When this post hits your inbox, I know exactly where I’ll be: sitting in my car, double parked on my quiet side street, reading a book, waiting to grab one of the 15 or so open spots on the southwest side of the street.
As someone who lived in NYC, and took a kind of romantic pleasure in it all, exactly as you're describing - for me and most of the people I know who left that feeling fades incredibly quickly once you are out of it. And you are left, rightly or wrong, with a memory of long lines and inconveniences and grubby tables, things you either never noticed at the time or thought were charming and quirky and oh-so-worth-it.
I really do miss it sometimes though, even the shitty parts. I constantly ask myself: would I trade my washer and dryer or my parking spot for the ability to do all my errands without having to get in the car? Sometimes the answer is yes...
I think I'd rather live in Newport than Brooklyn. It's right across the Hudson, proximity to the PATH means it's essentially just another subway stop connected to Lower Manhattan and parking is significantly easier. Of course the time to move there was twenty years ago.
I have never gotten it. There is an undeniable energy that comes with urban living and everything being in walking distance but at what point is the juice not worth the squeeze? If I vacation in a major city and do an Airbnb, after two days of dealing with the parking insanity I am ready to kill somebody. I will take a driveway and garage 100 times out of 100.
I've lived in Southern California all my life and been in and out of Los Angeles a million times, and I don't once remember ever seeing anyone double parked. Life on Neptune, I guess. (Whether you or I live on the alien planet I'll leave for you to decide...)
I think urban parking strategy is one of the best ways to gain insight into humanity.
In Philadelphia, where I live, parking is absolutely viewed as a right, so much so that you can park in the median in some places and the ticketing officers will do nothing about it. When the DNC came to town that median parking was temporarily banned, and you could just about hear the veins bulging all over the city. Seriously, if there is ever a populist uprising in the City of Brotherly Love, it will be due to some poor schlep at the parking authority who puts "tow" signs on the wrong cars.
I used to live in Southwest Philadelphia, and it was even nuttier than in other places in the city. There, you could park in the middle of a one-way street after a certain time of day and it was understood that you were there for the night. So your car is just blocking the street and no one stops you.
You must be referring to South Philly. In the Northeast we have different issues - more space but this whole issue of propriety that I describe below. The pressure of anger always just below the surface? That's the same citywide.
Yes, I am...the median parking on Broad Street. There's just this understanding that if you do so south of Washington and north of Oregon you are fine; stray but a half-block and you are ticketed and towed. There are no signs to this effect--you just have to know.
There's very little ticketing in the Northeast because - basically - we have enough space. But for some reason it doesn't reduce the passionate intensity people feel about this stuff. So we self-police. The forbidden are (1) taking up two spots by parking midway between houses and (2) parking in front of someone else's house. In "their" street spot. I really love my neighbors and neighborhood here but negotiating the parking rules is one part of Philadelphia city life I could do without. Like you say: you just have to know. And when you don't, you just have to educate!
It's weird because I've never had any issues parking in Philly. No one has ever come after me, or yelled at me, or anything. I just... park my car wherever I can find a legal spot that is closest to my house. And I certainly don't get upset if someone parks in front of my house. It's a public street!
Here's a fun story. My neighbor gets angry if someone parks in front of her house, and one night I did and she beat my car with a plastic broom. She's rickety and weak, though, so it was like my car was attacked by a plush toy. I said something to her after a few days, mostly out of a sense of I-should-say-something, but the whole thing was a riot.
I witnessed one last spring! I was at 17th & Chestnut and one guy popped three shots into another over a spot. The men were strangers, so it was definitely about parking.
Oh man. This definitely brings back some memories. I used to live in long island city (the part that's just south of Astoria) during the early 2010s. I had a high stress/high hours corporate law job that required my butt to be in a seat at a certain (early time) and I couldn't leave till late at night. The ASP was an amazing source of stress in my life; I think I worried more about it than I ever did about catching COVID. I had gone to law school in a rural-ish area so I had a car that I didn't want to give up, and I enjoyed being the "guy with a car" in my friend group.
After a few weeks it became so untenable I bit the bullet and ponied up for a parking spot in some dude's random garage. You had to navigate a crazy alley and it was almost impossible to do. It cost $275 month! But the peace of mind that came with not having to navigate ASP was worth it. I think it added a decade to my life.
I'm in D.C. now, and still park on the street, but thankfully street parking is a lot more plentiful. I have an EV and just installed a charging station to the side of my house and run the cord to the street. Urbanism at its finest!
In Montreal this game is played with snowplows instead of street sweepers and the penalty for not moving is having your car packed into a giant snow wall that will take 2 hours to shovel out.
"This is why there’s a little bit of a prisoner’s dilemma feeling to the whole thing."
It sounds more like musical chairs.
I've never been to NYC and have no particular desire to experience it (the ocean is on the wrong side, for one thing), but what I hear from those who live there is that it's better not to have a car. Though I suppose if you often leave town, going to places that aren't conveniently accessible from public transportation, or if you sometimes need to move more stuff than you can carry, it might be necessary.
In my general area, the closest equivalent to what you're describing would be San Francisco, where the streets are mostly narrow and in some neighborhoods you can drive around for a long time looking for a place to park. Or you use a commercial parking lot and pay $30 for the day. Since I don't actually live in The City, and it's currently full of drug addicts sleeping on the sidewalks, I go there as infrequently as possible.
It's definitely better to live in New York without a car. It's faster to get around the city using public transportation and unless you regularly leave the city or live out in a neighborhood that's basically the suburbs it doesn't really strike me as worth the headaches.
Yea the car is for leaving the city. Which is a thing that you may want to do from time to time. Unfortunately - and this is a real market failure - it's quite a pain to rent a car to leave NYC for a day trip or weekend getaway.
It's not the "regulations" per se - though maybe there are some regulations that could be improved - it's that the points of actually going to rent the car from a traditional rental place aren't that convenient and are very expensive (prohibitively so); and the ZipCar etc. situation is not that much better.
Just off the top of my head, I am imagining a "concierge" car service where you just rent through an app and they drop the car off at your door at the appointed time. Like Uber, but for a weekend car instead of a single trip. Heck, the delivery drivers wouldn't even need a ride back, they could take the subway.
I haven't found this, except at obvious times of high demand (4th of July weekend, for instance). I know how Freddie feels about Zipcar (and he's right) but I've found they've improved lately too. Compared to the stress of parking on the street, the stress of renting seems lower to me.
Yeah the rental car situation in the city is not great. A lot of times you end up having to go out to one of the airports to actually get a car, which makes loading your car up with kids, pets, camping gear, ski stuff etc a nightmare. You have to have one person take the subway to JFK, drive the car back to your building in city traffic, load it up, brave the traffic driving back out of the city again, and then do it all in reverse on the way home.
We have alternate side of the street parking in my lovely little small town, but we're at a much lower density (single family homes mixed with some rentals and duplexes) so it's not a source of stress. It's mostly coordinated with garbage pickup, so every Tuesday night I take the garbage and recycling out and move the car. Occasionally, I forget and get a ticket, and even more occasionally, in a moment of grace, a police officer will knock on my door about 9:00. "Is that your car? I'm about to ticket it." and I rush out apologetically and move it over.
I do know that our town also uses it as a means of monitoring for abandoned cars. If you let three tickets pile up, you're at risk of a tow - as happened to my neighbors' college-aged son, who left his car at home one semester and his parents decided to teach him a lesson...
How I love New York. This bit evokes a shard of the edgy blend of zero-sum resource competition and almost collegial fraternity that characterize possibly the most kaleidoscopically blended city in the history of the world.
I lived in New York once, but now I am a Philadelphian. It's a whole other vibe here. In my part of Philly you - unofficially - "own" the spot in front of your home. Except you don't. And there are more cars than spots. And the houses were built at just such a distance that two cars don't quite fit bumper-to-bumper between houses without very slightly obstructing the driveways that they abut. Perfectly fine neighborly relationships are, as a result, routinely disrupted by various parking micro infractions that arise on a regular basis. Lawn chairs and orange traffic cones routinely pop up to reserve spaces that in no domain of law belong to anyone. I have never seen an actual fight break out over any of these informal arrangements or their disruption but - knowing Philly - fists and probably blood will have flown more than once. We lack New York's sense of humor about these things, or at least its short memory for grievance. I am a Philadelphian now, but I do love New York.
In Baltimore we save the cones and lawn chairs for when there's a lot of snow on the ground, or a moving truck coming. And thank goodness all the colleges have parking lots, because it means one less thing for incoming students to be a pain in the ass about because they haven't learned how to live here yet.
The thing I don't get is why, at this time of year with all the leaves on the ground, I still need to sit in my car when the street sweeper has already passed. Surely the ticket-writers must see who moved and who didn't.
I used to live in the South Slope, did for almost 9 years, and reading this I cringed so hard. It's like when I decided to loom at what kind of condos I could afford in NY just on a lark, just to see what it would be like if I got any ideas about moving back. I saw junked out 500 sqft units with HOA fees of $500 and the only thought I had was "I have no idea how I ever put up with that shit." It was a real "in what kind of world is that acceptable" moment. I then remembered how my 1000 sqft condo with a 1 car garage out here in MN seemed like a mansion, just due to what I'd put up with. People talk about NYC as some kind of leftist Mecca, but it has some of the shittiest living conditions for working and middle class people you'll find anywhere in America. I don't think there's a dollar amount that would make Brooklyn palatable to me again, and even if there was no one would ever dream of offering me that kind of salary in the first place.
Yeah, my mortgage is a whopping $760 a month. I had the luxury of buying in 2018 before the entire housing market went haywire. There are many, many reasons why NY housing is in the condition it is in. Too many to even list. I think the best option is to just move away. It's not a big deal living in suburbs once you get used to it.
I frequently look at Brooklyn apartments for sale on Streeteasy to stop myself from making an impulsive decision to move back. I miss so many things about living in NYC but I left because I was nearly 30 with a decently high paying job and less than a thousand dollars in my savings account. I lived in constant fear of losing my job because I wouldn't have been able to support myself for even a single month of unemployment. It's so hard to live a decent life there while also saving money for emergencies or future goals like owning a home...and I'm gainfully employed in a lucrative industry with zero dependents or student debt. I feel like I'm a bit behind my peers who moved to cheaper cities after college, but at the same time I'm sort of glad I made the most of my time there even if I wasted all my money partying, going out to eat, and living in an expensive neighborhood that I loved. I will cherish those memories of being young in the city til the day I die.
Now the problem is that I moved somewhere extremely car dependent and it annoys the shit out of me after a decade in NYC...there has to be a happy medium, right? Somewhere I can have a washer-dryer and reasonably dream of owning a home some day but where I can also buy groceries or go for a night out without having to get in my car?!
Edit: it's shocking how quickly you get used to having more space. My 900sqft bungalow felt like a palace for the first 6 months and now it's totally full and I often wish for more space. Hard to imagine making my life fit in 400sqft again!
It's terrible for the environment, but I have to fess up: I'd take sitting in traffic any day of the week over having homeless people yelling vile things at me on the subway and the myriad of other harassment and unpleasantness that is completely ordinary on the subway. In my 11 years in NYC I pretty much saw it almost on the train. A gut masturbating to completion in front of me, getting stuck in the station because someone jumped in front of the train, being threatened more times than I can count, a guy smoking crack on a seat and offering me some, a garbage bag in the G station so full of rats it looked like it was breathing, and so on.... No thanks. I hate contributing to global warming, but still.
That's very likely to be my next move! My only reservations are about safety...my friends there tell me it's significantly worse than when we were in school there circa 2010, and I always felt less safe in Philly back then than I ever did in NYC...but overall it's a fantastic city.
I think the safety concerns are overblown. Is Philly less safe than New York? I suppose so. But, your risk of dying in a car crash in Phoenix are probably higher than being murdered in Philadelphia.
Fair point and if I'm being honest I'd rather be stabbed walking down the street in Philly than perish in a fiery car crash going 90mph on the highway where I currently live (god I hate driving outside the northeast, it always feels like a death match).
My wife, who doesn't drive, is still amused when I stop during a walk in central Philly to coo over a perfect parking spot. I'm glad to know I'm not alone.
Philly, though, rather notoriously doesn't do the same kind of weekly street cleaning that requires moving. This has advantages--you move your car less--and disadvantages--some people NEVER move their cars, for months. I've seen cars in Point Breeze that have archaeological accretions.
I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's a different side of human behavior. If NYC parking is Mad Max, Philly parking is a Beckett play: glacially slow, morbidly absurd, full of rust and filth, prowling the neighborhood at 5 MPH with your flashers on, waiting for your neighbors to die as "Fresh Air" plays on the radio.
I can’t recommend mid sized cities enough. There are still completely walkable neighborhoods, culture, night life, you name it. But it’s a fraction of the cost and hassle that a place like NYC is.
Someday, in the not-too-distant future, we'll all have flying cars. And instead of dozens of cars idling away at the start of every street, waiting for a spot, they will instead be quietly humming away in the air all around our rooftops, also waiting for a spot...on the roof.
I can see it now: every building having a jumbling ring hover cars around their rooftops, like metallic rings of bumblebees all pining for the sweet nectar of an open stall; half-empty coffee cups periodically plummeting towards the unfortunate 'walkers' down below; and some guy in a boat-shaped 'hover-cafe' a-la Blade Runner style, merrily buzzing from car to car doling out pastries and egg drop soup.
A savvy clairvoyant might start buying up rooftop real estate right now.
As someone who lived in NYC, and took a kind of romantic pleasure in it all, exactly as you're describing - for me and most of the people I know who left that feeling fades incredibly quickly once you are out of it. And you are left, rightly or wrong, with a memory of long lines and inconveniences and grubby tables, things you either never noticed at the time or thought were charming and quirky and oh-so-worth-it.
Or as I say to my friends that still live there: "You know you can get Thai food anywhere, right?"
but bodegas
BODEGAS
literally nowhere else has bodegas
Damn, what's the corner store down the block from my house in Philadelphia then?
Ha ha... Right? Freddie has a huge Philly contingent for some reason!
Left last June for Delco.
It's a WaWa. I admire WaWa. They have decent food and other stuff. But a WaWa is not a bodega.
Lol it's not a Wawa.
And it's Wawa, not WaWa. ;)
It IS Wawa! I pulled out my Wawa app to prove you wrong and... I can't believe I've been spelling it wrong all these years. WoW.
Inferior to Buc-ees I think.
Here in central Missouri, I can get Thai food in a literal van down by the river.
I really do miss it sometimes though, even the shitty parts. I constantly ask myself: would I trade my washer and dryer or my parking spot for the ability to do all my errands without having to get in the car? Sometimes the answer is yes...
I feel similarly and I would move back in a heartbeat if housing wasn't so fucking expensive.
I think I'd rather live in Newport than Brooklyn. It's right across the Hudson, proximity to the PATH means it's essentially just another subway stop connected to Lower Manhattan and parking is significantly easier. Of course the time to move there was twenty years ago.
I have never gotten it. There is an undeniable energy that comes with urban living and everything being in walking distance but at what point is the juice not worth the squeeze? If I vacation in a major city and do an Airbnb, after two days of dealing with the parking insanity I am ready to kill somebody. I will take a driveway and garage 100 times out of 100.
I mean the answer is, you don't own a car. It should be possible to easily live without a car in any city worth the name.
I've lived in Southern California all my life and been in and out of Los Angeles a million times, and I don't once remember ever seeing anyone double parked. Life on Neptune, I guess. (Whether you or I live on the alien planet I'll leave for you to decide...)
I think urban parking strategy is one of the best ways to gain insight into humanity.
In Philadelphia, where I live, parking is absolutely viewed as a right, so much so that you can park in the median in some places and the ticketing officers will do nothing about it. When the DNC came to town that median parking was temporarily banned, and you could just about hear the veins bulging all over the city. Seriously, if there is ever a populist uprising in the City of Brotherly Love, it will be due to some poor schlep at the parking authority who puts "tow" signs on the wrong cars.
Philadelphia parking culture is absolutely wild and I despise it. It is SO dangerous!
I used to live in Southwest Philadelphia, and it was even nuttier than in other places in the city. There, you could park in the middle of a one-way street after a certain time of day and it was understood that you were there for the night. So your car is just blocking the street and no one stops you.
They used to do that in South Philly too but it seems like there was a crackdown at some point because I don't see it that much anymore.
You must be referring to South Philly. In the Northeast we have different issues - more space but this whole issue of propriety that I describe below. The pressure of anger always just below the surface? That's the same citywide.
Yes, I am...the median parking on Broad Street. There's just this understanding that if you do so south of Washington and north of Oregon you are fine; stray but a half-block and you are ticketed and towed. There are no signs to this effect--you just have to know.
There's very little ticketing in the Northeast because - basically - we have enough space. But for some reason it doesn't reduce the passionate intensity people feel about this stuff. So we self-police. The forbidden are (1) taking up two spots by parking midway between houses and (2) parking in front of someone else's house. In "their" street spot. I really love my neighbors and neighborhood here but negotiating the parking rules is one part of Philadelphia city life I could do without. Like you say: you just have to know. And when you don't, you just have to educate!
It's weird because I've never had any issues parking in Philly. No one has ever come after me, or yelled at me, or anything. I just... park my car wherever I can find a legal spot that is closest to my house. And I certainly don't get upset if someone parks in front of my house. It's a public street!
Here's a fun story. My neighbor gets angry if someone parks in front of her house, and one night I did and she beat my car with a plastic broom. She's rickety and weak, though, so it was like my car was attacked by a plush toy. I said something to her after a few days, mostly out of a sense of I-should-say-something, but the whole thing was a riot.
It's wild that folks here just accept that 2-3 murders will happen every year over parking spots.
I witnessed one last spring! I was at 17th & Chestnut and one guy popped three shots into another over a spot. The men were strangers, so it was definitely about parking.
I mean, Jesus Christ.
Median Parking! That is just ANARCHY!
Oh man. This definitely brings back some memories. I used to live in long island city (the part that's just south of Astoria) during the early 2010s. I had a high stress/high hours corporate law job that required my butt to be in a seat at a certain (early time) and I couldn't leave till late at night. The ASP was an amazing source of stress in my life; I think I worried more about it than I ever did about catching COVID. I had gone to law school in a rural-ish area so I had a car that I didn't want to give up, and I enjoyed being the "guy with a car" in my friend group.
After a few weeks it became so untenable I bit the bullet and ponied up for a parking spot in some dude's random garage. You had to navigate a crazy alley and it was almost impossible to do. It cost $275 month! But the peace of mind that came with not having to navigate ASP was worth it. I think it added a decade to my life.
I'm in D.C. now, and still park on the street, but thankfully street parking is a lot more plentiful. I have an EV and just installed a charging station to the side of my house and run the cord to the street. Urbanism at its finest!
In Montreal this game is played with snowplows instead of street sweepers and the penalty for not moving is having your car packed into a giant snow wall that will take 2 hours to shovel out.
"This is why there’s a little bit of a prisoner’s dilemma feeling to the whole thing."
It sounds more like musical chairs.
I've never been to NYC and have no particular desire to experience it (the ocean is on the wrong side, for one thing), but what I hear from those who live there is that it's better not to have a car. Though I suppose if you often leave town, going to places that aren't conveniently accessible from public transportation, or if you sometimes need to move more stuff than you can carry, it might be necessary.
In my general area, the closest equivalent to what you're describing would be San Francisco, where the streets are mostly narrow and in some neighborhoods you can drive around for a long time looking for a place to park. Or you use a commercial parking lot and pay $30 for the day. Since I don't actually live in The City, and it's currently full of drug addicts sleeping on the sidewalks, I go there as infrequently as possible.
It's definitely better to live in New York without a car. It's faster to get around the city using public transportation and unless you regularly leave the city or live out in a neighborhood that's basically the suburbs it doesn't really strike me as worth the headaches.
Yea the car is for leaving the city. Which is a thing that you may want to do from time to time. Unfortunately - and this is a real market failure - it's quite a pain to rent a car to leave NYC for a day trip or weekend getaway.
I was going to say: it sounds like there would be a great market for car rental. Are the regulations bad?
It's not the "regulations" per se - though maybe there are some regulations that could be improved - it's that the points of actually going to rent the car from a traditional rental place aren't that convenient and are very expensive (prohibitively so); and the ZipCar etc. situation is not that much better.
Just off the top of my head, I am imagining a "concierge" car service where you just rent through an app and they drop the car off at your door at the appointed time. Like Uber, but for a weekend car instead of a single trip. Heck, the delivery drivers wouldn't even need a ride back, they could take the subway.
Yeah the labor cost for that would be insane. The delivery driver would also then have to get back to home base.
I haven't found this, except at obvious times of high demand (4th of July weekend, for instance). I know how Freddie feels about Zipcar (and he's right) but I've found they've improved lately too. Compared to the stress of parking on the street, the stress of renting seems lower to me.
Yeah the rental car situation in the city is not great. A lot of times you end up having to go out to one of the airports to actually get a car, which makes loading your car up with kids, pets, camping gear, ski stuff etc a nightmare. You have to have one person take the subway to JFK, drive the car back to your building in city traffic, load it up, brave the traffic driving back out of the city again, and then do it all in reverse on the way home.
We have alternate side of the street parking in my lovely little small town, but we're at a much lower density (single family homes mixed with some rentals and duplexes) so it's not a source of stress. It's mostly coordinated with garbage pickup, so every Tuesday night I take the garbage and recycling out and move the car. Occasionally, I forget and get a ticket, and even more occasionally, in a moment of grace, a police officer will knock on my door about 9:00. "Is that your car? I'm about to ticket it." and I rush out apologetically and move it over.
I do know that our town also uses it as a means of monitoring for abandoned cars. If you let three tickets pile up, you're at risk of a tow - as happened to my neighbors' college-aged son, who left his car at home one semester and his parents decided to teach him a lesson...
How I love New York. This bit evokes a shard of the edgy blend of zero-sum resource competition and almost collegial fraternity that characterize possibly the most kaleidoscopically blended city in the history of the world.
I lived in New York once, but now I am a Philadelphian. It's a whole other vibe here. In my part of Philly you - unofficially - "own" the spot in front of your home. Except you don't. And there are more cars than spots. And the houses were built at just such a distance that two cars don't quite fit bumper-to-bumper between houses without very slightly obstructing the driveways that they abut. Perfectly fine neighborly relationships are, as a result, routinely disrupted by various parking micro infractions that arise on a regular basis. Lawn chairs and orange traffic cones routinely pop up to reserve spaces that in no domain of law belong to anyone. I have never seen an actual fight break out over any of these informal arrangements or their disruption but - knowing Philly - fists and probably blood will have flown more than once. We lack New York's sense of humor about these things, or at least its short memory for grievance. I am a Philadelphian now, but I do love New York.
In Baltimore we save the cones and lawn chairs for when there's a lot of snow on the ground, or a moving truck coming. And thank goodness all the colleges have parking lots, because it means one less thing for incoming students to be a pain in the ass about because they haven't learned how to live here yet.
The thing I don't get is why, at this time of year with all the leaves on the ground, I still need to sit in my car when the street sweeper has already passed. Surely the ticket-writers must see who moved and who didn't.
I used to live in the South Slope, did for almost 9 years, and reading this I cringed so hard. It's like when I decided to loom at what kind of condos I could afford in NY just on a lark, just to see what it would be like if I got any ideas about moving back. I saw junked out 500 sqft units with HOA fees of $500 and the only thought I had was "I have no idea how I ever put up with that shit." It was a real "in what kind of world is that acceptable" moment. I then remembered how my 1000 sqft condo with a 1 car garage out here in MN seemed like a mansion, just due to what I'd put up with. People talk about NYC as some kind of leftist Mecca, but it has some of the shittiest living conditions for working and middle class people you'll find anywhere in America. I don't think there's a dollar amount that would make Brooklyn palatable to me again, and even if there was no one would ever dream of offering me that kind of salary in the first place.
Lol yeah. A friend of a friend just rented an apartment in Astoria and he's paying like $3600 a month for a 3-bedroom. Just... why?
Meanwhile I'm chilling in my rowhouse in Philly that I own that I pay like $1350 a month for.
I mean it's actually sad what's happened to New York; if they had kept up with housing construction it wouldn't be nearly as bad to live there.
Yeah, my mortgage is a whopping $760 a month. I had the luxury of buying in 2018 before the entire housing market went haywire. There are many, many reasons why NY housing is in the condition it is in. Too many to even list. I think the best option is to just move away. It's not a big deal living in suburbs once you get used to it.
Yeah the mortgage part of that is like $800 a month. I would never want to live in the suburbs, I despise driving, but Philly is good.
I frequently look at Brooklyn apartments for sale on Streeteasy to stop myself from making an impulsive decision to move back. I miss so many things about living in NYC but I left because I was nearly 30 with a decently high paying job and less than a thousand dollars in my savings account. I lived in constant fear of losing my job because I wouldn't have been able to support myself for even a single month of unemployment. It's so hard to live a decent life there while also saving money for emergencies or future goals like owning a home...and I'm gainfully employed in a lucrative industry with zero dependents or student debt. I feel like I'm a bit behind my peers who moved to cheaper cities after college, but at the same time I'm sort of glad I made the most of my time there even if I wasted all my money partying, going out to eat, and living in an expensive neighborhood that I loved. I will cherish those memories of being young in the city til the day I die.
Now the problem is that I moved somewhere extremely car dependent and it annoys the shit out of me after a decade in NYC...there has to be a happy medium, right? Somewhere I can have a washer-dryer and reasonably dream of owning a home some day but where I can also buy groceries or go for a night out without having to get in my car?!
Edit: it's shocking how quickly you get used to having more space. My 900sqft bungalow felt like a palace for the first 6 months and now it's totally full and I often wish for more space. Hard to imagine making my life fit in 400sqft again!
It's terrible for the environment, but I have to fess up: I'd take sitting in traffic any day of the week over having homeless people yelling vile things at me on the subway and the myriad of other harassment and unpleasantness that is completely ordinary on the subway. In my 11 years in NYC I pretty much saw it almost on the train. A gut masturbating to completion in front of me, getting stuck in the station because someone jumped in front of the train, being threatened more times than I can count, a guy smoking crack on a seat and offering me some, a garbage bag in the G station so full of rats it looked like it was breathing, and so on.... No thanks. I hate contributing to global warming, but still.
Philadelphia!
That's very likely to be my next move! My only reservations are about safety...my friends there tell me it's significantly worse than when we were in school there circa 2010, and I always felt less safe in Philly back then than I ever did in NYC...but overall it's a fantastic city.
I think the safety concerns are overblown. Is Philly less safe than New York? I suppose so. But, your risk of dying in a car crash in Phoenix are probably higher than being murdered in Philadelphia.
Fair point and if I'm being honest I'd rather be stabbed walking down the street in Philly than perish in a fiery car crash going 90mph on the highway where I currently live (god I hate driving outside the northeast, it always feels like a death match).
Oh, you'll be shot and murdered, not stabbed.
My wife, who doesn't drive, is still amused when I stop during a walk in central Philly to coo over a perfect parking spot. I'm glad to know I'm not alone.
Philly, though, rather notoriously doesn't do the same kind of weekly street cleaning that requires moving. This has advantages--you move your car less--and disadvantages--some people NEVER move their cars, for months. I've seen cars in Point Breeze that have archaeological accretions.
I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's a different side of human behavior. If NYC parking is Mad Max, Philly parking is a Beckett play: glacially slow, morbidly absurd, full of rust and filth, prowling the neighborhood at 5 MPH with your flashers on, waiting for your neighbors to die as "Fresh Air" plays on the radio.
They're starting it!!! Maybe the city won't be so disgusting.
I can’t recommend mid sized cities enough. There are still completely walkable neighborhoods, culture, night life, you name it. But it’s a fraction of the cost and hassle that a place like NYC is.
What!? Park Slope and South Slope are the same continuous neighborhood like protons and neutrons are basically just the same particle.
Hey I have no dog in the fight
Someday, in the not-too-distant future, we'll all have flying cars. And instead of dozens of cars idling away at the start of every street, waiting for a spot, they will instead be quietly humming away in the air all around our rooftops, also waiting for a spot...on the roof.
I can see it now: every building having a jumbling ring hover cars around their rooftops, like metallic rings of bumblebees all pining for the sweet nectar of an open stall; half-empty coffee cups periodically plummeting towards the unfortunate 'walkers' down below; and some guy in a boat-shaped 'hover-cafe' a-la Blade Runner style, merrily buzzing from car to car doling out pastries and egg drop soup.
A savvy clairvoyant might start buying up rooftop real estate right now.