For the past four years we’ve been living together, Jess and I have been in the apartment she rightly calls my former bachelor pad. So we’ve been looking, for a while, for a next place to live.

As of now, we don’t have kids. But, in the next few years, we’re likely to pop out a first. Which adds a whole new level of complication to the search. Ideally, we’d find a two bedroom. But if we’re looking to buy, rather than rent, here in Manhattan, nice two bedroom / two baths easily creep up to the $2m mark. Which is, obviously, ridiculous. And while Brooklyn is cheaper, it isn’t hugely so.

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of schools – New York being a place where parents unblinkingly spend $30k a year to send their child to pre-school, though only after having pulled strings and competed for slots in the “right” ones.

In the rest of the country, this is the prime argument for the suburbs. And, indeed, 25 years ago, someone with kids in Manhattan (aside from multi-generationally wealthy New York families who send their kids as legacies to Chapin) would have already moved out. Staying in the city meant having essentially failed; the nice house in the suburbs was the overt goal.

Amongst my peers, however, the equation has flipped. We apparently all want to stay. Moving to the suburbs is, it seems, an admission of defeat, a sign you couldn’t make it in the city.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work in this new world order. While more and more of us want in rather than out, the number of two and three bedroom apartments, and the number of slots in good schools, has remained largely the same.

But the suburbs of New York are equally problematic. Most, for example, are a surprisingly long commute away. Unlike other US metros, that are now populating their first wave of suburbs, New York is working on it’s second or third. It could be argued that New York, in fact, largely invented the suburb, with families initially moving on up to outer Queens and Brooklyn, upper Bronx, or Staten Island.

By now, however, Sunnyside or Yonkers have long since reached their peak, and starkly declined. So the real estate that would elsewhere hold prime post-city living has instead become no-mans-land, thirty minutes of commute to be passed through. (Though perhaps this isn’t entirely new, but simply enlarged, since Fitzgerald trained past the ‘valley of ashes’, en route to the ‘East Egg’ of Great Neck eighty years back.)

As a result, even New York hedge fund partners pay good money to commute to lower Connecticut, as much as an hour and a half each way.

And with most of those suburbs, there’s the issue of what you find when you get there. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA; Jess in Newton, MA. While both are ostensibly suburbs, they’re more accurately small cities that just happen to be near larger cities (San Francisco and Boston, respectively). Whereas many suburbs of New York are really suburbs. The two restaurants they have close at 9:00. On the plus side, they don’t have a Starbucks; and, on the downside, they don’t have a Starbucks.

All of which leaves Jess and me without much of a clue what to do next. We’re busy looking, weighing the advantages of a grocery store down the block against not finding somebody else’s underwear somehow mixed in with your laundry after a trip to the building’s ill-maintained laundry facility.
Fortunately, as demand and property taxes are working against us no matter what we choose, at least we’ll find a way to pay more than it’s worth for a solution that’s less optimal than it would be anywhere else. God bless New York.