Reasons You’ll Hate Living in the Suburbs: Property Taxes

September 13, 2012 by

No one who’s trying to get you to move to the suburbs tells you about the property taxes.  Oh, it’s so great living out here in the suburbs!  Look at the trees!  Look at my big house! Look at my closet!  Look at how my kid isn’t sleeping in that closet!  ALL THIS SPACE!

And all that’s true.  Pound for pound, living in the suburbs is a lot cheaper than living in the city.  Food is cheaper.  Clothes are cheaper. The dry cleaning is cheaper.  In particular, the housing is cheaper – generally running about $300-$400 a square foot, when pricing in the city is more like $1,200 a square foot.  So from a raw pricing perspective, housing in the suburbs is way cheaper than the city.

Except for the property taxes.  Property taxes in the suburbs are MURDER.  And the problem is that you don’t really pay attention to that when you’re looking for a new home in the suburbs. You’re looking at houses online, and all you see are these high-res pictures of giant houses with big lawns and actual foyeurs and humongous kitchens and OMIGOD LOOK AT THAT WALK IN CLOSET!  And then you realize that for the same price as your tiny 1,000 square foot two bedroom in the city, you could get a 4,000 square foot colonial in some tony Westchester suburb.  You figure out the down payment, you figure out your monthly mortgage payment, and you’re ready to go make an offer.

Not so fast.  Check out the taxes.  They’re on that listing somewhere, not all that prominent, buried deep in the fine print, and sometimes the real estate agent doesn’t even list them.  So keep looking…..looking……and….

WHAT THE EFF!  FIFTY EFFING THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TAXES!!!!  CAN THAT BE RIGHT????

It’s right.  Lucky you, if you’re looking to move to the New York City suburbs, you’re going to be paying the highest property taxes anywhere in the country.  Indeed, the local suburbs make up like three of the top ten highest-taxed counties in the nation.

Here’s the weird thing about property taxes in the suburbs. It’s not that they’re so high, it’s that property taxes in the city are ridiculously cheap.  I don’t actually know why, but it’s probably based on the density – there are so many people living vertically on every square plot of Manhattan soil that the property taxes don’t need to be high in order to fund what is, after all, a pretty expensive local government.

Put it this way – I used to live in a two-bedroom brownstone apartment on the upper west side, in a building that had four total apartments totaling probably about 6,000 total square feet of living space. All four apartments together are probably worth about $7 million today.  And the taxes on the building?  About $30,000.  Now, I live in a condo, about 4,500 square feet, worth probably about $1 million in today’s market, and I’m paying that same $30,000 in taxes.  It’s crazy.

In fact, I’d argue that housing prices in Manhattan are so ridiculously high precisely because the taxes are so low.  Think of it this way.  At today’s rates, you can borrow $100,000 for about $400 per month, or $4,800 per year.  If we round that up to $5,000, you can figure that for every $5,000 in taxes, you lose about $100,000 in property value.  So if you have a Manhattan apartment that costs $1.5 million, and has $25,000 in yearly property taxes, and on the other side you have a Westchester home that costs $1,000,000, but has $50,000 in property taxes, the yearly cost of owning those homes is roughly comparable.

That said, before you decide that your kid is fine sleeping in a doggie bed in your hall closet, let’s remember a few things.

First, even with the property taxes, you still get a lot more space for the money.  That apartment in the city costing $1.5 million?  It’s got about 1,200 square feet.  The house in the suburbs? More like 3,000 square feet. So you’re getting about three times the living space for the price.

Second, property taxes are deductible, so about a third of those taxes are coming back to you in tax savings.  That evens the playing field a little.

Third, you have to THINK OF THE CHILDREN!  Don’t forget that one of the reasons you’re probably moving to the suburbs is that you have kids, and you want them to go to good schools, and those good schools, with all the fancy computers and well-paid teachers and massive educational bureaucracy – all that costs money.  So maybe if you have school-age kids you can take comfort in knowing that your property taxes are going toward their fancy Ivy-League baiting education.

That said, when you’re like me, and you don’t have kids in school yet, it does make you wonder.  Like, can’t those little snots can get by with whatever text books they’ve been using all those year?   I mean, seriously, have there been so many advances in the arts and sciences that ten- or twenty-year old textbooks aren’t good enough for these kids?  What, has Nathanial Hawthorne come out with some new books recently?

Take history, for example.  History hasn’t changed much, and you never get to modern history anyway.  Ten year old history books are just fine.  When I was a kid, we’d start American History every year with about a month on the explorers – “Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth” is among the useless facts that I can never forget.  Then we’d idle along so that we’d get to the colonial era around November, so we could have a reenactment of the First Thanksgiving and wear funny hats. But if you spend three months on the explorers and Pilgrims, you end up compacting about 300 years of history into five months – by the end of the year, we’d be lucky to get to World War I, much less the modern era. To this day, I feel much more comfortable with my knowledge about Pocahontas then I do about Harry Truman.  So I don’t see why these kids need new history books so long as the books they have get them through, say, the Korean War.

Of course, when my kids are old enough to go to school, it’s entirely possible I might be singing a different tune.  WE NEED NEW MACS!  That does sound like me.

Until that point, though, I’m going to continue hating that tax bill I get every year.

And so will you.

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

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Cuter Vermin

August 13, 2012 by

One of the nicest things about living in the suburbs is that you get a better class of vermin.  In the city, you got your three basic types of vermin: rats, mice, and cockroaches.  They’re all horrible.  And no matter where you live, or how nice your place, you end up dealing with them at some point.

Rats, of course, are the worst, but unless you’re living in a hovel, you probably don’t have them in your home.  It’s just that they’re everywhere else, hiding out and just waiting until you’re staggering your way home after a long day at work or a long night of drinking, just biding their time until they JUMP OUT FROM BEHIND THE GARBAGE CANS GAHHHHHHHH.  Just the worst.  I’ve seen rats the size of cats, bigger than most dogs people have in the city, pacing around on the subway tracks, in alleys — they’re everywhere in the city.  Now, I guess we must have rats in the suburbs, too, but I just don’t see them as much.  I think rats like the city better.  They’re very sophisticated, those rats.

I had mice in my apartment, of course, pretty much every apartment I ever had in Manhattan. The only good thing about having mice was that I could pretend that I was their MOUSE GOD.  Like a real God, I had the power of life or death over them.  I could be a beneficent God, getting lazy and leaving food on a dirty plate in the sink, creating a bountiful harvest.  Or I could be a vengeful God, smiting them with the Plague of the Trays of Glue.  When you’re 25, living alone in the city, no money, working for The Man, you take your opportunities to be ALL-POWERFUL where you can get them.

But I wasn’t really cut out to be Mouse God.  I’m too much of a softie, definitely more of a New Testament Mouse God.  Mouse traps are horrible things.  Have you ever heard a mouse scream when he realizes that he’s stuck in a glue trap.  It’s a horrible sound.  And then what are you supposed to do with a glue trap that has a mouse stuck to it, the poor mouse terrified, struggling to get away, looking at his Mouse God and begging for mercy?  Horrible.  I never knew what to do — the kind thing would be to kill it quickly, but I don’t quite have it in me to take a hammer and beat a mouse to death with it.  And if you throw it away, you’re consigning that mouse to a miserable starvation death in the garbage.  No good option.

Now, cockroaches are a different story.  When I’m retired, I’ll happily take a part-time job hammering cockroaches to death, if someone was willing to pay me to do it.  DIE COCKROACH DIE.  No problems there. Very satisfying work.  I’d hammer away all day long.  So would you.  Nothing worse than coming home, turning on the light, and seeing a bunch of cockroaches scurrying away from your kitchen sink.  And then you also have those “water bugs,” which are giant mutant cockroaches that sneak into bathrooms.  Every time they did construction on our block, we’d get an infusion of those water bugs everywhere we had a faucet.

So if you were to ask me what I love about the suburbs, I’d have to say that I love the better class of vermin we have out here. Three years, I’ve yet to see a mouse, a rat, or a cockroach.  Instead, we have really cute vermin, like deer.  Seriously.  Deer.  That’s our biggest problem.  Because, you know, they eat stuff from the gardens.  Isn’t that awful!  And instead of rats, we have squirrels.  Cute little squirrels, big bushy tails, scampering joyfully from tree to tree, saving up those nuts for winter.  Awwwwwww.

Of course, once in a while, a bear comes down from the local state park and tries to eat us or our dogs.  That’s not good.  And one more reason why I live in a condo, because most bears have trouble navigating elevators.

But that’s unusual.  And, anyway, what’s worse — dealing with rats and mice and cockroaches in the city every single day, or taking a very small chance of someday getting eaten by a bear in the suburbs?

I thought so.

 

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

Message to People in the Hamptons: You Do Realize You’re Spending Thousands of Dollars for a Weekend in the Suburbs, Right?

July 19, 2012 by

The Hamptons are the worst.

I mean, seriously.  What an amazing marketing job they’ve done out there to convince Manhattanites to spend thousands of dollars and a five-hour schlep in traffic to visit what is essentially — and I hate to break this to you — JUST ANOTHER SUBURB.

Because that’s all it is.  The Hamptons are just the east end of Long Island, the original Manhattan suburb.  Think about it:

  • Five bedroom colonials and high-ranches?  Check.
  • One acre lots?  Check.
  • You have to drive everywhere?  Check.

That, my friends, is a suburb.  S-U-B-U-R-B.  The Hamptons are a beautiful place to live, probably one of the nicest suburbs in the region, but they are still a suburb.

And it amazes me that the same people who will sneer at me for my suburban exile in Nyack will happily spend half my yearly mortgage payment for a half-share so they can spend a few weekends in a five-bedroom high-ranch in Water Mill. Yes, okay, there’s a beach.  You claim that you pay all that money so you can be “at the beach.”  But are you really?  I did Hamptons shares a few times when I was living in the city, and I can remember going to the beach maybe three times. So don’t tell me about the beach.

Now, I’m not talking about the Hamptons experience that the uber-rich have, the Billy Joels and Alec Baldwins and Howard Sterns and David Kochs or whoever.  That’s a whole different world of ridiculous houses and star-studded parties and caviar and champagne and feasting on the flesh of sacrificial virgins in secret underground temples to Mammon. But you’re probably not having that kind of Hamptons experience.

No, here’s the experience you’re having.  You have a friend-of-a-friend, some sort of hyper-organized Tracy Flick type, who sent you an email blast six months ago inviting you to grab a summer share of some amazing “beach house” she found in Sag Harbor or wherever. So in the middle of some dreary January day, you plunked down a few thousand dollars for a quarter-share.

And now it’s one of your weekends, so you pack a bag and start on the great Hamptons Weekend Forced Death March. Maybe you took the train, fervently hoping that you get one of those three-seat benches and that you don’t have to sit next to someone else.  Or maybe you hop on the Jitney, so you’re stuffed into a bus — because who doesn’t love the luxury of riding in a BUS — for what would be a three hour trip if you’re in some glorious parallel universe in which there isn’t any traffic, but in your universe will end up taking like five hours.  Or maybe you splurge and rent a car for the weekend, because nothing says “relaxing” like sitting behind the wheel in traffic on a Friday night for a couple of hours.

But now you’ve arrived, and you find out that you’re sharing five bedrooms with about a dozen people, none of whom are your friends because you all screwed up and took different weekends for your share.  Hopefully, there’s at least a pool, because you now find out that the “beach house,” isn’t actually on the beach. Or near the beach.  It’s maybe in the same zip code as the beach — a fifteen minute drive, which would be manageable except that there’s no place to park your car without a permit, and although Tracy Flick got hers three months ago, you didn’t.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Not only have you shelled out thousands of dollars for your share, but now you arrive to find that you owe another hundred bucks or so for your contribution to the food and drink that Tracy picked up for the weekend. Except that you got there too late for Friday night’s dinner, and half the beer is already gone, so you’re basically paying for everyone else to eat and drink.

It gets better the next morning, which is spent in a three-hour group conversation about whether you should all try to go to the beach.  Chances are, of course, that if it’s not raining, it’s really, really hot, so everyone agrees it’s not a good idea to pile ten people into the one parking-permitted car to go to the beach where you’re not legally allowed to drink anyway.  So you all end up by the pool, which would be fine, except that the whole day is spent with people texting their “real friends” in a desperate search for the “good house parties” to go to that night.  And the women that you thought might be good hook-up possibilities back when you scanned Tracy’s “signed up!” list in January are totally not interested, instead passing back-and-forth their dog-eared copy of the Hamptons Magazine’s Annual 50 Hottest Bachelors list, a list that you’re almost certainly not on.

Even if you actually do find something to do that night, it’s probably a schlep from one part of the Hamptons to the other, so someone has to stay sober to drive. That would be you.  Then you get there, and it’s a sausage fest, so you all pile back into the car to go to some crappy bar that  — I hate to break it to you — is basically a suburban hangout for nine months of the year.

You wake up Sunday morning, and there’s nothing left to eat, because the people who stayed behind when your group went bar- and party- hopping ended up inviting some friends over and they ate all your food.  So you hang out for about a few hours, listlessly watching some Wimbledon on the teevee machine, before heading back for the five-hour trip home.

That, my friend, is your weekend in the Hamptons suburbs!  You spent it in a nice big suburban house with a suburban yard and a suburban pool where you needed a suburban car to get around, and the only thing that differentiated your “Hamptons Beach House” from those stultifying high-ranches you would never live in over in Westbury or Pleasantville or Park Ridge is that you were a fifteen minute drive from a beach that you never visited. And it only cost you a month’s pay so you can spend four more weekends there. Well-done!

And not only that, it’s a BAD suburb, an unholy alchemy of suburb and city that perfectly synthesizes:

  1. all the inconveniences of living in the city (expensive and crowded living space, annoying strivers, $15 sandwiches) with
  2. all the irritations of living in the suburbs (the need for a car, sprawl, lousy bars), and then adds
  3. the final secret ingredient of a glorious five-hour trip to get there.

That emperor?  He’s naked, my friends. He’s buck naked!

Maybe you disagree. Maybe that’s not been your experience. Maybe I’m just a bitter middle-aged man with hazy recollections of uniquely awful Hamptons weekends.  Fine.  But if you’re having a good time out there, and not because you’re some total desperate striver who likes to send his weekends trying to find the perfect party where THERE MIGHT BE MODELS, it’s probably because you’ve actually managed to put together a group of people you actually like, and you’re just basically hanging out with them. But if that’s the case, then it’s not the Hamptons you like, but your friends.  And you could be having a good time with them ANYWHERE, and save yourself a lot of trouble and money.

That’s really the bottom line.  The more I think about the differences between living in the city and living in the suburbs, the more I realize that the only real distinction is the people, the fact that urban environments uniquely attract interesting, bright, and challenging people who choose to live there primarily during the most sociable and vibrant time of their lives — when they’re young, single, and childless, looking for other young, single, and childless  people to hook up with and befriend.  The city doesn’t make them that way.  Theres nothing inherently interesting or special about the city, other than the people who live there.

The Hamptons are the proof of that.  There’s nothing inherently “hip” or trendy or even distinctive about the Hamptons, other than the people who choose to relocate there for part of their summers. Take away the people, and you have just another suburb, one that’s as close to Manhattan as Albany, and just about as interesting.

So, as the self-appointed driver of the Suburban Welcome Wagon, I have a message for all of you Hamptons-goers that you might not want to hear, but I think it’s for your own good — “Welcome to the Suburbs!”

 

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

What Do You Do When Your Birthday is on Friday the 13th? Nothing.

July 12, 2012 by

Tomorrow is my birthday. My 45th birthday. 45 years. Halfway to 90.

That’s a pretty hard number, actually.  90 is pretty old. Not a lot of people live to 90.  In fact, a quick internet search shows that only about 1% of people in this country live to be over 90.  So the odds say that I am halfway to dead.

The more immediate concern is that I can no longer say that I’m in my early 40s.  I’ve been saying that since the moment I turned 40, and I’ve gotten as much mileage out of it as I can.  But I can’t resist the dreaded “mid-40s” anymore, although I expect to stay in my mid-40s for another five full years, until I hit the next big milestone.

So I’m in my mid-40s.  It’s a little weird for me, because much of my life I’ve kind of defined myself by being “the young one.”  When I was a kid, all my friends were older than me, which wasn’t strange because I hit puberty early and always looked a lot older than I was.  When I was in my mid-teens, I looked over 21, and was actually the best candidate among my friends to be able to buy beer. Which is why they probably hung out with me.

(I’m assuming, by the way, that the statute of limitations on illegally buying beer has long since passed, but if it hasn’t I want to make clear that I just made all that up).

Being the “young” one carried with me for a long time. I was one of the younger students in law school, since I came straight out of college. In my jobs out of law school — clerking, then at a big law firm — I was generally a lot younger than the other people I worked with.  Then I started teaching, the “young professor,” much closer in age to the students than the other professors.  Even when I started working at my real estate company in my early 30s (I was in my early 30s, by the way, until the minute I turned 35), I was one of the “young guns” — usually a lot younger than other broker-owners, or even most of the agents in my company.

So that’s kind of ended. I’m not the “young” guy anymore. My friends are all now younger than me, all people I met back when I didn’t have a kid and would go out more.  And even my new friends, the ones I’m generally making because we both have kids, are a lot younger, since they weren’t stupid enough to wait until their mid-40s to have them.

All that said, I’m coping okay. 45 is not a big landmark number.  The big birthdays are 18 (old enough to vote), 21 (old enough to drink), 30 (no longer a “young person”), 40 (starting mid-life), 65 (old enough to get social security),  90 (“I beat out 99% of the rest of you!”), and 100 (you get mentioned on the Today show by Willard Scott).

But anytime you hit a fairly round number you sort of think about where you are and where you’re going. By the time you’re 45, and have put more birthdays behind you than you’re likely to have in front of you, you realize that you’ve also probably experienced most of the big moments of your life: your graduation, getting married, having a kid, buying your first home.  Now, most of those big moments, those landmark milestones, are going to be experienced vicariously, through the people you love. You want to live long enough to see your kid graduate, your kid get married, your kid having a kid and making you a grandparent.

The consolation is that you get to take stock of where you are, and, hopefully, feel good about what you’ve already put in the book. I have a great wife, a beautiful kid, a a wonderful family, some great friends (who hopefully forgive me for pimping the BRAND NEW MOVE TO SUMA FACEBOOK PAGE), a good business, and a nice home.  So I have nothing really to complain about, other than the normal grousing about the flipping of the calendar.

So what am I doing to celebrate?  Absolutely nothing.  It doesn’t help that my birthday falls on Friday the 13th, which can’t be good.  But I don’t expect that we’re doing much of anything. My wife threw me a great surprise party for my 40th — a great dinner, then she got a bunch of tables in this great Meatpacking District club where we had about 40-50 come out to celebrate.  So my 40th birthday was basically a drunken bacchanal.

Now, a move to the suburbs, one dog, one kid, two SUVs later?  Nothing. If my wife is throwing me another surprise party, it would honestly be an ENORMOUS surprise, because all indications are that we’re both just too tired to do much of anything.  In fact, any actual party would be more of a big passive aggressive move by the wife, since we barely acknowledge her birthday two weeks ago, spending it, at all places, at a business conference of mine.  So if she throws me a party, I’m in trouble, because it would be more of a “see how much MORE I LOVE YOU than you love me” move than anything else.

And I don’t know that I could handle that, not when there’s a 99% chance that I’m halfway to the grave.

Filed Under: Humor, My Life in the Suburbs

Suburban Rite of Passage: Filling Up Your Kitchen With Appliances You Never Use, EXCEPT a Juicer.

July 10, 2012 by

One of the things that happens to you when you move to the suburbs is that you start accumulating a lot of new stuff.  I’ve written before about how one of the big challenges in making the move is buying all the new furniture you need to fill up your new home, after spending years in a cramped city apartment relying on “transformer” furniture: tv trays that become coffee tables, couches that fold out into guest beds, collapsable end tables that turn into seating for six, stuff like that.

The effect is even bigger in the kitchen.  When I lived in the city, I pretty much had one appliance: a toaster.  That was it.  To the extent that I might have had any culinary ambitions, they were pretty much limited to recipes that relied heavily on browning slices of bread.  The funny thing was that I don’t actually eat a lot of toast — I rarely eat breakfast, and toast is not really a dinner food.  But when I got my own place, my mother got me the toaster, telling me that having a toaster was a sign of maturity, a sign of settling down.  I honestly never knew that a humble toaster could say so much about a person.

Nevertheless, that toaster stayed with me for years, prominently featured in my tiny little kitchen, just sitting there like a scrub basketball player at the end of the bench waiting for the coach to call him into the game, patiently biding its time until the day that I would have a dinner party featuring 15 different varieties of warmed bread

Now, of course, it didn’t really matter back then, because I never cooked.  Two people with full time jobs living in a small apartment with no kids and access to about 100 restaurants that will deliver food to their door have little need to roll their own pasta. But now that I’m in the suburbs, and well outside the Lenny’s delivery zone, I’ve suddenly found myself cooking more.  And as a result, my toaster has suddenly spawned a whole new array of cooking appliances:

  • A food processor, which according to most people who cook is the one indispensable cooking appliance.  To me, it seems like the one indispensable way to cut off a few of my fingers.
  • A pasta maker, which I haven’t actually used yet because I can’t figure it out.  I’m not sure that I have all the pieces, because it just looks too flimsy.  I need to do some research.
  • A slow cooker, which I think we might have had in the old apartment in the city, but it was always stored in an upper cabinet above the refrigerator, and required me to get a stool to pull it out, and it was heavy, and I am very, very lazy, so that was pretty much it for slow cooking back in the city.  Now it sits on the counter, just waiting for me to fill it with vegetables and meat and then find something else to do for six hours or so.
  • A waffle maker, which is just about the most frivolous appliance you could possibly have.  It does one thing. One thing!  And moreover, you only need that one thing at most once a month, unless you really, really like a lot of waffles.  To paraphrase Robin Williams, a waffle maker is God’s way of telling you that you have too much space in your kitchen.

That’s all on top of all the new pots and pans we have stored away in our ridiculously big cabinets, including a couple of cast iron pans that I like using just because it makes me feel like I’m some scrappy short order cook in a diner or something.  COOKING WITH IRON!

One thing I will NEVER get, though, is a juicer.  I’ve had a juicer. It was horrible.  I think a lot of people at some point in their life fall victim to the hype about juicers — that we all need to drink more juice, it’s so healthy, so tasty.  What no one ever tells you in those commercials is the amount of sheer pain that goes into making a cup of juice.

First, you have to buy an absolutely ungodly amount of fruit.  I had no idea how little juice there was in an orange until I tried to make orange juice. You need like a whole SACK OF ORANGES to make a decent glass for just one person.  You want to make juice for your friends coming over for brunch?  No problem, just back up the car to the produce stand and start emptying it into your trunk.  Why haven’t those geneticists come up with an orange that is nothing but juice, that you can basically stick a straw into like a coconut?  Something to work on, you scientist geeks!

Second, once you have your crate full of oranges, you have to actually CUT them before you can stuff them into the juicer’s big scary sharpy maw.  But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the juicer?  If I wanted to sit there and cut oranges all day, I could just squeeze them to make my juice.  I don’t even need you, Mr. Juicer.

Third, once you’re done stuffing 87 orange halves into the juicer to make a small cup of juice, now you have to actually clean the juicer.  And it’s not like cleaning a juicer is like cleaning a pan — the juicer has this sharp, complicated blade that is perfect for severing more of my fingers, and which ends up all matted up with dismembered orange parts. “Scrub scrub scrub the blade,” sings the juicemaker!

Bottom line, if you want a nice cup of juice, expect to spend about half an hour between the cutting and the stuffing and the cleaning.  And that’s for oranges, which actually have a decent amount of juice in them.  You want, say, carrot juice, with all those helpful anti-oxidants or whatever it’s supposed to have, figure on an hour.  For a cup of juice. A cup.

The one thing a juicer does is give you an enormous appreciation for those stores that will sell you a big glass of freshly squeezed juice for like six bucks.  After you’ve owned a juicer, you’ll never begrudge paying that money for juice again. Six Dollars!  Think about it — it’s the same price as a large cup of coffee, but I can make all the coffee I want pretty easily at home.  I don’t even know how those juice places can stay in business, or keep their employees for more than one shift.  I’d rather dig ditches than make juice for other people.

So my advice to new suburbanites is this: never ever under any circumstances ever ever EVER get a juicer.  Otherwise, when it comes to appliances filling up your kitchen counters and cabinets, go crazy, if only so that you can make your visiting toast-eating city friends jealous.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage Tagged With: , , ,

What’s the Manliest of Holidays? The Fourth of July, Although Not for Men Like Me

July 6, 2012 by

I love the Fourth of July.  Not only is it the best holiday of the year, and the most suburban holiday of the year, but something else just occurred to me this past week: Independence Day is the manliest of the holidays.

Everything associated with the Fourth is manly:

We celebrate the achievements of manly men.  The whole holiday commemorates a bunch of men deciding to declare their independence.  Independence! What’s more manly than that?  Now, of course, it’s absolutely HORRIBLE and SEXIST that only men signed the Declaration, and my wife has pointed out that “all men are created equal” doesn’t at all imply that any of them are the equal of women.  But it is what it is: the Fourth of July celebrates men doing a manly thing.

What do we celebrate on other holidays?  Christmas is about a woman giving birth, or more secularly about a big fat man giving away free stuff. Not manly.  Thanksgiving?  All about having a big meal, which is relatively manly except that the main thrust of the holiday is COOKING the meal, which isn’t manly at all.

We blow stuff up!  What’s more manly than taking fistfuls of gunpowder and setting them off for no reason other than to see what the explosion looks like?  It’s the ultimate peacock display: lots of noise and flashes of light, accomplishing absolutely nothing. And if you’re like me, you get the potential bonus of blowing up your house when you try to connect a propane tank by yourself.

Blowing stuff up!  Now, THAT’S a manly holiday.  Christmas? Putting up decorations, buying gifts, writing cards. Yeeesshh. Thanksgiving?  Cooking.  Halloween?  Dressing up.  All these are girly holidays.

We cook manly food in a manly way.  Indeed, the Fourth of July is the one day of the year that men are expected to do the cooking, mainly because the “cooking” is simple enough for them to handle.  Here’s the recipe: (1) take meat, (2) put on hot grill, (3) cook until done.  No measuring, no mixing, no ingredients, no setting a timer.  Simple. Easy. Manly.

All that said, I should be clear that I am not at all a manly man.  It’s sad, really. I don’t know how to fix things, or make things, I work in an industry (real estate) that is about 90% women, and my main job requires me to basically type a lot. Put it this way — at a costume party a few years ago, the theme was that people had to dress up in a representation of their “uniform,” and most of the men had ACTUAL uniforms to wear: doctor’s scrubs, fireman gear, manly stuff like that. I wore a tux.

My glaring inadequacy, in fact, has become more pronounced now that I’m living in the suburbs.  There are just more manly men living out here. You live in the city, you’re surrounded by bankers and lawyers and other girly men like me.  All the manly men — the cops, the firemen, the contractors, they live out here in the suburbs. You see them at Home Depot on weekends picking up lumber and table saws and pistons, or whatever,, when I’m usually there to get replacement light bulbs or batteries or something. I’d like to say that it was 17 years living in the city that made me so soft, but I was pretty much a marshmallow my whole life.  Living in the city just hid the fact, since I had a super and stuff like that.

So when I say that the Fourth of July is a manly holiday, I say it mostly in appreciation for OTHER men, the manly ones, the guys who can actually do stuff and fix stuff and make stuff. And I was brutally reminded of my own shortcomings in this area this year.  We were having our annual party at my mom’s house, which we’ve done for many years because she has a pool.  She also has a grill, but it wasn’t working.  So, in the classic family fashion, she didn’t actually try to fix the grill, she just bought a new one.  That’s really the way we do things in the Rand family, which might explain my basic inadequacies in this area.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t get the grill delivered, so I had to pick it up.  Ideally, a real manly man would have a truck or something to go pick it up, and maybe one of those dollies or something to move it.  Of course, I have an SUV, not a truck. And I don’t have any dollies, other than the ones my kid plays with.

So here I am, on an incredibly hot day, trying to get this giant grill into my SUV. Again, this is a challenge I never had to deal with when I lived in the city. First of all, I would never have had the need for a big grill, or a big anything, in my old apartment.  Second, no one would have ever expected me to bring it home.  What would I do?  Strap it to the top of the cab, like Mitt Romney’s dog?

Now, to give myself a little bit of a break, I will point out that grills are VERY HEAVY, and so it was never going to be easy to get in, even for a manly man.  But I tried. I actually lifted it into the air, pulling out some tendons in my back (if backs have tendons, I guess) and almost getting it in.  But it was too big.

Which brought me to the next great divide between the manly man I wish I were, and the girly man that I actually am.  A manly man would have tools to take apart that grill to get it in the car.  I, of course, had no tools in the car. But I did have something almost as good: twenty dollars of cold hard cash.  So in the great Rand family spirit that led us to buy a new grill rather than just fix the one we had, I proudly took that crisp twenty dollar bill and slipped it to a guy at the store who actually had tools. In fact, a whole STORE of tools. So he helped me take the grill apart and get it into the car.  Of course, by “helped me,” I mean that he did it while I watched with an attentive look on my face designed to indicate that I could do all that if I only had remembered to bring the right screwdriver, or wrench, or plunger, or whatever it was that he was using.

Once that beautiful display of basic economic market dynamics was completed, I sped off to my mom’s house to start the reassembly.  And I’m proud to say that I actually was able to put it back together, or at least at the very end I didn’t have any leftover screws or bolts — which is not always the case when I put something together, when I usually reassure myself that that most manufacturers put in a couple of EXTRA bolts JUST IN CASE.

Even better, the grill worked, once my manly friend Mike helped attach the propane tank, something that I’m not quite ready for at this point in my development. But I did do most of the cooking, so there’s that.

Burgers for everyone!

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Why Independence Day is the Most Suburban of Holidays

July 3, 2012 by

I’ve written before that Independence Day is pretty much the best holiday of the year.  Compared to other holidays, it’s a breeze. You hang out by the pool, throw some stuff on a grill, and watch other people blow stuff up.  You don’t have to do a lot of traveling, or feel the pressure to visit family you don’t really like, or do a lot of difficult cooking (4 different types of stuffing!).

But something else recently occurred to me: Independence Day is the ultimate suburban holiday.  It’s the one day of the year when it is incontestably, incontrovertibly better to live in the suburbs than in the city.  Why?

  • You need a pool.  You can’t celebrate the Fourth of July properly without being able to take a dip.  You want to spend the day in Central Park sweating your face off, that’s fine, but after a few hours you’re going to be thinking about jumping the fence on the reservoir or taking a wrench to the nearest fire hydrant.  Otherwise, you can go to one of those city pools, which are apparently very exciting.
  • You need a grill. And not one of those crappy portables that you can put out on your fire escape in violation of like a hundred building codes, which can barely singe a decent piece of meat.  You need a big, manly barbecue.
  • You need outdoor space. Now, some lucky people in the city might have a small backyard, or a deck or something, but that’s not enough for a proper Fourth of July party. You need grass. You need places to sit and take a nap in the sun.
No, if you want to do the Fourth of July properly, you need to be in the suburbs. It’s like the ultimate revenge for us suburbanites — you want to live in the city, with your hot people and your great clubs and fantastic restaurants and your culture and all that?  Fine, but on the Fourth of July, you’re going to be BEGGING to come visit me so you can sit by my pool and eat my hamburgers.  BEGGING, I tell you!
And that’s really what happens. You know how difficult it is for me to get people to come visit us out here in the suburbs?  Impossible.  No one wants to schlep for our annual super bowl party, much less a random weekend night.  Why would they leave the city to come hang out with us. The only hook I have for the Fourth of July:  a pool (not even mine, but my parents’ house is ten minutes away and well-provisioned), a grill, and a great view of the fireworks from my condo in Nyack.  Suddenly, people who won’t take my calls the rest of the year are lining up to hop a train to Tarrytown.
Sweet Revenge!!!
Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Understanding the “Bridge and Tunnel” Crowd, and Why There Aren’t Any Good Clubs or Lounges in the Suburbs

June 22, 2012 by

When I resigned myself to a life in the suburbs, one of my goals was to try to find nightlife opportunities that would give me some semblance of the experiences I used to get in the city.  Now, let me be clear that I was not a big nightlife guy in the first place.  In my 20s, my usual nightlife routine was a night playing pool at the lost and lamented Amsterdam Billiards or getting a beer in a neighborhood bar.  Part of that was that I was, as they say, “living in the 80s and making in the 30s”, so I didn’t quite have the bankroll to hit a club. It’s a lot more fun to go clubbing if you are (a) a rich guy, or (b) a hot girl.  I was neither of those things.

Even as I got older, though, and could afford the club scene, it was really only something I did once in a while.  Maybe if I’d been single, or liked dance music music, or liked standing, or liked tinnitis, or couldn’t do the math on the cost of buying a bottle of Grey Goose for $350, I would have been a bigger fan.  But it just wasn’t my thing.  Maybe once in a while we’d get together with a group, get a table at a club, and put a big hole in our credit cards to enjoy a night out, but it really had to be a special occasion.

Otherwise, as I got older, my main nightlife routine would be hitting a “lounge,” which is really a euphemism for “a bar that has the drink prices of clubs because it has couches.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate having couches in bars.  The world needs more couches.  And I guess I like lounges because they aren’t as loud, so you can have a conversation.  The world needs more conversation, too.  You can’t really talk in a club, which is actually generally a good thing because most of the people in the clubs don’t have much of anything to say beyond “hey, nice shoes.”

So when I say that I was hoping to find nightlife opportunities in the suburbs, I’m really talking about those kinds of lounges — places with couches, where you can have a conversation, maybe with a bartender who makes interesting drinks that involve something called “muddling.”  Drinks that involve “muddling” are always much more expense than the non-muddling variety, but they sort of justify the fact that you went out at all — if you’re going to just mix vodka and soda, you can do that at home.  You need a fancy bartender in some couchy lounge to make you something with 15 muddled ingredients.

Here’s the thing — they don’t exist in the suburbs.  They. Don’t. Exist.  There are no lounges.  In fact, there are no clubs, nowhere that you can, if you wanted that experience, go to dance and listen to music and become insensate from the ringing in your ears.  What you have in the suburbs is simple: bars.  Just bars. No couches. No muddled drinks. No dancing.

It’s actually a lot worse than I thought. I figured that with all the people who get exiled from the city to the suburbs every year, some entrepreneurial type would realize that there’s a market for an “urban-style” lounge or club that would appeal to people who don’t want to just sit in a bar and, moreover, don’t want to have to schlep to the city to go out.

But I was wrong, and here’s why.  People who live in the suburbs who want to get an urban nightlife experience go to the city.  Whether they are 25 year olds who want to dance and listen to music without words, or 35 year olds who want to go to drink complicated drinks and sit on couches, they all have something in common — they want to do it IN the city. That’s the whole point.  They want to escape the suburbs for a night and feed on the urban energy and excitement.

Hence — the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that everyone in the city complains about when they go to clubs and lounge.  Oh, boy, there’s nothing worse for the reputation of a club/lounge than to get tagged as a “B&T” place, because then no one who actually lives in the city wants to go.  So the urbanites stop coming, and eventually the B&T people realize that they’re schlepping 45 minutes and paying $50 for parking to hang out with people from their neighborhod, so they stop coming. And then the place shuts down, while the B&T people start chasing wherever the urbanites went to.  It’s a vicious circle.

And that’s the point.  The people in the suburbs don’t really care about the music, or the muddled drinks, or the couches — what they want is the feeling of being a part of the urban excitement for a night.  If someone actually opened a hipster club/lounge/whatever in the suburbs, it would be the absolute worst.  By definition, EVERYONE in the place would part of the B&T crowd, except that they wouldn’t actually have to cross a bridge or burrow through a tunnel to get there.  Even worse, the people most likely to end up filling the place would be the very B&T people who aren’t even urbanized enough to want that hit off the urban pipe.  They’d be like the junior varsity to the B&T crowd, people who don’t even care about getting that authentic vibe.  In other words, that suburban hipster lounge would be like the worst place on earth for an urban exile.

That’s why those places don’t exist.  And that’s why my nightlife over the past three years has narrowed down to the occasional trip into the city, or game night at the condo.  In other words, despite any ambitions I might have had to maintain any kind of urban cred, I’m a typical suburbanite.

Ouchy.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , ,

The Return from Exile in Reverse: Re-Creating the Suburban Experience in New York City

June 5, 2012 by

Jesse McKinley had a great piece in the New York Times last week about trying to recreate a stereotypical suburban experience within Manhattan. A native suburban, his theory was that the city is slowly becoming “suburbanized“:

 The ’burbs seem to be everywhere, from miniature golf in the Village to batting cages on the Upper West Side. There’s table tennis off Park Avenue South, an Applebee’s in Harlem and highway-style hotels like the Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side. Multiplexes are more common than art houses, and don’t even try to avoid trivia nights. If not for all the big buildings and honking, you could easily mistake Manhattan for Mahwah on some nights.

McKinley thinks that this might be the result of changing demographics, with people from the suburbs moving into the city and providing a target market for their “cultural traditions.”  Sort of like the way that an influx of ethnic immigrants create the need for more Pakistani restaurants, but far less spicy.  I would also add that, to the extent that his thesis is accurate — and I’m not quite convinced that a couple of bars offering ping-pong is a sign of the suburbanizing apocalypse — it might be that more couples deciding to stay in the city after they have kids might create a greater need for more “family-oriented” activities.

Anyway, as part of testing his theory, McKinley wrote a funny travelogue of a weekend he spent sampling these suburban diversions throughout the city:

  • A trip to the Manhattan Mall, which he found disappointing insofar as the “mall” doesn’t have a food court. No food court!  What kind of mall is that?
  • Trivia Night at a bar on the upper west side, which is I guess representative of the average suburban night out.
  • Two nights at a cheap chain hotel.
  • Dinner at Chevys, a classic suburban chain.
  • Mini-Golf at some place down in the Village.
  • Brunch at Applebees, the great “neighborhood grill,” if you live in the worst neighborhood in the world.
  • An Imax movie.
  • A few swings at the batting cages.

Now, as much as I liked this piece, as a self-appointed champion of the suburbs, I’m a wee bit nettled by the reductionist approach to suburban living.  We will not be MOCKED!!!  Or, rather, we can mock ourselves, in the way that only, say, Italian people can properly make Italian jokes.  But it hurts to see someone practically put on “blackface” like this.  Seriously, Applebees?  Ouch!

More to the point, I’ve lived in the suburbs for almost three years now, and I don’t do most of the stuff that McKinley put in his piece.  I get the mall, and the batting cages, and I guess I can understand the trips to stereotypically suburban restaurant chains.  But why stay at an Econo Lodge? Suburbanites don’t stay in cheap hotels — we live in cheap houses!  And what about miniature golf?  I haven’t even seen a miniature golf course here in the Hudson Valley area in years — they were all closed down and turned into McMansion developments.  The only place you get mini-golf is down at the shore.  It’s really more of a vacation activity.

So I don’t know if he quite captured the true modern suburban experience. If you really want that experience, and I don’t know why you would, here’s what I’d add to the agenda:

First, you can’t rent some small little hotel room at the Econo Lodge; rather, you should get some cheap suite hotel, because you need a kitchen that you can cook in.  Here in the suburbs, we don’t go out every night to fancy places like Chevy’s and Applebees — we cook.  So pick up some groceries, cook up a meal, and eat it in front of the TV like the rest of us suburbanites.

Second, when you’re done eating, skip the miniature golf and the batting cages, and get in touch with your true suburban self:

  • Take a trip to Costco, because nothing says suburbs like picking up 400 rolls of toilet paper.
  • Rent a lawnmower and start mowing a section of Central Park.  You’ll probably end up in jail, but you can’t spend a suburban weekend without cutting some grass.
  • Buy a car seat, and try to install it in a cab. That’ll take up a good half a day. The cabbie will be thrilled!
  • Clog up a toilet, and fix it yourself.

Buying stuff, cooking a meal, mowing the lawn — now, THAT would be a suburban weekend.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, News, Return from Exile Tagged With: ,

Where Do Most New York Cheating Spouses Live? In the Suburbs!

April 28, 2012 by

Oh man, this is not good.

Lots of coverage this week of a report from Ashley Madison, a website apparently designed for people looking to have affairs, identifying the best places in the New York to try to cheat on your spouse.  Essentially, Ashley Madison looked at the overall population of towns and cities, and then calculated the percentage of people who were members of the site.

So, for example, at least 3% of the adults who live in Great Neck, Long Island are on the site, living in cheater’s paradise. That’s pretty alarming.  I mean, if you live in Great Neck, and you’re in a room with 33 other people, statistically speaking one of you is on Ashley Madison looking for some strange.  And one of those people might be your spouse…..

Indeed, the report showed that seven of the top 10 cheating areas were in the suburbs.  Here’s the full top 10 list:

1). Great Neck, L.I.

2). Park Slope, Brooklyn

3). Upper East Side

4). Forest Hills, Queens

5). TriBeCa

6). New City – Rockland County

7). Douglaston, Queens

8). Riverdale, The Bronx

9). Howard Beach, Brooklyn

10). Garden City, L.I.

I think that’s a little surprising.  After all, who would have thought that the quiet, boring suburbs would be such hotbeds of sweaty illicit action?  I mean, seriously — New City?  I’ve been to New City.  I don’t even think that the people in New City have sex with their spouses, much less other people’s spouses.  I need to get out more, apparently.

How can this be? Well, the methodology is a little whack, since it’s based on taking the total number of people who live in a town/city and then dividing it by the number of people on the site.  So I can see how smaller towns might be more likely to make the top 10 list, simply because they have fewer people and a relatively small number of members could forge a higher percentage.

But it also might actually be a reflection of the general atmosphere of the suburbs: more married people, more boredom, more free weekends with not a lot to do. And maybe people in the suburbs need a site like Ashley Madison to hook up, since you don’t have the urban density of the city to provide fresh new opportunities to destroy your married life and ultimately cut your life savings in half.

I have to be honest that I’m very happy that Nyack didn’t make the list, because I have enough problems at home.

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