It has more people than 26 states, contains one out of every 65 people

July 31, 2015 9:28 AM

It is still possible in Park Slope, for example, to rent a duplex with a garden for $200 a month, a half-block from the subway [...] Hundreds of people are discovering that Brooklyn has become the Sane Alternative: a part of New York where you can live a decent urban life without going broke, where you can educate your children without having the income of an Onassis, a place where it is still possible to see the sky, and all of it only 15 minutes from Wall Street.

"Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative", Pete Hamill, 1969
posted by griphus (52 comments total)

Enormous sad face.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:31 AM on July 31, 2015 [6 favorites]

Just FYI the inflation calculator says $200 in '69 is about $1300 today.
posted by griphus at 9:32 AM on July 31, 2015 [11 favorites]

I did a double take on the $200/month until I saw that it was 1969. Around that time, I rented a whole house two blocks from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. for $200 a month, and then moved to San Francisco and got a huge two-bedroom apartment for $200 a month on the south side of Nob Hill. In both places, even if you were making minimum wage you could afford your share of the rent.
posted by beagle at 9:37 AM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

...so slightly more affordable than much of Boulder, CO, ca. 2015.

:(
posted by brennen at 9:38 AM on July 31, 2015

It blows me away that one borough of New York can be bigger than the entire metro area of my city.
posted by octothorpe at 9:39 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's funny because our real estate is being manipulated by foreign billionaires so they can hide oil and arms dealing money and our neighborhoods are being being slowly strangled and emptied in favor of empty condos no one will ever live in and the price Will never go down for.
posted by The Whelk at 9:45 AM on July 31, 2015 [24 favorites]

Whatever I don't think it's that big a deal that rents have gone up over 1000% since wages have gone up at the same rate.

Oh wait.
posted by windbox at 9:47 AM on July 31, 2015 [20 favorites]

An Australian Cartoonist Explains Brooklyn
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:50 AM on July 31, 2015 [10 favorites]

I did a double take on the $200/month until I saw that it was 1969. Around that time, I rented a whole house two blocks from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. for $200 a month, and then moved to San Francisco and got a huge two-bedroom apartment for $200 a month on the south side of Nob Hill. In both places, even if you were making minimum wage you could afford your share of the rent.

1968 was the peak of the minimum wage's purchasing power at $10.34/hr while 1969 is the second highest year in purchasing power at $9.81/hr.

Funny that.
posted by Talez at 9:50 AM on July 31, 2015 [10 favorites]

It blows me away that one borough of New York can be bigger than the entire metro area of my city.

Oh, yeah - if Brooklyn seceded from the rest of New York City, it would still be the fourth largest city in the US.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:54 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

It blows me away that one borough of New York can be bigger than the entire metro area of my city.

If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the fourth largest city in America. Number 1? The rest of New York.

People not from NY tend to have a hard time grokking how really massive the city is.
posted by Itaxpica at 9:55 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

JINX, Itaxpica!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:56 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

An alternative take from 1905.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 9:59 AM on July 31, 2015 [6 favorites]

There's a famous neon sign in Seattle's Pioneer Square, which is right downtown, alternately hip and gritty, depending on the hour of the day, with condos going for big numbers.

The sign reads, "Rooms: 75 cents."

The sign was installed in the late 60s.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:03 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

There's one county in California that is larger than the four smallest states combined, larger than the nine largest states individually, and still has fewer people in it than Brooklyn
posted by LionIndex at 10:04 AM on July 31, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm paying $1275 for a 1BR in Queens, 45 minutes out from Manhattan by the Subway, so I'm getting a kick out of this thread.

And also getting depressed. If I didn't have to worry about taking my NYC-native partner with me, I'd fuck off back to Philly where rents are at least slightly more reasonable in places not so far from where the action is.
posted by SansPoint at 10:13 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

According to the numbers here and here:

• Manhattan has roughly the same population as Philadelphia.
• The Bronx has roughly the same population as Phoenix.
• Brooklyn has roughly the same population as Chicago.
• Queens has roughly the same population as Houston.
• Staten Island has roughly the same population as Kansas City.

I couldn't get the numbers to match up exactly, so the above has a margin of error of Hartford, Connecticut.
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:17 AM on July 31, 2015 [36 favorites]

There's one county in California that is larger than the four smallest states combined, larger than the nine largest states individually, and still has fewer people in it than Brooklyn

Pffft. The Division of Durack is 1,587,758 square km (613,036.8 sq mi) and has a population of 90,000. Twice the size of Texas and its a single electoral district.

I love making fun of Texans about how tiny their state is.
posted by Talez at 10:17 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

I say we make a stand and do it 19th century style and start annexing shit. Hoboken is basically what Brooklyn was, let's grab it! west jester too, snag that tax base and make the billionaires pay. More city! More future!
posted by The Whelk at 10:21 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

weeps silently into artisinal cocktail
posted by the_blizz at 10:21 AM on July 31, 2015 [5 favorites]

I pay $850 a month ($800 in the winter, since heating costs go up) for a two-bedroom house with a living room, a big kitchen, a nice full bathroom, a little backyard, and two off-street parking spaces. The landlord lets me keep my big dog and my little piano here, too. I'm two blocks from the bus stop, three blocks from the supermarket, and four blocks from a large state university; and my city has more parkland than any other city in America, so there are a ton of places nearby for my dog to run around at. I don't even own a car.

Albuquerque is actually pretty nice when I consider the alternatives.
posted by koeselitz at 10:27 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

by public transit i mean it actually has to functionally be enough to get anywhere in the whole city. not like the LA subway or something.

i know the big coastal cities in China have insane housing costs, relative to what a well-paid professional makes there. (let alone the average Chinese person.) Likewise Japan. everywhere in western Europe obviously.

I honestly think it might just be that there are way more people now.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:30 AM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Albuquerque is actually pretty nice when I consider the alternatives."

Yeah, but the rabbits there don't seem to be able to turn left.
posted by I-baLL at 10:33 AM on July 31, 2015 [14 favorites]

larger than the nine largest states individually

Shit, I meant smallest states, obviously.
posted by LionIndex at 10:48 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love making fun of Texans about how tiny their state is.
Talez

I'm from Texas, and learned to my surprise when I moved to D.C. that Alaskans apparently have a big chip on their shoulder about state size. Their state is larger, but no one ever thinks of them, which apparently makes them very bitter.

I was out at a group dinner that included two Alaskans, and they started riffing me about their state being bigger. It happened again with some Alaskans I met when I moved to NYC.

It was very strange, because it's completely one-sided. While living in Texas no one ever gave a thought to Alaska, which I guess is the source of said chip. It reminded me of when I was going to UT Austin and would meet Texas A&M students. A&M is supposed to be UT's rival, but in my experience no one at UT really cares all that much about the "rivalry", yet the A&M students are always super intense about it.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:50 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

Based purely on watching Breaking Bad, what's considered "parkland" in the ABQ has less water in all of it than a single Triscuit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:07 AM on July 31, 2015 [10 favorites]

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

You can buy a pretty decent 2-bedroom apartment in Medellín for $32,000. A really fancy house for $130,000. Bogotá prices are similar. Professional wages are very low here, though.
posted by zjacreman at 11:15 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's one county in California that is larger than the four smallest states combined, larger than the nine largest states individually, and still has fewer people in it than Brooklyn

I'm sorry but there's no way this puny county is bigger than the state of Alaska

I'm from Texas, and learned to my surprise when I moved to D.C. that Alaskans apparently have a big chip on their shoulder about state size.

...whoops.

(dad worked for the national guard fixing planes and helicopters so I lived in Alaska as a wee lad)
posted by Gymnopedist at 11:41 AM on July 31, 2015

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don'lot have too damn high rents?

Pretty much anywhere in the rust belt, for varying values of "functional" transit. And if you include buses.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:53 AM on July 31, 2015

Berlin, for starters...
posted by the_blizz at 11:54 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

No, and here's why there never will be.

The definition of the cool urban lifestyle you describe is that the place is desirable on its face for multiple reasons. NYC, Paris, London, SF, etc, are all seen as good places to live. People want to live there. People don't want to live in Detroit, even if you shazamed it with the greatest public transit in the world and a hip art scene.

Then it's a matter of supply and demand. With a more or less fixed amount of supply (we're not making more real estate in Manhattan), if demand spikes, then prices will rise.

But wait, you say. With good public transit, with good development (relaxing regs in SF that prevent vertical development), you could increase the effective supply. Prices fall, right?

Except that won't happen, because:
* The people that own the existing supply create barriers to entry and barriers to competition (e.g. the aforementioned SF development regs).
* Overriding the will of the people that own the supply often reduces the perceived value of properties (e.g. one of the reasons there's limited SF development is the fear that any development will detract from the character of the city, which is why it's desireable in the first place. On the one hand, you ought not plow over the historic bungalows to build apartment towers that block the sun. On the other hand, gentrification)
* Public transit has to happen in the same place the housing is. That means removing housing to build roads and trains, or expensive tunneling beneath cities, or pulling up roads to lay light rail, or filling the roads with buses). There's always going to be a cost that has to be funded by someone. Which means taxing the people in the city (who often don't want development), or taxing the people outside the city (and why would Spokane pay for light rail in Seattle?).

So, what's the solution?

Make it easier for people to turn "marginal" cities into better places to live.

What would it take to make you want to live in Detroit? What combination of goods, services, taxes, education, art, employment, etc, would turn Detroit into Paris-on-Lake-Erie?

And more importantly, who wants to go first? :-)
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:08 PM on July 31, 2015 [5 favorites]

And if you include some of northern NJ, Hudson County has about the population of Baltimore, in less space. Jersey City alone has roughly the same population as Orlando, Florida.

Or comparing to US states, add Hudson county as "Vermont" between Wyoming and Idaho.
posted by fings at 12:32 PM on July 31, 2015

I don't think there are too many similarities between 1969 and 2015. Inflation was very high during all of Nixon's time in office and the Fed's moribund attempts to control it with a restrictive money supply kept housing prices low and borrowing expensive. It's pretty much the complete opposite today.
posted by three blind mice at 1:12 PM on July 31, 2015

There's one county in California that is larger than the four smallest states combined, larger than the nine largest states individually, and still has fewer people in it than Brooklyn

Like ROU_Xenophobe, I was pretty skeptical that California had a county that was bigger than Alaska, so I looked it up. Here's the actual statistic, emphasis mine:

San Bernadino County is "larger than each of the nine smallest states [and] larger than the four smallest states combined."

Which makes a lot more sense, though I think a clearer way of putting it would be that it's "larger than the four smallest states combined, and if it were a state would be the 10th largest in the country." (And if it were a country, it would the 72nd largest in the world!)
posted by Ian A.T. at 1:12 PM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

While we're arbitrarily pointing out the size of things, Alaska is pretty damn big.
posted by T.D. Strange at 1:17 PM on July 31, 2015

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

I'm keeping my eyes open! Maybe Mexico City? Berlin seems to be affordable - I've read that Germany doesn't base their economy on real estate, and this prevents the mad speculation we see in other cities. I wish I knew enough about economics that I could explore this further.

What would it take to make you want to live in Detroit? What combination of goods, services, taxes, education, art, employment, etc, would turn Detroit into Paris-on-Lake-Erie?

Detroit is either too hot or too cold, and it's much too flat. It's surrounded by a soul-crushing grid of suburban emptiness. People can sell it as the next hip place all they like - I just can't see it happening.

I would only move back if:
- The metro region deals with it's race issues.
- They improve regional transportation links. I want good trains to London, Toronto, Tobermory, Traverse City, Lake Michigan, Tawas, Saugatuck, Mackinack, Chicago, etc. I would want places to escape to on the weekends!
- They replace the acres of toxic rubble with trees and parks and farms
- There were less guns on the streets
posted by kanewai at 1:27 PM on July 31, 2015

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

Pittsburgh is more or less walkable and rents are getting pretty expensive lately but it's still pretty cheap to buy a house here.
posted by octothorpe at 1:32 PM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

Housing in big Japanese cities is actually rather affordable from what I've heard. And public transport is obviously excellent.
posted by pravit at 2:43 PM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

For example this site claims 1br in Tokyo city center costs only 150,000 yen/mo which seems insanely low to me (compared to paying 3000/mo in Manhattan which is accurate), even taking into account how much the yen has weakened vs. the dollar. Rents in Osaka are apparently half that. And I think both of those cities feel more urban than NYC does.
posted by pravit at 2:48 PM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

What would it take to make you want to live in Detroit?

The relatively imminent immersion of places like NYC, I guess.
posted by busted_crayons at 2:50 PM on July 31, 2015

For anyone else whose brain got stuck trying to reconcile the headline with reality, the ... is "born in America." Brooklyn is big but it's not *that* big.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 3:38 PM on July 31, 2015

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

Berlin

Also quite a few other cities in Europe are not too bad. Smaller cities in France and Germany can be pretty reasonable.
posted by sien at 5:24 PM on July 31, 2015 [3 favorites]

Re : Alaska versus San Bernardino County. The county is large in the sense of absolute population, not land area. SBC is only the fifth most populous county in California and is, of course, dwarfed by LA County.
If we consider population density, things get weird fast because of the way areas incorporate - number one is Gutenberg, New Jersey, which only has 11,000 people but they're crammed into a fifth of a square mile. Manhattan is the densest borough. Brooklyn is an order of magnitude more dense than LA County, and is about four times more dense than the city of Los Angeles.
posted by gingerest at 5:41 PM on July 31, 2015

Affordable safe urban setting, you say? Hamilton, ON.
posted by tivalasvegas at 5:50 PM on July 31, 2015

* Public transit has to happen in the same place the housing is. That means removing housing to build roads and trains, or expensive tunneling beneath cities, or pulling up roads to lay light rail, or filling the roads with buses). There's always going to be a cost that has to be funded by someone. Which means taxing the people in the city (who often don't want development), or taxing the people outside the city (and why would Spokane pay for light rail in Seattle?).

I can't imagine this happening anywhere in our current I Got Mine era. Some kind of seismic political or economic shift would probably have to occur before there was an appetite for this kind of governance.
posted by cotton dress sock at 6:20 PM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Affordable safe urban setting, you say? Hamilton, ON.

My wife and I had to find a new place to live last summer. Our tiny two-bedroom duplex we were renting for $1,400/mo was sold for almost $400,000. It sold in a day.

We're paying $1,600/mo for a bigger but older place just off Locke St., which is an expensive area, but we're pleased with it. Of course we pay for all the utilities as well. We spent three months looking for something less expensive that had good transit connections and was in a neighbourhood where you could walk to at least some interesting places. We couldn't find anything.

I love Hamilton, but I'm not sure I'd call the prices affordable if you're not making a fair bit of money, unless want to live in a crappy apartment, or want to live in suburban hell.

If you know of secret spots in Hamilton that are affordable and urban then please let me know!
posted by alaaarm at 6:47 PM on July 31, 2015

Well, some friends and I paid $800 for a three bedroom house near Wentworth/Barton (30 minute walk from the downtown core) some years ago, and I had numerous low-income friends who were able to find decent affordable housing -- but maybe the Torontoization of the city has been more robust than I'd thought. (I lost my visa and moved back to the States in 2009.)
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:01 PM on July 31, 2015

are there any cities on the whole planet Earth that have the usual public-transit-walkable-urban lifestyle that don't have too damn high rents?

by public transit i mean it actually has to functionally be enough to get anywhere in the whole city. not like the LA subway or something.

Yeah, as others have said, Berlin. Most of the former East Germany too. Leipzig you can get a three bedroom apartment in the city centre for about $1000 USD a month, or a one bedroom for about $400. There aren't so many jobs available in the former East, though, and the wages tend to be lower, but the standard of living is still pretty damn high, and you don't have any of the crazy high healthcare or education costs you find in the USA.
posted by lollusc at 7:03 PM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Not that it wasn't a crappy post-university house, mind you, but the point is that normal people with normal jobs were able to afford normal houses at normal prices in our reasonably safe area.
posted by tivalasvegas at 7:03 PM on July 31, 2015

It blows me away that one borough of New York can be bigger than the entire metro area of my city.

Brooklyn alone has well over half the population of this entire state. I've lived and worked in rural areas long enough now that the idea of being crammed into a tiny area with millions of people sounds like absolute hell, but I'm also aware of the cultural, culinary, and other things that make dense urban living valuable.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:58 PM on July 31, 2015

I have a hard time wrapping my head around these crazy rents people pay. $3000 a month for a one bedroom apartment?

For about $1200 a month, I'm renting a 1750 sq. ft. two-story house on the outskirts of Indianapolis with three bedrooms, a loft , 2 1/2 baths, family and living rooms, a two car garage, and a fairly big yard. It is a perfectly ordinary middle-class house on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood. If I were paying a mortgage, it would probably be around $1000 a month. There are lots of places in the Midwest (and apparently Albuquerque) where I could pay less.

Maybe Indianapolis doesn't have the cachet of Manhattan or San Francisco, but consider this: I have a high-tech permanent job as a Ruby on Rails developer. Computers work the same here as they do everywhere else. Not convinced? Here's another thing: my son might have left the back door unlocked tonight when he let our dog out (we also have three cats.) We've talked about this, but he forgets. I'm probably not going downstairs to check it, because I don't really need to.
posted by double block and bleed at 1:14 AM on August 1, 2015

Yes, how much more enlightened you are to be living in a place which is cheaper.

How foolish we are - why, it's almost as if there aren't any other possible reasons to choose a particular city to live in, like the political makeup, the climate, the quality of the public transit, a job that can only be found in that particular location, family connections, the calibre of museums and theater - why, fie on all of that, for clearly the only factors to consider when selecting a place to live are rent and the ability to forget to lock your door.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:45 PM on August 1, 2015 [16 favorites]