Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
I think that anyone who lives in the city but can afford a mortgage on a house in the suburbs already had the luxury of choice.
Let's play this out. Let's say that being close to work is keeping a lot of people in NYC that would otherwise not live in NYC, and let's say that those people are suddenly enabled to work remotely from a place of their choosing. Why would they choose an expensive NY suburb over leaving the area altogether? Why not get a mansion in suburban Cleveland, in a great school district, for the same price as a Brooklyn studio apartment? Why not get a McMansion outside of Atlanta, or Charlotte, or Austin, or Dallas, for what you'd pay for a modest house in northern New Jersey?
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I used to have this view, which is to say "if you're gonna live in a McMansion in New Jersey or Connecticut, may as well live in suburban Omaha or suburban Houston".
But this fails to take into account the multiplicity of individual people's needs, wants, affinities, preferences, etc.
It also supposes that the NJ or CT McMansion dwellers, simply because of their place of residence, can't possibly be interested in or value the urbane delights of the city.
Which of course is totally ridiculous.
Just as it's ridiculous to assume that just because someone lives in one of the NYC boroughs (OK, maybe not Staten Island
) that they will automatically be more interested in the Met and MOMA.
For all the much-vaunted openness of urbane urbanites, sometimes I wonder if these people ever actually talk to people outside their immediate bubble of peers. Because those NJ, CT and LI McMansion dwellers are right there next to you at the cool Manhattan cafés, and the
vernissages at the Brooklyn art gallery.