Infographics help illustrate how expensive rent is in New York City

Some info from the EV Grieve inbox via Zumper, an apartment rental listings site...

Here's some info that we've gathered:

Top three most expensive neighborhoods to rent a one bedroom:

• Tribeca ($4,180)
• Greenwich Village ($3,550)
• Garment District ($3,535)

Alternatively, here are the three most expensive neighborhoods to rent a two bedroom:

• Tribeca ($6,275)
• Battery Park ($5,650)
• Soho ($5,545)

We also found the neighborhoods where splitting a two bedroom with a roommate can save you the most money (versus each renting a one bedroom on your own):

• Greenpoint - Save 47.5% or $1,425 per bedroom ($3000 for a 1 bed vs. $1575 per bedroom for a 2 bed)
• Williamsburg - Save 43.3% or $1,220 per bedroom ($2820 for a 1 bed vs. $1600 per bedroom for a 2 bed)
• Murray Hill - Save 37.7% or $1,036 per bedroom ($2750 for a 1 bed vs. $1714 per bedroom for a 2 bed)

Here are the three neighborhoods where you'll save the least by adding a roommate:

• Battery Park - Save 15.7% or $525 per bedroom ($3,350 for a 1 bed vs. $2,825 per bedroom for a 2 bed)
• Soho - Save 20.8% or $728 per bedroom ($3500 for a 1 bed vs. $2,773 per bedroom for a 2 bed)
• Chelsea - Save 24.63% or $838 per bedroom ($3,400 for a 1 bed vs. $2,563 per bedroom for a 2 bed)

Finally, some overall stats so you can see how the East Village fares in all this. To the graphs!



For instance, one-bedroom apartments are less expensive here than in Greenpoint and Williamsburg...



...and two bedroom apartments almost seem like deals (!!) compared with other neighborhoods... only Murray Hill and the Lower East Side have (slightly) lower rents in the parts of Manhattan that Zumper surveyed for two bedrooms...

Noted

On Avenue B at Fifth Street, the site of the seemingly abandoned Caffe Buon Gusto.

Fixed Rate Mortgages are available

Noted Manhattan cakemaker April Reed created a gingerbread version of the Farnsworth House. Can be yours for only ... $4,320. (New York Times)

Young former Wall Street workers ponder their next move

The Times has a lengthy piece today on the recent college graduates who suddenly find themselves without jobs on Wall Street:

Mr. Menzul, 22, is among the untold numbers of young finance types caught in limbo by the economic crisis, yearning to stay in the nation’s financial heart yet fearful that no market rebound is in sight. It is impossible to gauge how many such strivers are leaving New York or considering it. But interviews over the past two weeks with affected workers and recruiters revealed an emerging portrait of newly minted college graduates suddenly jobless in a frightfully expensive city, and forced to contemplate a change in career — or address.

And:

Adjina Dekidjiev, an operations manager at Manhattan Apartments Inc., said she had been seeing more people trying to break leases, some leaving, some just looking for cheaper places to live.
“A lot of people are doing their math, asking, ‘How can I stay in the city, for as long as possible, and try to find a job?’ ” said Win Hornig, who started the blog bankergonebroke.com after being laid off from JPMorgan in September. “People are definitely going to leave the city if the market doesn’t come back. It’s just too expensive.”

And before you make a smartassy, ha-ha comment, the Times wants you to understand this:

Many in New York have delighted, at least a little, in a sense of schadenfreude over investment-banker woes, having viewed them as a greedy breed that helped homogenize and gentrify the city. But the market crisis has already had widening ripple effects, and many young people working in jobs related to the finance sector were never making a mother lode.

NYC's boutique baseball teams

Pablo S. Torre on SI.com:

If you're a typical sports fan -- you know, the kind who worries about gas prices, tuition and the trade deadline -- New York's new stadiums might look as if they belong behind a boutique window.

In the Bronx looms the skeleton of Yankee Stadium 2.0, a coliseum with half as many bleacher seats as its predecessor but more than three times the luxury boxes. In Queens, the Mets traded Shea's 20,420-seat hull of an upper deck for Citi Field and its 54 suites, burnished by leases priced firmly in the six figures.

What season-ticket holders will be paying next year at Yankee Stadium

The Yankees announced the prices for their 2009 season-ticket plans the other day. As the AP notes, "Even seats behind the outfield fence will be costly at the new Yankee Stadium."

But!

"Behind those four sections of seats, and to the rear of the bullpens closer to center field, are nine sections of bleachers priced at $12, the same as the cost this season in the final year of the 85-year-old ballpark."

Team COO Lonn Trost said other than 4,300 pricy seats, the tickets are "not being raised significantly. And remember, 24,000-plus seats will have no price increase at all."

Individuals game prices haven't been set.

Meanwhile, wonder how much these seats will cost next season:



From That Touch of Mink.

Previous ticket stories on EV Grieve: Go here.

NY baseball fans: "Some of them are also facing startling increases in ticket costs during a serious economic downturn"

The Times hits on one of EV Grieve's favorite topics today: New Stadiums: Prices, and Outrage, Escalate.

No American market has witnessed anything like it: two baseball teams and two football teams will open three new stadiums within 17 months and 20 miles of one another, with everything set to be in place by the fall of 2010.
But even as fans of the Mets, the Yankees, the Giants and the Jets look forward to state-of-the-art stadium architecture, better sightlines, wider concourses and more bathrooms, some of them are also facing startling increases in ticket costs during a serious economic downturn.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Even rich people can't afford to see the Mets or Yankees next season

Any bets that S.I. Yankees and Brooklyn Cyclones ticket prices go up as well?

Now we know why the new Mets stadium is named after a bank

I've had several posts this summer about how expensive it will be to see the Yankees or Mets in their fancy-schmancy new stadiums next season. Well, the Mets just announced their 2009 ticket prices. How bad are they? Bad enough the Post made it part of its Page 1 cover package.

No wonder it's named after a bank - Met fans are going to have to open up their safe-deposit boxes to afford seats at Citi Field next season.
The choicest seats will cost $495 - a 79 percent increase.

On the lower level, where tickets at Shea were an average of $77 to $85 - depending on the opponent, day of the week and the Mets' five-tiered pricing system - comparable seats at Citi Field will average $150 to $225.

Michael Bakal, 27, of Baldwin, LI, hanging out at Virgil's in Midtown, expressed the frustration of many a Met fan.

"It costs more to put gas in the car, or to take the train, and now it costs more to get a seat in a stadium that we paid to build," Bakal said. "It's kind of insulting to New Yorkers. Go find the money somewhere else. Give us a break, leave Joe Public alone."

Newsflash: New York is expensive (aka, we're No. 1!)

According to Forbes:

New York City's got fashionable Fifth Avenue, trendy Tribeca and an oasis in Central Park. To enjoy those perks, residents pay up.
The Big Apple topped a new list of America's most expensive cities, with a measured cost of living surpassing that of Houston, Boston and Washington, D.C. The culprit? High rent: $4,500 a month on average for a two-bedroom, unfurnished luxury apartment.
Los Angeles comes in second place. Its residents can partly blame a long, expensive commute. The average driver there spends 72 hours a year stuck in traffic delays, and, as of July 21, the cost of a gallon of regular gas was $4.46.

To determine the U.S. cities where the cost of living is highest, the London office of Mercer, an American human resources consulting company, measured the prices of the same basket of goods in 253 of the world's cities. The basket is composed of over 200 products, representative of executive spending patterns and including everything from rent for a luxury apartment to the cost of a fast-food hamburger.
Location has a lot to do with why New York and Los Angeles top the list.
In New York, the need for more homes has been increasing since the mid-1970s, says Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University.
"Before 1970," he says, "workers in some sense were paid a premium to live in New York." This, says Glaeser, was due to its reputation for crime and dirtiness. "Now, people pay a premium to live there."
The change happened when the city began to experience robust economic growth that's still occurring, despite some hiccups along the way. Even though business is increasingly global, New York is a center for industries that produce ideas, like finance and publishing, notes Glaeser.
"You don't see anyone relocating to South Dakota," he says. "The idea now is that you become smart by hanging around other smart people, which New York has in abundance. That's why it's been able to thrive."

Related:

Actually, New York is cheap (Curbed)

[Image via New York]

Even rich people can't afford to see the Mets or Yankees next season

Yesterday I mentioned how expensive tickets were to see the Home Run Derby at Yankees Stadium. That should prepare everyone for what will be charged for normal, everyday tickets next season. No surprise, steep ticket prices will be the norm once the Yankees and Mets open their schmancy new stadiums in 2009. In the Post last Friday, EV Grieve favorite Phil Mushnick wrote about a rather wealthy fellow who has been a Mets season ticket-holder since Shea opened in 1964. As Mushnick reported, this man decided he's not renewing his tickets. His four box seats cost him $5,837 in 1993, $11,836 in 1998, $23,702 last year and $33,300 this season. Last week, the Mets informed him that comparable seats next year will cost him roughly $60,000.

Yesterday, Mushnick wrote that his Friday column "led to a pile of missives from Mets and Yankees season and partial season ticket-holders; those who now realize that they, too, have reached the point of can't return.

"Friday, one wrote that he's one in a group of friends who have purchased the same box seats in Yankee Stadium the last 20-plus years. The first year, the seats were $12.50 per. By 1996, they were $25 per. Last year they went to $150 a seat. This year they are $250 a seat. And, he added, the seats have been in disrepair the last three years."


(Sidebar: And, given the insufferable John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman calling games on NewsRadio 880, you can't even listen to the Yankees...And why does Sterling insist on saying "an A-bomb for A-rod" as his signature home run call?)

Still, there are options left for those of us who like watching baseball: For the price of one draft beer at Yankee Stadium, you can get a good ticket to see the Staten Island Yankees. Better scenery along the way too. And, of course, there are the Brooklyn Cyclones and Newark Bears. And Long Island Ducks. And Atlantic City Surf.

With that extra $$$, you can buy two ounces of popcorn

Still, at least someone came to their senses for once. (And what's a movie ticket going for these days? Think I paid $11.75 to see the art-house sensation, Iron Man.)

Anyway, as the Post reports:

A movie-theater chain that stopped offering reduced-price tickets for kids and seniors at a Manhattan cinema did an about-face yesterday - and said it will restore them.

Clearview Cinemas, which last week quit offering discount tickets for children and seniors at its theater on First Avenue and 62nd Street, said it will restore the discounts.

Clearview Cinemas, which operates 52 movie theaters in the New York metro area, didn't explain its change of heart.

"Clearview did experiment with certain discount eliminations at a few select theatres," spokeswoman Kim Kerns said in a statement.

"Upon initial review, we have determined that we will return to our previous discounts at these theaters.

"We note that at the vast majority of Clearview theaters, the discounts remained in place and were never changed."

I suspect that the Post created this flap on their own just so they could run this headline:

'NO-KIDDIE' FLIX-TIX NIX

Here's the article from yesterday reporting on the increase.

Excerpt:

"I feel like everywhere I go, I'm getting nickeled-and-dimed these days," said Jack Miller, 40, who took his 7-year-old son, Benjamin, to see "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" at the Clearview yesterday afternoon, only to find that a children's ticket had shot up $2.50.

Real estate update: "Much of Manhattan continues humming along"

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on cities where home prices on holding up. While the housing market may be soft in, say, San Francisco, to no surprise, you won't many bargains in Manhattan.



According to the Journal:

While New York's commuter market -- which includes suburban New York, New Jersey and Connecticut -- is down about 8% from its peak in mid-2006, much of Manhattan continues humming along. Neighborhoods such as SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Murray Hill, the Upper West Side and Harlem are all up in the past year, according to DataQuick's Zip Code analysis.

Bidding wars still happen. Toni Haber, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, a New York City real-estate firm, says 60 people waited in line recently at an open house to view a three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. The owner had four competing offers within the week, and agreed to sell for about $2.5 million -- $300,000 over the asking price.

Part of the city's strength comes from the fact that few buyers were investing in properties to flip them. Moreover, many apartment buildings in New York aren't condominiums but co-ops, which impose financial demands on potential buyers far more rigorous than banks do -- which helps keep the number of foreclosures down. In addition, foreign investors have been exploiting the weak dollar by grabbing Manhattan real estate.
One area of weakness: the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, where median prices are down, in part because of an abundance of new construction in the area.

Those areas of Brooklyn that are close to Manhattan are also holding up well. On the periphery, places like Jamaica, Queens; parts of the Bronx; and nearby New Jersey towns such as Jersey City and Hoboken are off between 3% and 14%.

New York Post attempts to relate to the economic struggles of the common family man trying to make a living in New York City

The Post has a piece today that so many of us can relate to here in the city: Everything is just getting so expensive.

YIKES! HIKES HIT $1,000+ A MONTH
BLAME FOOD AS MANHATTAN FAMILY'S BILLS SURGE
By JEREMY OLSHAN

The cost of living for a typical Manhattan family has shot up in the past year - just ask Gary Foodim.

Foodim, 37, his wife and two kids saw their expenses increase well over $1,000 in April compared to the same month last year.

Of course, this story runs on the same day that the paper ups its price from 25 to 50 cents. Thanks, Rupert!