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Notes -
There isn’t really comparable real estate. I went to visit some friends recently and their quintessential rich northern suburb town had (after years of legal issues preceding construction) a new generic apartment building with probably a few dozen units. A) The prices were still very high, maybe 20-30% below semi-prime Manhattan and like half ultra-prime like the West Village for a generic modern apartment and B) this is in a small town where you realistically need a car, have limited amenities, and lack any of the real advantages of living in the outer suburbs like a big backyard, garage, lots of space. If you want those you’re out $2m, probably more in the same place.
If you’re going to live in an apartment you may as well live in NYC, even if it’s somewhat more expensive, whereas companies are more keen for many reasons to shift operations to the suburbs. This building, if I had to guess, was mainly occupied by nurses, medical residents and other moderately-but-not-very highly paid jobs that were actually based locally, or indeed by people who work at IBM HQ which is probably the iconic example of a big northern suburban NY employer.
It’s also one thing to live in a shoebox apartment when most of the people around you do too, it’s another to do so when everyone else is enjoying their expansive suburban lifestyle.
I mentioned several areas with comparable real estate (parts of Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken) -- these are not small towns where you need a car, they are dense cities. As for the outer suburbs, they're not $2M you can get that for $1M easy; my own house in an Essex County suburb is probably $750K.
Suburban Westchester is another story, not only is it more expensive but it has the whole of Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and Yonkers (technically in Westchester) between it and the commercial centers of Manhattan.
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