3. TIL Rich neighbors refused to let George Lucas build a studio, so he’s buildin...

TIL Rich neighbors refused to let George Lucas build a studio, so he’s building affordable housing instead. "We’ve got enough millionaires here."

/u/AgentLangdon has it basically correct.

In NYC for example, you could get lucky and get a rent controlled apartment or luck into a good situation. But I know of 400 square foot apartments that go for close to $3k a month, so a decent 1 bedroom or two bedroom is going to be out of the question.

You have a few options.

Option 1: Live somewhere close by and pay 90% of NYC prices which is still a ton. There are apartments in Hoboken that are over 4 grand a month for newer construction. You could live in one of the outer boroughs and in the right neighborhood pay a fortune.

Option 2: You live somewhere close by (or maybe even in the city) and hope to catch the gentrification wave. Harlem used to be associated as a rough neighborhood. It's a lot nicer and a lot more expensive now and if you somehow got in on the ground floor and managed to buy, you did really well. The area around Capitol Hill in DC was wretched, until almost unit by unit, congressional staffers would buy places and fix them up and one street at a time they became nice. Gentrification has a lot of negative connotations, but from the perspective of a home owner, you generally root for gentrification. There are parts along even NW DC near the convention center that have gradually gotten nicer and nicer as dilapidated buildings are torn down and replaced with luxury high rises. If you bought one five years ago, one one side might be nice but two blocks the wrong way was dangerous. Now today it's nice all around and you saw some epic appreciation. The NYC suburb equivalent is maybe Jersey City, in that it's still a 15 minute or so train to at least certain parts of the city. (and still some opportunities there I think)

Option 3: Just live in a not great neighborhood with little hopes of a near turn turnaround and deal. This is surprisingly fine for some people Newark NJ has some OK pockets for example. There are obvious downsides, increased risk for burglary and car theft. Your options get worse still if you have kids. You could live somewhere like Union City NJ, and if you have kids you are just hosed in terms of schools, but it may well be all you can afford. There are also safer blue collarish places with less fun things to do, that are also public transportation accessible such as Rahway. But at this point you start to lose some of the fun parts of being in the city.

Option 4: Live further away and have a nice suburban type life and be near a train. You can still take mass transit to shows and restaurants, but you give up something by not being in the city in a way. This also requires a surprising amount of money if you are within 25 miles or so.

Final Option: Try to save a lot of money and trade time on your commute. Become adept at reading on trains, or listening to albums deeply, or studying something. The prices are still pretty high in many cases. There are several people who live in Philly that commute to NY (they pay Amtrak an obscene amount for a mass transit pass). There are many people who live in really nice suburban parts of CT and NY State who maybe have a slightly better commute.

The real estate prices, for example... 60 miles from NYC are probably still more than most parts of Dallas TX (where I live now). But when I commuted to NYC, with a 2 hour each way commute, I ended up having made three friends at the company I worked for just by virtue of us having the same trains, as well as a couple of other people who were doing the same thing and we kept running into each other.

Those 6 am trains out of the north east corridor line were PACKED with thousands of people getting on at the furthest 3 stops away heading to NYC, and ran every 15 minutes.

And our train pass was ~=450 a month plus parking.

I can tell you if there was an easy answer lots of people would do it.

If you do really well, and are making $400k as a household, as opposed to just $100k (which sounds like a lot but it isn't), you might rent a crashpad in the city, and live in the suburbs with a good school district and maybe get the best of all worlds.

Source: Lived (briefly) in DC and worked in NY metro area for a while.

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