« Tom DeLay Booked in Houston | Main | So Much For Liberal Propaganda »

October 22, 2005

He Got That Right!

Brian Carney's New York experience in yesterday's Opinion Journal talks about something I, too, have recently encountered.

I was in New York for several days last month, and man, has the city of my birth become expensive in the last few years. I mean, here's a place where people have become so accustomed to being robbed at the cash register that they don't bat an eye when forking over $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes or $4.50 for a coffee and a bagel "with a schmear" to go.

I am preparing to move back to the east coast soon and buy a house, and have studied real estate prices from Maine to the Carolinas and New York... well, let's say you're single and you badly want to live in Manhattan, where you are willing to buy a condo or co-op{personally, I wouldn't even consider a co-op, because then you're subject to a "board of directors" whose decisions can in many ways decide upon how you can live in your own "home"). If you search very hard and are blessed, beat the multitudes of competitors for the property and win the day(strike up the band!) you may get really, truly lucky and be able to buy your own tiny studio condo for a mere $350,000.00 plus monthly maintenance fees. Woo, at least you won't have to spend a lot of money on furniture, since there'd be noplace to put it. Add a couple of hundred thousand dollars or considerably more if you're looking to buy a small or medium sized house or a multiroom condo. On the even brighter side, you would have the opportunity to pay the city's high property tax, a gift to the people of New York from mayor and "former" Democrat, billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

The other four boroughs, especially Brooklyn and Queens, with the exception of New York's few remaining enclaves of "live here and die, whitey!", are fast catching up on the inflated property gravy train.

Brian Carney, looking to buy a home for himself and his family, searched high and low for a property that was affordable, without success:

But even Brooklyn has gone real-estate crazy, especially if you limit your search to neighborhoods with decent public schools. After seriously considering a two-bedroom basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights going for far more than we could afford, the reality hit home. New York might be great--greater than ever in many ways--but it was beyond our financial grasp. We regrouped and started to look in the suburbs. Which is where we ended up.

And he's got a family in tow, jeez! It's enough that prices in New York repelled me, intending to live by myself, from its real estate market.

There's this bubble thing, you see, in many large cities, among them New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, DC, that has real estate prices titanically overvalued, and in my opinion as well as those of acquaintances in the business, this bubble will burst in the not-too-distant future, transforming current sellers' markets into big time buyers' markets, and that $500,000.00 house you buy today might suddenly enjoy a market price of only $300,000.00 three or four years down the road, if that.

So, like the author of the linked article, I, too, am looking elsewhere for my house.

Posted by Seth at October 22, 2005 12:51 AM