bchad:
There’s a reason that $35k is enough to live on in Texas. And it’s because lots of those $35k places just aren’t all that great places to live. You may not die (though be careful with all those guns!), and you might have large living room to put that awesome $1000 TV that represents about 3% of your beforetax income, but one of the big reasons that it costs so much to live in NY is because it’s a highly desirable place to live.
Consider that living in a desirable city is part of your compensation package as well.
You might be tempted to say, “No, it’s the taxes, Texas doesn’t have high taxes like New York.” But if taxes really were the primary reason everything is so expensive, no one would want to live here, and that would drive the prices down. Taxes influence things at the margin, but the primary reason the prices are so high is that it’s a desirable place to live.
texas is also a very desirable place to live. It just has more space. It’s more about the desirability to space ratio than the absolute value of the desirability
I live in queens, 2000 can get you a condo or town house… My family just rented out a home in a good area of queens for around 2200.
Wendy
August 27, 2014, 9:09pm
#63
Good point, Queens is a big place. I was specifically thinking about Long Island City and vicinity; not some affordable far-from-Manhattan corner of Queens.