Want Cheaper Rent? Move to Manhattan. All the Cool Slopers are Doing It.

Pic from a BRILLIANT Onion Article Written Long Ago

Since Brooklyn is over, I guess it's time to turn right back around and go back to where we all wanted to end up in the first place: New Jersey Manhattan. Not says me, says the Daily News and the New York Times. In what I'm sure is a conspiracy started by disgruntled writers to get people to move out of their beloved "it" borough, both city rags ran "move to Manhattan to find rent steals" within 3 days of each other. 

The Daily News even featured a 34 year old Occupational Therapist and Park Sloper by the name of Roxanne Alegrado who has decided to move to Manhattan because Brooklyn rents are too much for her now. Alegrado says she was frustrated with the long commutes, especially during this bitch of a winter. As she told the News: "In Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Williamsburg, the apartments were more expensive than the Upper West and Upper East Side. It doesn't add up." What doesn't add up is her budget, $1800. But apparently that's doable now in Manhattan.

Let's look at another Park Sloper by the name of Tina Dupay a syndicated columnist who decided she was sick of the Slope and budgeted herself a whopping $3500 to find for a one-bedroom in a dog-friendly building in Brooklyn. What she found was jack and shit. Dupay said "The only decent place we could afford was below street level. You were paying for the cachet of the 'B word.'" Awesome not only are we over, we're a 7 letter word. 

Enter the Upper West Side, there she found a one-bedroom in a brownstone with a backyard. Dupay's Citi Habitat broker, Anna Steinman, said, "Her backyard is one of the nicest I have seen. Probably the same apartment would have been $3,400 to $3,500 in Brooklyn - if it was available."

And therein lies the problem. The rents aren't all that different, we're talking about a couple hundred dollars a month, if that. What is the problem is the availabilty. "Brooklyn is getting hotter and there is a lot less inventory."

And so the New York Times is telling those 20-somethings fresh out of college, don't move to Brooklyn... move to the Upper East Side. Now compared to the Lower East Side and "the B-Word" it's cheap.

Young apartment hunters on the Upper East Side, on the other hand, can expect fully outfitted kitchens, bathrooms that don’t require contortions — and comparative bargains. And in many instances they’re finding contentment in a neighborhood they had previously been associated with old money and old fogies, i.e. people over 35. 

And get a load of this: “'I have friends in the East Village who will not come up here,'” said Alexandra Perrotta, 27, a recruiter for a law firm who just moved into a studio on 97th Street between Park and Lexington. “'I have to go to them.'” Jay-sus these young'uns. 

It's almost like looking in the mirror 10 years ago, except 97th Street was Brooklyn and the East Village was the West Village and Park Slope was the Upper West Side in the '70's but now the Upper West Side is Park Slope back in the 90's and eventually the Upper East Side will be Williamsburg and Spanish Harlem will be the new Bushwick. And someday our grandkids will think the suburbs are the hippest, coolest places on earth and they'll be killing each other to move into one-bedroom houses next to malls and they will think NYC is such a dump. Just wait, you'll see.