went to the US was blown away by the food. She even swooned over freaking gas station pizza I picked up once. Now that I live in sg I understand what she meant by the food in the US having flavor, the staples are great but the western food is pretty mediocre and just is either off or just lacks the proper seasoning, or if it's good, it's easily twice the price (after conversion!) of similar quality food I ate in Ohio.
I seriously miss creole / cajun food for example, but the SG experience of the west is freaking British food which is the bottom of the barrel (fish and chips anyone?) seriously.
Another thing (sorry for the rant but it's fresh in my mind). Good luck getting any amount of vegetables in your meal.
This is pretty true throughout Asia. Bangkok’s probably best for western food. But nothing like NY.
SG has a few decent options once you get over the fact that you’re paying four times the price for a slice of pizza (or, god forbid, cote de boeuf). Ironically the best Cantonese food (IMHO) is in the American club.
Having lived in both New York and Singapore, I can’t say I’d recommend Singapore to anyone who loves NY for the aspects you mention (but there are other reasons to love SG!). I think the scale of opportunities for recreation, arts, and really just a diversity of experience is vastly different. In APAC, I’d suggest Hong Kong (where I’ve also lived) instead, though that is even more like London than NY.
Yeah, HK is (or was) way better than SG, and much more NY-like. Even more beautiful than NY, actually. HK's inevitable destruction by the CCP is a fucking tragedy. There are very few cities in the world like that.
Have you lived in Sydney? I spent a day there recently and I loved it, but I got the sense that things tend to wind down in the evening (at least around Surry Hills where I was staying). Curious if I got the wrong impression: my recollection of NYC is that there's something going on at pretty much any hour, day or night.
I lived in Sydney for five years! Great city. Lived there before I came here.
My partner and I are looking at Madrid. But yeah, there is no other city in the world that's going to be like NY. Maybe London but of course that has the same problems.
As a New Yorker who had to move to Seattle for a job five years ago and misses the city every single day, I totally agree with you.
I will say, depending on how close you are to a train station, Brooklyn isn’t bad. Yeah, it’s 45 minutes door to door, but you get to walk and listen to podcasts or whatever on the train. As commutes go, it’s definitely doable. But I totally agree with you that many people don’t want to live anywhere else and people who don’t love New York might not understand that, but New York is different from every other major city in the US.
I’m still carless in Seattle (I don’t drive and have no desire to drive) but it’s so much harder (my husband does have a car but I can’t rely on that for my own needs). And although Seattle is somewhat cheaper than Brooklyn (it’s really not but my luxury building in Capitol Hill definitely costs less than a luxury building in Williamsburg foot for foot — I pay about 70% more in Seattle than I did in Brooklyn, however), the things I’ve lost compared to New York are massive. I’ve definitely considered moving back now that I’m at a fully-remote company (that does have office space in NYC), but there are some practical realities about being in Seattle for my job that makes that hard. Maybe when my lease is up next year, I’ll reassess.
Part of the problem is that most people would rather move to an existing desirable city than try to improve their own to make it more desirable, myself included. In most major cities, less than 20% of people vote for mayor, let alone city council. Most of those who do vote in local elections are much old.
The goal posts keep moving tho. Even if your city becomes closer to NYC circa 2010, NYC is moving towards becoming a totally different beast of NYC circa 2030. There will always be a massive gap
I don't blame them. It can take decades for the kind of change that urbanists want to fully play out, and I bet they would rather experience good city life while they can enjoy it.
Exactly. The bike lane network plan in LA county has been on the books for 10 years now and its still a patchwork mess in the second largest city in this country where you could realistically bike to work every day of the year. There is no hope elsewhere for change. If you don't already have it you won't ever have it or you will be beating sand until you die fighting for a mile of bike lane or a single train line that waits at red lights.
That kind of proves my point though doesn't it? There is a definite demand for bike lanes. However, civic participation is abysmal for everyone but the elderly who tend to be NIMBYs. If more people pitched in, we wouldn't have to rely the efforts of a few hyper-dedicated individuals.
Have you been affected by the rent increase yet? Curious how much power the landlords have there. Can they raise your rent without warning, are they trying to force you out, etc.
Not personally. I know some of my friends have been who moved back well after the "Covid Discounts" were a thing, got a little bit of an inflated deal, and now are facing like at least 3k for 1 bedrooms in places like around Williamsburg & Lower Manhattan(west village, soho, etc.). That's one of the better case scenarios I've heard as well. Truly a shame :(
As someone who has also lived in both places (and lives in neither of them currently), I'd have to vehemently disagree. SF is not only comparably expensive, it's also incredibly far behind in transit, far more homogeneous in all sorts of ways, much less culturally interesting and significant, and- despite my agreeing that the headlines are blowing it out of proportion- pretty clearly headed in the wrong direction overall. It has some potential advantages (weather, proximity to nature, stronger tech job market), but I relate to the OP comment a lot, and for me SF just cannot even slightly compare to NY.
Obviously this is all just my opinion! I know tons of people love it there.
Sounds we should really build walkable city with convenient mass transit in the US and Europe. It's a shame that building anything infrastructure in the US is prohibitively expensive.
I went to NYC many many times when I lived in New England, my cousin went to school there and took the train down multiple times a week for years, her mother worked and lived there for decades, my father went there every week for work for many years. Anecdotally our experiences have been that the city is generally safe, none of us have any crime stories to tell.
My parents also used to go there a lot in the 90s and the city has come a long long way since then- for the better.
I'm confused what the "problem" is, is it that things you really like are expensive? I really like driving a Porsche, but it would seem a bit odd to lament a wild increase in new Porsche prices or my salary not keeping up with owning one as a "problem". I also really like that in Paris you can affordably get a glass of real champagne with every meal, but I hardly consider it a "problem" that in the US this isn't really reasonable.
Things are getting more expensive, for some people that means they can't eat steak as much as they like, for others it means they need to move in with their parents, for you it means you might not live in the heart of one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world.
I've always found it a bit odd that in the tech community there is this assumption that people have the right to live wherever they want, and that somehow living in NYC or SF during it's prime isn't its own variety of luxury good. I enjoy champaign when I'm in Paris, and am glad that at least for today I can drive a Porsche. I've spent plenty of years in a beat-up old Ford and drinking yuengling, won't be terribly surprised if I spent plenty more doing the same in the future.
What % of available living space is not lived in, and further what % is owned by foreign nationals.
I know that in MANY countries, one is precluded from owning any property if not a citizen. Obviously this leads to a bunch of corruption issues with bribing and marrying nationals for access to property, but the USA has literally zero control on property ownership.
You know how much foreign money laundering is done through US property ownership?
MOST of it.
A vertical zoning law might be an option:
There are places like Singapore where you cant build a high-rise unless the subterranian aspects of the project dont include a connection to other sub services, like the walkway malls and such.
I say do a % split on a vertical level which must include subterranian levels as a course:
The building MUST include underground parking, a commerical section and a range of income level sections.
You cant just build a high-rise of $millions apartments.
Look at Millennial Tower in SF. What a disaster. I HUGE legal BS and not a single person with a net worth of south of 10 million was accommodated in that disaster - but it still cost the city (i.e. tax payers who are NOT worth >10 million -- millions of dollars.
My quick google says 4% of apartments are vacant in nyc. Got to believe the vast majority of that is structural vacancy while landlords clean units and look for new tenants. feels like a none issue to me.
Nit: 4% of "apartments" - means "apartments that are available from landlords seeking to rent to rentors and likely consitute the available inventory that is unable to churn, due to already being either overpriced, or shit-holes nobody wants to live in."
this is a different metric than:
What % of luxury "apartments" are uninhabited in extremely high cost situations where an average person isnt renting the "apartment" - but laundering money by owning such place and paying a tax placeholder fee...
And in addition CHURN
What % of apartments are experiencing churn and whilst during so, what is the rent increase on each new wave of tenants...
This would be a really intresting tower defence game.
You are the landlord/super/scumlease
You have apartments that will constantly dwindle in desireability
so you have upkeep.
You can accept the upkeep cost, or, for a lesser price, evict the current tenant and accept a new tenant at a fraction of the upkeep cost to keep revenues going into the future with % rates you like that keep you slum lord-ship going... or you kill them all, demolish and build a new building gentrify the neighborhood and blame it on rats, older policies etc...
We need a TRUMP LORD 2000 NYC SIM module.
Instead of installing new sewar, water, fire PREVENTION systems
You are needed to install new RAT, SUPER, COP-INTERFERENCE-BRIBERY schemes to keep your shit going...
Like the trump Water Heater Scandal. (this buildingz gunnaz needz a newz water heatahz...
My cousin tony iz dah only guyz who gunna do dis
Pay mah kidz what dez needz be paid, and you can stay)
How much of the rising rents are risk premia for future cases of "government says you dont have to pay rent and cant be evicted" that we experienced in 2020-present? I'm curious if there has been a Natural Experiment comparing rent increases in places which did vs didn't have eviction moratoriums during COVID.
> I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
Isn't most of that true for most large cities anywhere in the world?
Consider Amsterdam.
- Mass transit? Yes.
- Not owning a car? Sure.
- Safer than America.
- Tech hub, yes.
- Finance hub? uhh, does it really matter?
- Everybody gets along, across many cultures.
- Food? Depends on your taste, but all kinds of cuisine are available.
Or consider Singapore/London/Gothenburg/Paris/Toronto/so-many-others. Similar deal. Sometimes even a better deal, depending on your priorities.
Of course, I fully agree that NYC is a cool place :)
NYC is pretty much the only quasi-European larger city in the US, and in North America maybe only Mexico City and Montreal are comparable. Boston and DC are more influenced by cars but still have a large fraction of the city that's walkable. The effect of cars on urban fabric is very depressing elsewhere in the US.
You and everyone else buddy, that's why you're going to be priced out just like the people before you.
It's nice you enjoyed your ride from $2,000/month to $5,000/month. That range was absurd to the people that went through an earlier range, and so on and so forth.
Agree with everything except the last part. Brooklyn is a fantastic place to live, and takes 20 mins or so door to door to get to most parts of Manhattan.
I'm sorry, but... you might be able to get to FiDi from downtown BK in 20 minutes, door to door. If you live anywhere else in BK, from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay, you're looking at 30 minutes minimum to get into manhattan -- probably closer to an hour door-to-door.
Not trying to be rude here, but your statement does not seem to match my lived experience. Maybe you can get 20 minutes door-to-door on a citibike?
The rent in areas adjacent (downtown Brooklyn included) to Brooklyn Heights is nothing to sneeze at. You're looking at equal or higher prices to Manhattan.
Even areas further away, like Prospect Heights or Crown Heights, with decent access to transportation have seen quite the uptick in price and availability.
Eh. I spent a summer there once. Admittedly in the 80s and admittedly as a relatively poor student intern. I like visiting NYC for a few days every now and then but I couldn't wait to get out at the time.
This reads like a silly NY maximalist without really any context of the rest of the country. New York is cool and all but I’m not paying 60k in rent to live somewhere marginally better then a handful of major cities in the country. I moved to the PNW and the idea of living in a city now seems insane
Honestly don't get what is so special about NY... It's not bad, but on the flipside is pretensious, expensive, and difficult to travel to/from.... also all of the things you mention that are positive points are by no means unique to new york.
There are many, many places to live with crime rates far lower than NYC so I'm not sure I really understand this. Maybe you mean compared with most places you could see yourself living?
For example, I live in a nice town in CT and the crime rate is 3.99 per 1000 vs NYC which is currently about 13.3 per 1000, making NYC (as a whole — I understand your point about neighborhoods within the city) 3x higher in crime.
I understand the other things you appreciate about the city. It's great to able to walk outside and have amazing restaurants and other amenities a few feet away; there's a reason many people like the city.
For people wondering the drivers here: car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides. So the claim isn't really referring about the things people usually consider when it comes to "safety" (interpersonal attacks), although it's talking about things that we perhaps *should* think about more when it comes to safety.
If I'm being honest with myself, muggings in DC still scare me more than car crashes in Montana, despite the reality of these stats.
It's not listed as a particularly safe or unsafe place by the measure of the Bloomberg article.
When I lived in DC I was several times narrowly missed by people blowing red lights, robbed, and once had to wake a driver up at a red light because they and a passenger had both passed out while driving at 11am. It definitely didn't feel like a particularly safe place.
That Bloomberg article is a really interesting experiment in cherry-picking data: it focused specifically on deaths, and only on deaths due to specific causes that helped its case. Yes, New York has fewer homicides and car crash deaths than rural towns, but if you look at most other data, which is arguably more relevant, the opposite story shows up.
I'm not that worried about being murdered. Murders tend to happen between people with a relationship. There are very few random murders. In cities, gangs do the murdering, and outside of cities, it is generally crimes of passion. The NYPD is very, very aggressive about going after gangs and murders. This is at the cost of controlling other types of crime.
The car crashes are easy to explain: NYC is designed so that you drive very slowly, and there is a 25 mph speed limit everywhere a pedestrian might be. Crashes in NYC are almost always non-fatal. It's not that they don't happen. They are just non-fatal.
Personally, I am worried about being mugged or harassed, and that is extremely common in NYC compared to most places. It also happens to be something that happens between unrelated people. That is why I moved out of NYC after having been attacked once and witnessing 2 thefts in 4 years, and that is why the statistics cited in that op-ed are completely useless.
It's amusing that you bring up a mogul's "media narrative" and then cite a link from Bloomberg News. Michael Bloomberg is of course also a billionaire with his own empire and media company.
This piece you are citing is from the Opinion section of Bloomberg News. Bloomberg itself being a company whose headquarters are in NYC and whose founder is Mike Bloomberg a NYC resident himself as well as being a 3 term mayor of NYC. The author of this opinion piece, Justin Fox is also a NYC resident. It's worth noting too that Bloomberg LP company famously does not allow remote work and owns the Bloomberg Tower, a 55 story commercial and residential skyscraper that takes up an entire city block in Midtown.
Lastly Bloomberg himself is a polarizing figure since during his long tenure as Mayor he was widely seen as being in bed with big real estate development. His tenure as mayor was notable for the hyper development of luxury real estate. The types of "glass boxes" that are dark most of the year. For more background see:
As someone who currently lives in Philly… yeah, I feel this. I love being able to get around on foot and by transit, but Philly is still a pretty car-centric place compared to what I’ve seen of NYC, and I wish it weren’t.
That plus making it easier/safer to get around by bike/scooter/etc. That’s something even NYC doesn’t seem to do well; have to look at international peers to see good examples of that.
Before I start with my comment, I'll remind everyone that averages skew very high when there are outliers. NYC has a high quantity of extremely high rent tenants. I wish more news articles used medians and median per capita when discussing rents.
The main point I want to make: even with those high rents, we tend to forget how much our cars cost us, directly and indirectly.
Directly: AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent. Unlimited MTA rides only cost $1500/year/person.
Indirectly: There's the obvious car crash issue, the top killer of children (well, guns just passed that, but luckily NYC is safer than the average American city in that regard), but the other main example is health. We're not supposed to sit all day. My doctor moved from a car suburb to the city and admitted they lost weight and walk a lot more. When walking is the easier option compared to attempting to drive to your daily errands, it's much better for you and extends your life, especially when considering your high-quality years of life.
Number one premature killer is heart disease, by far.
Even if you're just walking to the subway, that's a lot more activity than your commute to your garage.
NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
In NYC I see very old people walking everywhere, stereotypically playing chess in the park, meanwhile I have suburban relatives struggling to walk across the Walmart parking lot and they haven't even hit 70 years old. They may live into their 80's but it will not be pleasant for them. The difference in alertness is noticeable. As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
I think the best way to try and stabilize rent is to buy a condo. It's not a silver bullet due to property taxes and HOA fees that rise with inflation, but it's still a slower rise than renting, I think. You can definitely find 2 bedroom condos with monthly payments under $5000 in Manhattan.
If you're interested in what NYC apartments are really like and how far your money gets you (along with some general YouTube vlogging entertainment), a channel I recommend is Cash Jordan. I won't link it but I'm sure you can find it. Like any other real estate market, it's all about compromises. If you want to live in NYC and pay $1000/month/person, you can definitely do it. You can also pay $10,000/month if you want.
The big caveat to everything I'm saying is that the poor are unlikely to live in the most walkable areas, and a lot of them will perhaps have to own a car. This is definitely the case in Chicago, where the most walkable areas are also the most desirable and affluent (I wonder why that is? Maybe our whole country would be more desirable and affluent if it wasn't designed to be a cash funnel where we dump our income into constructing vehicles, maintaining the infrastructure and utilities utilities of nearly unused land, and burning oil?)
> AAA's average new car TCO is close to $10,000 a year. Multiply by two for a typical couple and that's $1600 a month you could dump into your NYC apartment's high rent.
First, you can get by just fine without a new car. My car was $26k new - 18 years ago. I’ve put another $10k over the years in maintenance (tires, oil, repairs). Insurance is $500/year. Gas is maybe $2k/year at $4/gal. Not even close to $10k/year.
That caveat you apply to averages for rent also applies to cars. Some people are obsessed with having a new car. That’s not the price of having a reliable car.
Second, if you’re a couple, you don’t need two cars. That’s another luxury that many people get by without.
Finally, the car takes me out of town monthly into the mountains. So you would need to factor in car rentals for leaving NYC in your equation if you wanted a fair comparison of what people actually get out of their cars.
> NYC's obesity rate is half of the national rate. HALF! That's downright incredible.
Cause or effect? A lot of people with mobility issues end up obese and having mobility issues is a fucking nightmare in NYC. You just forced the unhealthy people out of the city by design.
> As a bonus, old people in NYC never had to drive so they never have a retired life feeling isolated to their home.
+1. It’s a great place to live… if you don’t have health issues that make mobility a problem.
“Living on the top of Mt. Everest is so healthy! Look at all of the healthy people up here!”
Here are some numbers that are not focused on new cars specifically. If the $10k figured I gave you is high, you can still expect that Americans are still going to spend thousands per year on their car, maybe around $5,000 a year. [1]
Insurance $500 a year as you stated, and then you've got a typical driver driving somewhere around 15,000 miles a year if not more. [2] If you've got a 30MPG car [2.1] at $4.50 a gallon [2.2], you're paying $2,250 just to fuel it, before any expenses for maintenance, oil changes, tires, etc. If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Don't forget that the poorest Americans get the worst auto loan rates, so their payment may be pretty high for a car that has already depreciated significantly. They're losing money to interest that isn't even technically being put into the vehicle itself.
So our grand TCO for this hypothetical car is $5,750, which is really close to the averages that you see in my first reference. [1]
I think this is a really, really reasonable ballpark estimate.
How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
If it was a "luxury," the entire freaking country wouldn't be doing it.
You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates? [4]
It's not hard to figure out that higher levels activity help prevent obesity. Calories in calories out, walking and walking up and down stairs burns more calories than sitting. [4.1]
The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible. Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
When it comes to your point about getting out to the mountains, it's important to note that NYC has plenty of transit-accessible outdoor spaces, including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park. NYC is extremely well-connected to regional rail and other methods of transit to all sorts of destinations, including outdoor spaces. [6.1] And, yes, New Yorkers can rent a car once in a while, it's a lot cheaper than owning one! They can even stop paying for their MTA fares while they're out of town, while car owners continue to pay for insurance even if they're spending time away from home. A lot of those car owners are even paying daily to park their car at the airport!
Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment, when most people are drowning in clutter and wasteful purchases? [7] How much space in your house is dedicated to storing your vehicle? How much space in your home is dedicated to storing things you rarely or never use? Holiday decorations?
> If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Ask yourself why only 35% have payments. Also, half is pretty pessimistic since a car loan on the long end is 6 years.
> How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
One person drops the other off. This isn’t a difficult problem and it’s how my parents did it for nearly 15 years way back in the 70s and 80s. Clearly car ownership is a foreign concept to you, but at least try to steelman it to get a decent argument.
> You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
Are you seriously asking for proof that obese and disabled people aren’t the biggest fans of having to walk everywhere?
>New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates
You’re getting confused again and assuming that the city is causing activity rather than just forcing the inactive people out by being an unfriendly environment to them.
> The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
The segment of the population who does X tends to do X! News at 10! This doesn’t say anything about the community that can’t walk.
> NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible.
“Accessible” doesn’t mean convenient. The elevators are fucking shit in the stations that are accessible and getting to/from the stations is still shit. I took a wheelchair bound aunt to a play on broadway maybe 10 years ago, and it was awful even with me pushing her. Accessibility isn’t a checkbox.
>Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
Non sequitur, I’m not talking about blind people. I’m talking about mobility impaired people.
> including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park
It’s an amazing park, but it’s just a park. The comparison to wilderness is laughable.
> Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment
Depends on if you treat your apartment as a box to shit in and sleep in between spending all of your time elsewhere or as a place to actually live and spend huge parts of the daytime. There is a reason NYC was one of the worst places to be quarantined.
> I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not 30MPG.
No you’re not, you quoted $4.50/gal for gas when that hasn’t been an average people have paid until the Ukrainian invasion.
I grew up in NYC and just completely disagree with your analysis here. There are a lot of hidden costs to live in NYC such as some of the highest income and sales taxes in the country, apartments where even if you own if a problem is found the forced maintenace costs can go up thousands a month and you get evicted for not being able to pay. Health driven by sin taxes on soda and tobacco, and much more along those lines than just people walking places.
It is true that older people in NYC are seemingly healthy, but they're definitely a very specific type of person.
Just to be clear, I am not saying NYC is literally cheaper than other places overall. I’m saying that this one major cost component of car ownership is not there, so the high sticker price of housing should be lessened by some amount.
Live in SF or LA and you’ll face similar costs and still need a car on top of it.
People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
What? Most people I know in Manhattan are just people with jobs who enjoy living in the city. There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found in my sprawling NYC-based friend group. Sounds like something from TV or the movies.
> There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found
They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.
And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
But in all seriousness, this has always been happening. NYC is NYC because the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, over and over, generation after generation. The same with so many high-demand cities. That's how they got to be such massive, dense cities to begin with. We're all just riding the wave.
> And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of one's group of friends.
I like mass transit. I like not owning a car. I like that the city is generally safer than the rest of America. I like that it's the center for tech on the east coast, the arts for the entire country, and finance for most of the world. I like that we generally get along in the city, across many cultures and backgrounds. I like it has some of the best food in the world.
I think a lot of people are like me. No, we don't want to live in Boston, Chicago, or Washington DC (similar cities with mass transit). Unfortunately demand will continue to outpace supply greatly.
The only alternative I have is moving further out in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately the subway has decent coverage, but moves at a snail's pace, and I'm looking at 50+ minutes for 6 miles into the city.