Final Thoughts on the “Move to SUMA”: Was Moving to the Suburbs the Right Decision?

June 22, 2017 by

Eight years ago today, I moved out of the city.  I was 41 years old. I had lived in New York City since 1992, for most of 17 years, and was horrified about how moving to the suburbs of my youth was going to destroy my urban sensibility, and turn me into another colorless suburban drone.  The whole conceit of the “Move to SUMA” was the inside joke that “SUMA” was just another Manhattan neighborhood, that I needed to convince myself that I wasn’t actually moving into the suburbs if I wanted to survive.

So for the past eight years or so, I’ve written about the good and the bad about living in the suburbs. I wrote about all my stereotypical suburban experiences — like getting a dog, buying an SUV, having a child, trying to find decent takeout food – and some less-than-stereotypical adventures, like when I almost killed my poor dog, or virtually destroyed my new boat.  Over time, I’ve also come to be a bit more of an advocate for the suburbs, almost to “validate” my decision — sometimes jokingly by pointing to all the celebrities allegedly joining me in suburban splendor, and other times more seriously to defend my new home from critics who argue that the suburbs are dying.  

But as I came to this anniversary of my move out of the city, I realized that I’d never come right out to say whether I think I made the right decision to move to the suburbs. So let me make that clear: as much as it pains me to admit it, moving to the suburbs was the right call.

In fact, looking back, I’m surprised that it was a close decision at all. I’d had 17 years in the city, was looking to raise a family, and in my case my job was actually already in the suburbs.  And the more I look at the life I was actually living, the sacrifices I was making to maintain my self-perception as a smart, sophisticated city person were just too great. Frankly, it would have been monstrously selfish and unfair to try to navigate through the next phase of my life, as a parent, while still clinging desperately to that urban vanity.

For other people, the calculus might be different. If you don’t have kids, or you have enough personal wealth to provide enough space for those kids, or your work requires you to maintain that intimate urban sensibility, then maybe it makes sense to stay in the city.  I’m certainly not going to second-guess anyone making that choice, particularly since it’s the choice I made for so long.

The longer I live in the suburbs, though, the more I realize that it was the right choice for me at that stage in my life. Like many people, the decision to move from the city is bound up in the decision to simply “grow up” – to get married, have kids, settle down.  It’s tough to separate one from the other.  Would I have moved from the city if I wasn’t married, or not planning to have a kid?  Maybe not.  But then I’d also have to think about the life I would have today as a 49 year old single childless man living in Manhattan, and whether that’s the life I want for myself.  That’s not a particularly pretty picture.

Moreover, I’m finding it increasingly tough to separate out my longing for the city from the general romanticizing about the life I had when I was younger.  That is, do I really miss the city, or do I just miss being the 25 year old, or even 35 year old, me who happened to live in the city — not married, no dog, no kid?   Basically, without a whole lot of responsibility and at the beginning, rather than middle, of my career?   Yes, I miss the freedom I had when I was 30 to get together with my friends Tom and Woody on a random night to play some pool and drink some beer.  But then I have to remember that they both moved out of the city years before me.  That life ended long before I moved to the suburbs.

I think that’s the challenge that anyone thinking of moving to the suburbs has to face.  Don’t think about the life you had in the city, and how living in the suburbs is going to change it.  Rather, think about the life you are looking to have, and where it makes more sense to try to have that life.

I started writing this blog to address the question of whether living in the suburbs would change me.  But that’s the wrong way to put it.  The better question is this: how will I change while I’m living in the suburbs?  The change is going to happen regardless of where you get your mail. It’s going to happen the first time you look around and realize that you’re the oldest guy in the club, or when you have a party and realize that all your friends have to drive in from their new homes, or when you realize that you can’t take cabs around the city with your baby in your lap.  The suburbs don’t change you.  You change.

And that change can sometimes be hard to accept.  You don’t want to be the guy with the two SUVs, and the Costco membership, whose nightlife revolves around game night with the other parents.  You want to be that other guy, the cool guy who still goes to Arlene’s to hear bands and chat up 25 year olds with navel rings.  But you’re not that guy anymore, not because you moved out of the city, but because that guy simply got older.  You can make the choice to stay in the city, but you don’t get the choice to be young again.  The question is whether you’re willing to accept the life you’re actually living, and give up the life that you’re living only in your head.

The mistake all us urban exiles make is that we compare our lives in the suburbs to the lives we had at the moment we left the city, a life experience captured at a perfectly romanticized point in time and lovingly encased in amber.  And then we flog ourselves mercilessly for all the compromises we’ve made and everything we’ve given up —  i.e., “can you believe I drive a minivan?” – without recognizing how many of those compromises were simply the inevitable result of, well, growing up.

And that’s what it’s really about – growing up. As I wrote once in a riff on an old Winston Churchill quote: ”If you’re not living in the city at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not living in the suburbs at forty you have no brain.”  I lived in the city for much of my 20s and most of my 30s, and that was right.  But now that I’m in my 40s, approaching my fifties I can’t imagine what life would be like for me if I was still living in a fourth floor walkup with a 18 month old kid and a dog.

Okay, I can imagine it.  Horrible.

But I can’t blame the suburbs.  The suburbs didn’t do this to me. The suburbs didn’t make me an uncool dad who goes out maybe once a month and drives a seven-seater crossover. For better or worse, I did it to myself. I just happened to live in the suburbs when I did it.

So this is probably it for the “Move to SuMa” blog. I’ve enjoyed writing here from time to time over the past seven years, chronicling my struggle adapting to suburban life.  But, for better or worse, that adaptation is over. The conversion is complete.  I found my “SuMa,” and, although it’s not what I expected, it’s pretty good.

So I probably won’t be writing more in this space.  But I’ll leave the blog here for anyone else who might be going through that process, who might be dreading their own move to the suburbs, to let them know the simple truth — it’s not so bad. Really.

Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

Thoughts on the New “Quasi-Urban Suburbia” — What Do “Millennials,” “Young Professionals,” and “Empty-Nesters” All Have in Common?

December 19, 2016 by

It’s funny.  When I started writing this blog about my experiences moving from the city to the suburbs about seven (!) years ago, I thought my desire to retain a certain urban sensibility was unusual.

After all, I’d seen my city friends leave for the glories of suburbia, one after another, without ever apparently looking back.  So I sort of thought that my desire to maintain a walkable, urbanist lifestyle, my own “SUMA,” was unique, almost quixotic.

But either I just wasn’t tuned in to the world around me, or I was a bit ahead of my time.  Because now I keep reading how developers are trying to build multi-use, multi-family suburban communities that retain a certain urban sensibility.  Here’s an article from this week in the Times by Marcela Susan Fischler:

Some suburbs around New York City are becoming decidedly less suburban, as new apartment buildings and condominium communities close to mass transithelp expand the downtowns of these villages and towns. Multifamily housing is also popping up near highways and main thoroughfares.

Young professionals seeking more space than they can afford in Manhattan or Brooklyn, empty nesters looking to downsize and leave the snow shoveling to others and, to a lesser extent, millennials moving out of their parents’ basements are leading the charge to a more urbanized suburbia.

What’s interesting is not just that people are looking for that urban experience in the suburbs, but the TYPES of people looking for it.  As the Times notes, it’s not just millennials who are loathe to give up the urban lifestyle — we’re also seeing the appeal to “young professionals” and “empty-nesters.”

Now, of course, one of my main themes in this blog is that NO ONE who lives in a city  ever WANTS to move to the traditional suburbs, any more than people WANT to buy a minivan.  It’s a choice borne out of circumstance (or even desperation) when you have kids and you simply have to accept that you have to give up the urban amenities for a more child-friendly lifestyle.

That is, think about what “millennials,” “young professionals,” and “empty-nesters” all mostly have in common — NO KIDS. And that makes sense. If it’s just you, or you and your new spouse, or you and the spouse you’ve had for a while, then a two-bedroom with no back yard but with a short walk to trains and downtown makes a lot of sense.  Once you have a couple of kids, though, and that second kid is sleeping in a closet, and they’re driving you ABSOLUTELY FREAKING CRAZY when you’re cooped up with them all day, then you’re going to want a bigger place.  Go break things outside for a while, kids!

So what’s my point? That there are limits to this new urbanist suburbia, and that it’s not a replacement for the traditional suburbia, at least not for the vast majority of people who decide to move (however reluctantly) to the suburbs in the first place. And as much as I absolutely love that developers are responding to urban exiles who want to retain at least some of that lifestyle, I don’t think it means the end to the traditional suburb.

Anyway, tradeoffs do not have to be absolute.  I gave up my 2,000 square foot apartment on the Upper West when my wife and I decided to have kids, but I’ve retained at least a semblance of my former life by finding a place that’s a seven-minute easy walk to the downtown of Nyack.  I don’t have the full suburban experience of a one-acre lot and all that, but I’ve got a backyard and a small pool.  And I’m surrounded by people with that same sensibility, who are willing to take that same “half-step” of moving to the suburbs, getting the bigger house, but keeping just a touch of that walkable urban sensibility.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

Will We See a New “Exodus”?

July 5, 2016 by

Are home prices in the New York City suburbs on the rise?

We’re not seeing it in the data just yet.  Even with home sales up pretty robustly for the past five years, home prices in the Manhattan suburbs have been relatively flat since their financial crisis correction back in 2008-2010.  At some point, you have to think that increasing demand with a flat supply is going to drive prices up — just basic Economics 101.

And here’s another theory that bolsters the idea that the suburbs are due for some price appreciation.  Conor Sen in Bloomberg View argues that demand for homes in the suburbs is likely to surge in the next few years, driven largely by the simple fact that big-city housing prices are out of whack. Indeed, he analogizes big cities to large cap stocks and suburbs (and smaller cities) to small-cap stocks (this is Bloomberg, after all — everything is about equities….), and thinks that the housing market is like the stock market in the late 1990s, when large caps were overvalued and due for a fall relative to small caps.

Why? Well, basically, two reason.  First, home prices in the big cities across this county have soared in the past few years, and at some point people are going to decide that they just don’t want to pay that much to live in Manhattan or San Francisco or wherever.  And second, he sees the internet driving job mobility:

The conventional wisdom that the internet would allow people and jobs to leave primary metro areas for secondary ones has run up against the fact that over the past 20 years the opposite has occurred. There are a few problems with this argument. First, at the height of the last housing boom the impact of the internet on daily lives was still quite small. The only people with smartphones were business users who had BlackBerrys. Cloud technology was still in its infancy. For most people, the internet was still a desktop-computer- and email-based experience. Now, with a labor market approaching full employment and the housing market nearing a normal recovery, it would be fair to evaluate the question of whether people will move. And the evidence suggests they will.

Certainly, this makes sense in the New York area, where Manhattan prices have risen dramatically in the past ten years compared to pricing in the surrounding suburbs.  To give you an idea of how the market has changed, let’s compare the average sales prices for Manhattan and some of the surrounding suburbs in the past ten years.

First, Manhattan. According to the market reports put out by the Corcoran Group, the average Manhattan home is now priced about 60% higher than it was ten years ago in 2006.  Here are the numbers, with links to the market reports:

Now, let’s look at what’s happened with pricing in some of the surrounding markets over the past ten years. We have done a quarterly market report every quarter for about 15 years for the New York suburbs, so we can get the data there:

Westchester County:

  • 2006Q2:$938,825
  • 2016Q2: $841,549
  • Difference: -$97,276 (-10.4%)

Rockland County

  • 2006Q2: $567,277
  • 2016Q2: $465,795
  • Difference: -$101,482 (-17.9%)

Orange County 

  • 2006Q2:$351,538
  • 2016Q2: $228,037
  • Difference: -$123,501 (-35.1%)

Putnam County

  • 2006Q2:$483605
  • 2016Q2: $362,584
  • Difference: -$121,021 (-25.0%)

In other words, while the average price in Manhattan is up almost 60%, the pricing in the New York suburbs is down between 10% (Westchester) and 35% (Orange).

And it’s the same in the New Jersey suburbs to the west of Manhattan.  We don’t have market reports going back as far in that county, but we do have the calendar year average prices going back that far.  So here’s a comparison of the average price for the past rolling year ending in June, and the calendar year price in 2006:

Bergen County

  • 2006 (calendar year): $680,313
  • 2016Q2 (rolling year): $569,484
  • Difference: -$110,829 (-16.2%)

Passaic County

  • 2006 (calendar year): $396,703
  • 2016Q2 (rolling year): $312,000
  • Difference: -$84,703 (-21.3%)

Same thing: while Manhattan is up almost 60%, Bergen is down 16% and Passaic is down over 21%

And how about the eastern suburbs — i.e., Long Island?  We don’t cover that market, so I don’t have market reports handy, but if you look on Zillow’s median price index, you can see that the median prices (not the average) in Nassau and Suffolk Counties have done the following:

Nassau County

  • August 2006 Median Price: $510,000
  • August 2016 Median Price: $469,000
  • Difference: -41,000 (-8.0%).

Suffolk County

  • August 2006 Median Price: $447,000
  • August 2016 Median Price: $343,000
  • Difference: -104,000 (-23.2%).

You have to be a little careful comparing averages to medians, but the trend is still pretty clear: Manhattan is up, and all the surrounding suburbs are down.

So does that bear out the thesis that home prices in these suburbs are due?  Maybe.  Certainly, it’s amazing how well Manhattan has done over the past ten years, rising almost 60% while the surrounding suburbs are down.  And it’s puzzling that this kind of rampant appreciation has had little or no impact on suburbs that are right on the border.

Think of it this way: back in 2006, the average price of a Manhattan home was $1,25M, which was 33% higher than the average priced home in Westchester.  Today, the average Manhattan home is almost $2.0M, which is 137% higher than the average priced home in Westchester.  That seems a little nuts.

Now, it might just be that the imbalance could be corrected in another way — Manhattan prices could just go down, rather than suburban prices going up.  But I think that we have good reasons to be optimistic about suburban pricing.  We have a strengthening economy, low interest rates, good employment, and a lot of twentysomethings who can’t afford a home in Manhattan and are likely to start looking outside the city in the next few years.

 

Filed Under: My Life in the Suburbs

Millennials will move to the suburbs when they’re ready, just like everyone else…

May 5, 2016 by

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As an early Gen-Xer, I have to roll my eyes every time I see a think piece about Millennials and what they want out of life.  The Gen-X curse is to grow up in the shadow of the the most solipsistic generation in history, the Baby Boomers, and now in middle age to endure the entitled brats they raised.

And so we see it again in a recent article in my local suburban newspaper about — wait for it — what local suburbs are doing to attract Millennials to live there:

Faced with aging populations, stagnant post-“great recession” economies and static or declining tax bases, local villages, towns and cities are eyeing millennials and young professionals as potential saviors. It’s the same story across the nation as communities look for ways to attract 18- to 34-year-olds.

With an estimated 75.4 million people in that age group, the Pew Research Center says millennials surpassed the nation’s 74.9 million baby boomers last year, making them the largest generation in the U.S. Their numbers alone suggest that millennials will soon drive the economy and culture, and that the communities they choose to call home will reap the benefits.

So what are these suburbs doing to try to attract 20-somethings to come live there?  All the stuff that, say, people like me would have liked 20 years ago, the stuff that 20-somethings ALWAYS like: affordable rental apartments, nightlife, restaurants, entertainment, recreation, hiking trails, mass transit to the city.

I mean, are they hiring EXPERTS to tell them this, that young people want affordable housing?  That young people want restaurants and nightlife?  Do we really need a focus group of Millennial Panelists to tell us that they like going out at night?

My god, these people drive me crazy.  There’s nothing special about them, nothing new in the attitude that they want to live in the city and hate the idea of moving to the suburbs.  These 25 year olds are like all 25 year olds, going back to when the suburbs were invented.

Let me save everyone a lot of time and money: Millennials will move to the suburbs when they grow up, just like everyone else.  

So stop wasting your time.  You’re never going to get a 25 year-old to move from the greatest city in the world just because you have an artisanal “home-decor shop that purveys mono floral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily.”  No matter what they do in New Rochelle, or Mount Vernon, or Dobbs Ferry, or Hastings, they’re never going to create anything that’s more than the faintest, palest imitation of what Millennials can get in Manhattan. And why settle for downtown White Plains when you have the real thing 20 miles away?

If you don’t believe me, here’s what a Millennial herself had to say about these efforts:

Developers try to convince millennials of the “value” of these new luxury developments by installing high-end appliances, but value isn’t just having a dishwasher and Sub-Zero fridge. They also try to recreate the convenience of New York City by building “urban villages,” but, to me, transit-oriented, mixed-use developments are little more than ersatz recreations of what comes naturally in big cities. All the amenities might be there, but, at the end of the day, they’re just another suburban development that feels too sterile and artificial, closer in spirit to a retirement community than somewhere a person in their 20s wants to live. And really, if all I wanted was to live in an overpriced, luxury apartment on a block with an artisanal coffee shop that’s not too far from a train station, I’d live in Manhattan.

If you can get past the self-centeredness of a 25 year old typical of a generation taught by their Baby Boomer parents that Galileo was wrong, you can see the problem.  There is absolutely nothing that developers or planners can do to attract young people to the suburbs by trying to compete with the city.

Millennials, like all other young people, are only going to move from the city if one of two things happen.

First, they’ll move if they can’t afford it. And mostly they can’t, not anymore. When I was 25, my first apartment in the city was $700 a month for a studio on 34th street right above the Lincoln Tunnel, which represented about 30% of my monthly income.  You know what that studio rents for right now?  $400,000 a month.  Seriously.  It’s very expensive in the city.

Even then, though, young people will do anything to avoid moving to the suburbs. Even move to Brooklyn, which is basically a suburb but don’t tell anyone or you’ll kill the market.  And now they keep going deeper and deeper into Brooklyn until they eventually they’r going to realize that they’re living in Coney Island and it’s actually further from midtown than White Plains.

Second, they’ll move to the suburbs when they get married and have kids, and  realize that they need closet space.  After all, that’s basically why the suburbs were invented — as a place to settle down.

But here’s the good news for these suburban towns: Most people grow up.  The baby boomers thought the only time they’d go to the suburbs would be to dance in the mud at Woodstock, and they eventually settled most of the Hudson Valley.  Generation X never thought they’d move to the suburbs, and here I am.  And Millennials don’t think that they’ll ever move to the suburbs, but they will.

But not because they opened a new artisanal pickle shop in Dobbs Ferry.  They’re going to move to the suburbs for the same reason that everyone does — because babies make noise and you can’t sleep in the same room as them.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , ,

11 Reasons Why Ted Cruz Should Shut the Hell Up About “New York Values”

January 16, 2016 by

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Ted Cruz should just shut the hell up about “New York values.”

Seriously.  Not just because Donald Trump owned him in the Republican debate Thursday night by pointing to 9/11.  And not just because of the brutal hypocrisy of decrying New York values on the one hand, and on the other relying on New York money and undisclosed Goldman Sach “loans” to fund your campaign.

Rather, Cruz should just shut up because he’s wrong about New York values.  Indeed, even if you look only at the kinds of “traditional values” that Cruz reveres, New York actually blows out his home state of Canada Texas.

Now, let me be clear: I like Texas.  (And Canada, for that matter!)  Love the riverwalk, Austin is very nice, I like barbecue, big fan of Friday Night Lights.  All good stuff.  As a great New Yorker once said, “this isn’t personal, it’s business.”

But in Biblical terms, which he should understand, Cruz threw the first stone. So let’s see how Texas versus New York shakes out on traditional values like marriage, chastity, life, law-and-order, and charity:

1.  Texans are more likely to get divorced.

We start with one of the most fundamental of values: marriage. Now, Ted Cruz might not like ALL marriages — if you catch my subtle drift — but he certainly would say that getting, and staying, married shows a sound value system.  And yet, Texas has a higher divorce rate and more divorced people than New York, which actually has the second-lowest percentage of divorced residents in the country — after, you’ll never guess, New Jersey!.

2.  Texans are more likely to beat their wives.

Why are so many more Texas marriages breaking up? Maybe it’s because Texas has the eighth highest domestic violence rate in America, well above New York.  Seems to me that the “family value” of “not hitting your spouse” is setting the bar kind of low, but at least New York clears it, and Texas doesn’t.

3.  Texans are more likely to be sex offenders.

Speaking of setting the bar low, Texas has one of the highest rates of registered sex offenders in the country.  Indeed, according to Parents for Megans Law, Texas has the most registered sex offenders of any state in the country.  It’s not clear from the data whether Texas breeds sex offenders, or whether sex offenders from around the country flock to the state for the barbecue, warm weather, prevalence of white windowless vans, or what, but whatever the reason Texas, with only 40% more people, has over twice as many sex offenders as New York.

4.  Texas has a higher teen pregnancy rate….

I’m sure that Ted Cruz is a big proponent of chastity as a value, and Texas is also one of the country’s leading advocates of “abstinence-only” sex education teaching.  But it’s not working so well — Texas has the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country.

5.  …And a higher rate of births out-of-wedlock.

Abstinence strikes again — Texas has one of the highest rates of births to unmarried women in the country, much higher than in New York. Now, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with an unmarried woman having a baby, but my guess is that Ted Cruz probably does.  If so, he should do something about that.

6.  Texans don’t live as long.  

If you value “life,” then you should probably value a longer life than a shorter life.  And yet, New York outranks Texas on every indicator on lifespan, with a lower infant death rate and a longer life expectancy. Indeed, New Yorkers have the sixth-highest life expectancy in the country; Texas ranks 30th.

7.  Maybe that’s because Texas has a higher violent crime rate….

Okay, Texans get divorced more, diddle the kids more, get teens pregnant more, and die earlier. But, surely, Texas is safer, right? All those guns?  Not so much —  according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, Texas has a higher rate of violent crime than New York, including twice the rate of forcible rape. Shouldn’t “not raping people” count as one of those “values” Ted Cruz talks about?

8…And a higher murder rate…

Maybe it’s the heat. Or all that flatness. Or all the guns.  But Texas also has a vastly higher murder rate than New York.  Again, “not murdering people” seems kind of like an important value, almost like one of those “Commandments” that I read about somewhere.

9.  …And a higher suicide rate.

If Texans aren’t killing each other, they’re killing themselves — Texas has a much higher suicide rate than New York.  In fact, even with all those tall buildings and bridges, New York has the second-lowest suicide rate in the country!

10.  Finally, Texans care less for the needy…

Certainly, we can all agree that taking care of those less fortunate is a cornerstone of our values system.  Ted Cruz would probably call it “being a good Christian.” So why is it that even though Texas has a higher poverty rate than New York, Texans give less to charity than New Yorkers?

11.  ….And are more dependent on the federal government.

This one’s going to hurt.  Guess which of the two states gets more in federal tax dollars than it puts in?  Yeah, it’s Texas, which is one of those “taker” states, getting about $1.50 in federal money for every dollar of taxes paid.  Texans can thank New Yorkers for their generosity, since we pay more than we get — about 80 cents back on every tax dollar.  You’re welcome, Texas.  We know you need it more than us, with all those poor people who aren’t getting any charity….

So on all these measures, New York out-values Texas.  And that’s using only the “traditional” values that Ted Cruz is probably referring to: marriage, chastity, law-and-order, life, charity, all that stuff.  Let’s not even mention the values that might be considered more “partisan,” like how Texas is a bigger polluter, has more accidental gun deaths, is less tolerant, and, frankly, dumber. Okay, let’s sort of mention them.

Frankly, I would think that Ted Cruz wouldn’t want to remind voters that they’re making a choice between a Texan like him and a New Yorker like Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton, or even Brooklyn native Bernie Sanders!).  After all, both New York and Texas have a presidential track record, contributing presidents from both parties.  But Texas saddled us with LBJ and two Bushes, a dismal bipartisan record of two one-termers and another who has been disavowed by his own party.

How about New York?  Well, we didn’t get off to such a good start in the 19th century with Fillmore and Van Buren, but the 20th century track record was, ummm,  pretty good: two Roosevelts, one Republican, one Democrat, one on Mt. Rushmore, the other memorialized on the D.C. mall.

But Ted Cruz might not be aware of presidential history.  After all, they don’t study that so much in Calgary.

Joseph Rand is the author of the Move to SUMA blog about his experiences moving to the New York suburbs. The caricature is credited to DonkeyHotey, who identifies it as based on a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmore’s Flickr photo stream  and was found through a Google search of images licensed for non-commercial use.  If the photo is not available for non-commercial use, please advise and we will remove the picture. 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan Tagged With: , , ,

Are the Suburbs a Good Place to Grow Old? Not So Much…

February 4, 2013 by

A very funny piece in the Huffington Post last week by Jane Gross got me thinking about the possibility of growing old in the suburbs.  She writes about how getting the flu, and then having to deal with an infestation of rats in her home, made her realize that the suburbs might not be the best place for an older, single female:

People our age who choose to live alone belong in cities, with plentiful take-out food options, friends close by, and apartment building superintendents to deal with rats in the basement.

It raises an interesting question: should older people live in the suburbs, or should they move to the city?

Take my experience.  I’ve lived in the suburbs at two points in my life: first, when I was growing up as a kid, from ages 0 to 18, and then as an adult anticipating HAVING kids, from ages 42 til 45 (now).

For the most part, I think that’s kind of worked out.  I had the pretty stereotypical suburban life growing up: walking to school, my best friends all lived on my block, backyard baseball games, sports leagues, etc.  And now that I’m a parent, I kind of see the advantages of raising kids in the burbs — the convenience of having a car, better public schools, all that stuff.

And like a lot of people, I lived in the city during the “young and single” part of my life — Washington DC for college and law school, then mostly New York City (and a little San Francisco) for my 20s and 30s.  And that worked out for me as well.  I got to spend almost 20 years living in the big city, drinking muddled drinks and playing pool and chatting up women with body tattoos and all that.  I loved that time in my life.

So I’ve had what I think is kind of the best of all worlds: suburbs as a kid, city as a young adult, back to the suburbs as a parent.  I think that’s the perfect cycle.

Now, I’m sure city people would disagree with me, telling me all about how much they loved growing up in the city around ALL THAT CULTURE, when really what they mean is easy access to buying pot in the Village.  But that’s okay.  If you grew up in the city, and loved it, that’s great.  And if you’re raising kids in the city, I don’t know how you survive, but more power to you.  Fight the good fight!

But for those of us who live in the suburbs for our parental years, we rarely stop to think about what’s next.  What do you do when the kids have grown?  Now, that’s a ludicrous question for a guy who has a two-year old and an infant at home, and won’t have time to think about his retirement until the (gulp!) 2030s.  But just as a thought experiment — would I want to stay in the suburbs once I’m getting ready to retire?

The answer?  Probably not.  In fact, almost certainly not.  I don’t see how that would make sense.  In fact, I don’t understand why retired people immediately flock down to Florida for their golden years, just because of the weather.  Have you been to Florida?   The food stinks, it’s hot, mosquitos everywhere, and it’s filled with other old people.  That’s a high price to pay for a little golf during the week.

Indeed, if cost is not an issue, I can’t imagine NOT wanting to spend my retirement living in a big city.  So if anyone reading this is thinking about retiring to Florida, or living out in the suburbs during their golden years, here are some reasons to buck the trend and move into the city instead:

  • You don’t have to drive. Old people shouldn’t be driving.  Seriously.  No offense, but I’ve seen elderly people try to operate remotes to the television, and it scares me to think that we you can pass a driving test at 16 and then hit the road for the rest of your life with impunity.  But if you live in the city, you don’t even have to own a car!  You get to walk around, get all that exercise that doctors tell you that you need, and you can take taxis or the subway anytime you need to go more than 20 blocks or so.
  • You can eat out.  When you’re young and living in the city, you can’t afford to eat out. When you have kids, you REALLY can’t afford to eat out.  But now that you’re retired, you can actually go to all those great restaurants you read about in the Times.  Even better, you can probably get a table, because even the fanciest, trendiest eateries are pretty empty at, say, 5:30, which I understand is the standard elderly-person meal time.
  • You can go do stuff.  I lived in the city for almost 20 years, and made it out to like four museums.  Too much stuff to do, what with earning a living and all, plus all the tattooed ladies who need chatting up.  But when you’re retired, you have nothing else to fill your day but go check out a new exhibition at the Met.  Even better, I’m sure there are all sorts of senior citizen discounts, so it’s cheap!  Not to mention all the movies, theater, etc. — all the stuff that people say they live in the city for, but never actually go.  But when you don’t have to work, you can!
  • Lots of eye candy.  You really want to live out in Florida, where the average age is about 97?  Or do you want to walk down the streets of Manhattan, teeming with young, attractive people with energy and drive and firm, supple limbs?  I mean, when you’re 85, I figure that anyone under the age of 35, no matter how homely, is pretty good eye candy. And when you’re 75 and harmless, it’s okay to stare, people will just assume you have cataracts and can’t see anything anyway.
  • No stairs.  I’m assuming you’ve learned enough in all those years of living to NOT buy a walkup.  So instead of staying in a suburban house, with all those stairs, you get an elevator.  And maybe a doorman to hold the door for you.  I think about how slothful I am now, and I can’t imagine the deep levels of lethargy that I will reach when I get older.  I’ll be one of those guys in a Rascal riding around the streets, not because I’m infirm, but just because I’m too lazy to walk.

Seriously, why would you want to live in Del Boca Vista Phase Four when you could be living on the upper west side surrounded by great food, public transportation, young people, and things to do?  And if you’re not going to Florida, why would you want to maintain a big house, with a lawn, and a second floor that you never actually visit, when you could get a sweet place in the city with takeout food and young people to leer at?

So are the suburbs a good place to grow old?  No.  They’re the place to be a kid, or raise a kid.  But if you don’t have kids, either because you’re young and single and having a good time living life, or because you’re old and retired and having a good time cheating death, you should live in a city.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Alicia Keys, That’s Who’s Moving to the Suburbs!

November 15, 2012 by

Okay, as you all know, we have a recurring feature here at the Move to Suma breathlessly covering any news about celebrities making the move to suburban idyll.

And we’re doing pretty good.  Here’s our tally so far:

  • Tom Cruise
  • Elisabeth Hasselbeck
  • Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively
  • Usher
  • Jay-Z and Beyonce
  • Jonah Hill
  • Any Winehouse (before, umm, she died, but that was TOTALLY unrelated)

So we’re clearly not along in our decision to get out of the big city and move to the land of big lawns and rooms that we never actually use.

Now, we’re proud to add someone new to the list:  Alicia Keys!  From Curbed:

Grammy-collecting R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys and her producer husband Swizz Beatz have apparently had enough of the concrete jungle where dreams are made, having just dropped about $12M on the opulent (if flinchingly over-designed) New Jersey estate of comedian Eddie Murphy. Bubble Hill, in Englewood, N.J., is a seven-bedroom estate with all the benefits of being rich and in the ‘burbs; the 25,000-square-foot manse boasts a recording studio, two-lane bowling alley, indoor pool, billiards room, spa, and tennis court. Murphy had been trying to sell his 30-room mansion for nearly eight years before a mystery buyer (mystery until now, that is) made an offer in May. Keys, who was born and raised in NYC, seems to be rather fond of star-studded real estate, having picked up Lenny Kravitz’s SoHo duplex penthouse more than two years ago. (She recently listed it for $17.95M.)

Most importantly, catch that last part: she’s putting her Soho duplex on the market after only two years. In other words, leaving Soho for Englewood!  To paraphrase a popular song:

Let’s hear it for Su-Burbs!

Pick-et fences where dreams are made of.

There’s nothing you can’t do!

Alicia Keys — Welcome to the suburbs!

Filed Under: Humor, News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

Another Hurricane! Seriously? That is so NOT the deal……..

October 29, 2012 by

It’s just not fair.

As I write this, the northeast is preparing for our second major hurricane hit in the last two years.  And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also had an earthquake and an October blizzard in the past year.  None of this is particularly heartening to a guy who lives in a condo surrounded by glass on the eighth story of a building constructed on landfill at the end of a big river.

That’s not the deal.  When you live in the northeast, you accept certain tradeoffs, particularly with the weather.  As I’ve often said, people that say they love living in a four-season climate really mean that they love the first snowfall of winter, the first week or so of spring, about one week in the summer before it gets too humid, and the two weeks of peak fall foliage.  That’s like one good month out of the year.  For the rest of the year, we endure lousy weather: too cold in the winter, too rainy in the spring, too hot in the summer, and too grey in the fall once the leaves are gone.

The tell is that our favorite time of year is when the seasons change – we absolutely LOVE that first snowfall, the first warm day of spring, the first beach day, the day the leaves start to turn.  Basically, we get sick of our seasons fast, and can’t wait until the fresh novelty of the next one.

But it’s okay. We live with it.  We laugh good-naturedly when our California friends call us to“ complain” that they have to put on a light jacket in February because the temperature dipped below 75 degrees.  We endure those Facebook posts with pictures of people playing volleyball on the beach while we’re huddled in front of our fireplaces like cavemen.

Why? Because we accept the tradeoffs.  We get mostly crappy weather, but at least we don’t have hurricanes.  Or earthquakes.  Or mudslides. Or any of the other natural disasters that plague other parts of the country. In other words, we take the small everyday inconveniences instead of the big life-threatening catastrophe.

That’s why this is so unfair.  WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET HURRICANES.  Hurricanes are the tradeoff that people who live in Miami are supposed to make.  They get all that beautiful weather all year long, and get to post all their bikini photos on Facebook, and I get to laugh at them when Anderson Cooper is standing in front of their home in a windbreaker.  Those people in California?  Okay, they get to enjoy 80 degrees and sunny for 350 days a year, but once in a while their homes fall down from earthquakes, burn up in wildfires, or slide into the sea during a rainstorm.  That’s the tradeoff: great everyday weather, occasional cataclysm.  That’s fair.

None of this makes sense. I’m getting emails from friends in Miami WISHING ME LUCK GETTING THROUGH A HURRICANE.  These people live in Hurricane Central, they actually have sports teams and alcoholic drinks NAMED AFTER HURRICANES, and THEY ARE PITYING ME.  This is just no good.

So that’s why I’m bitter. It’s like a guy who runs five miles every day and eats nothing but steamed vegetables keeling over with a heart attack at 45.  It’s just cruel and wrong.  That’s not the deal.

Stay safe, everyone.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Reasons You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: Because you don’t need all that extra space!

October 25, 2012 by

Space.  It’s why people move to the suburbs.  They need space. Space for their kids,. Space for their dogs.  Space for all their STUFF.  More space.  People like this guy love talking about all their extra bedrooms, and their closets, and all their square footage.

But why?  How much space do people really need? For about 10 years, I lived in about 600 square feet. Then, for a few years, about 2,000 square feet.  And now that I’m in the suburbs, about 4,500 square feet.  But even with all that space, I’m not sure that my everyday life is all that much different.  Whether I’m in 600, or 2,000, or 4,500 square feet, I spend about 90% of my time in only about 300 square feet in total: kitchen, couch, bed.  I eat, I lounge, I sleep.  That’s my life.

Indeed, I’ve been reading about this new “micro” apartment movement – the proposal to create affordable sub-300 square foot apartments in Manhattan.  Think about what 300 square feet is – about a 20’x15’ room, including space for closets and a kitchen.  As long as there’s a wall where I can put a flat screen, I think that would be fine.  For me, I mean.  I’m not sure what I’d do with the kid and the wife. Or the dog.  Then again, if I suggested to my wife that we go live in a 300 square foot space, I’m pretty sure she’d divorce me and take all my money, so a micro apartment would be all that I’d need or could afford.

So a micro apartment might be a little extreme.  But on the other hand, so is 4,500 square feet. For example, let’s examine all the basically useless space in my home:

  • Living room.  It’s the nicest room in my home: lovely couches, a fireplace, floor-to-ceiling views of the Hudson, just gorgeous. And I’m never in there.  No TV.  I don’t spend a lot of time in rooms without TVs in them.
  • Dining room.  Big table.  Seats 10 people.  But we’re not 10 people.  It’s me, my wife, and my kid, and my kid sits at his own chair.  That’s like two-and-a-half people.  (The dog isn’t allowed to sit at the table, but try telling him that.)  So the dining room has pretty much become an expensive place to put the mail, at least until my wife agrees to my proposal that we eat at opposite ends of the table, like fabulously rich people with servants do in the movies.
  • Study.  Beautiful wood-paneled library/study with bookshelves and two separate desk spots, where I keep the desktop computer that I never use because 99% of the time I open up a laptop sitting on the couch.
  • Guest Bedrooms.  Two of them for the guests that we never invite over.  Part of it is that we dramatically overestimated the number of people who would be eager to visit us in the suburbs.  The other part is that I hate guests.  (If you’re a friend who is reading this and has stayed over at our place, let me make clear that I’m not talking about YOU, I’m talking about those OTHER guests).

You see my point? I have a lot of places in my home where you could hide a dead body, and I wouldn’t discover it for weeks.  For all I know, there’s a dead body in my guest bedroom right now.  I really should check.

And you know what you need to do with all that space? You need to fill it with expensive furniture that you’ll never actually sit on.  And you know how you get that expensive furniture? You hire a decorator/designer, most of whom like to be paid for their work.  So much for all that money you save living in the suburbs.

So why do we do it?  Why do we feel compelled to get a big home with all that extra space?  I’ll tell you why.

It’s to make all you city people jealous.

We need all that extra space so on the rare occasion when we get you all to come out to the suburbs, we can see the look on your face when you see that our closet is bigger than your bedroom.  The suburban shock and awe.  That’s what makes everything worth it.  “Look, I have a room just for my computer! Suck on THAT!”

Suburban space is the ultimate extravagance, the real estate equivalent to dangling a $25,000 watch on your wrist.  You don’t need it, but you get it and flaunt it because you want everyone else to envy it.  Suburbanites will never admit that we never eat in the dining room, or that we use our pools about three times a year, because we need to justify our move to the burbs.  If we left the city to get a perfectly usable and unimpressive 2,500 square feet, we’d never have anything to hold over the heads of our city friends.  All that extra space is the solace we take for not having good bars.

All that said, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: if you live in the city, and come visit me, you absolutely need to marvel and gush over all the space I have or you’re not going to be invited back.  It’s only polite.

Filed Under: Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Hate Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Reasons Why You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Because the bedrooms are actually, you know, bedrooms.

October 23, 2012 by

You know why you’ll love living in the suburbs?  Because the bedrooms are actually bedrooms.

If you live in the city, you know what I’m talking about, right?  That “two-bedroom” apartment where they carved up the living room, or put a wall down the middle of one bedroom? You ever live in one of those?  It’s really great if you don’t mind being able to hear EVERYTHING GOING ON IN THE OTHER ROOM.

How do you know when you’re dealing with a fake city bedroom?

  • The bedroom doesn’t have a closet.
  • The bedroom IS the closet.  It’s a bad sign if you can still see the imprint of the brackets for the closet rods.
  • The bedroom doesn’t have a window.  Bedrooms without windows are more properly called “cells.”

On the other hand, it’s also a bad sign if your “two-bedroom” apartment doesn’t have an actual living room.  As in, it’s two bedrooms and a kitchen.  Builders don’t make a lot of apartments like that, so it’s a pretty good sign that your second bedroom is actually the living room.

But it’s not just the fake bedrooms.  You can’t believe anything you read in a Manhattan apartment listing.  Take square footage estimations. Anytime you see square footage listed, just modify it by about 25%. If the apartment is listed at 800 square feet, it’s really 600 square feet.  And the one listed at 600 square feet is really 450 square feet.  If you took out a tape measure, you wouldn’t get to 600 square feet unless you counted the walls.

But the system works, if only because everyone has internalized the inflation.  You go see a “1,000 square foot” apartment that is really 800 square feet, and you marvel at how roomy it is compared to the “800 square foot” apartment that is really 600 square feet.  And once everyone has bought into the “Manhattan Modifier,” you can’t really opt out  If a broker listed apartments at their actual square footage, everyone would complain that they were overpriced.

For example, when we rehabbed our Manhattan place a few years ago, we ended up with about 2,000 square feet.  That was actual square feet.  We had the floor plans and everything to prove it.  So when we sold it, we advertised it as 2,000 square feet, and everyone who came to look at it said they were amazed at how roomy it was.  Why?  BECAUSE IT WAS ACTUALLY 2,000 SQUARE FEET.  If we’d used the “Manhattan Modifier,” we’d have advertised it as 2,500 square feet, and people would have said, “hey, this is so much roomier than that 2,000 square foot apartment we saw yesterday!”

You don’t have that problem in the suburbs.  You don’t have to carve up your bedrooms, because you already have four or five of them.  You don’t have to lie about the square footage, because you have enough space already.

And that’s also why city people are so amazed by the size of suburban homes.  We tell them we live in, say, 3,000 square feet, and they come thinking that it’s a “Manhattan” 3,000 square feet.  So then they’re shocked by how big it is, because it’s ACTUALLY 3,000 square feet.

Real bedrooms with closets and windows. True square footage.  Basically, space.  One of the reasons you’ll love living in the suburbs.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,
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