<p>For neighborhood locations, perhaps Chinatown or the Lower East Side have affordable dwelling places for individual students as boarders with a family, or groups of students in a simple apartment.</p>
<p>Me? I think I’d sleep under the desk each night, wake up, have coffee with the brokers and wait for the stock exchage to ring itself open with that bell.</p>
<p>Still, Mythmom brings up an important way to open up the discussion of neighborhoods.
Many new yorkers count neighborhood closeness according to the subway stops.
If a neighborhood is near an express stop, that’s meaningful. Every fare ride costs exactly $2., or less with a metrocard, but you can get far from one neighborhood using the subway to find affordable housing. Then you do that weight-and-balance thought process: how man minutes am I willing to commute, how many blocks walk to the subway station, to save how many $ by being in a more budget neighborhood than right where I work. WHen my S lived on 125th St. he felt close-in simply because it had an express stop so he could reach Times Square in l0 minutes flat. People livng in Brooklyn and New Jersey also talk in these terms. </p>
<p>Closeness has less to do with how things look on a map with a compass radius; more important is which train line it’s near, how frequently and late the trains actually run; are they express or local, and so on. Just as plane routes affect our understanding of map geography, the NYMTA system makes neighborhoods come closer together. </p>
<p>More on subways: It;;s helpful to jump on an express, but even at an express stop I saw that my S, like others, would hop onto a local subway, take it as far as the next possible express, look out across the tracks and sometimes switch off the local and onto the express by walking across the platform. These are no added fares. Similarly, switching train lines means no additional fare. </p>
<p>Subway stations are hot in the bad summer months but the trains are air-conditioned so that helps a lot. Also remember that in NYC people walk a lot more than they would in other locations. </p>
<p>There are many options for choosing neighborhoods because of the subway system.
The most brilliant thing they ever did with planning NYC was to declare the identical fare for all boroughs and all stops. That pulled the 5 boroughs together. I learned this from a Ken Burnes documentary, and hope genuine NYC-dwellers say it’s so. I just visit.</p>