<p>I recently heard that the cost of living in San Francisco is higher than New York City. Don’t know much about New York City. When people say Manhattan, is this different from NYC and not comparable to San Francisco? Or is it more appropriate to only compare certain neighborhoods?</p>
<p>Yes, I think you need to compare neighborhoods, not just cities.</p>
<p>It’s such a huge continuum. My definition of “rich” is my own, of course. Our younger one went to a very expensive Eastern prep school because we relocated from out of state just as she was starting 11th grade. We were in a furnished apartment, searching madly for a house in a region we didn’t know at all. Anyway, it made sense to put her in this school and it turned out to be a really good investment. She made friends, got a tremendous two years of education and great college counseling. Many of her friends are what I consider to be outlier rich – amazing homes, beach homes, apartments in Manhattan, ridiculous cars and clothes. A lot of these families do seem to come from a family tradition of big money. The parents seem to work but it doesn’t add up. Then it comes out that they and their parents and the grandparents etc all went to Cornell or Dartmouth or whatever. I can’t help but think of my parents – mom no college, dad a degree courtesy of GI bill and my grandparents were coal miners who pretty much started school at about age nine or so. The family lineage is one of sheer poverty and little to no education.</p>
<p>So yes, I think it helps to be born into a family with “money” in the picture. No college debt. Help in funding a business. Help in buying a home. All the stuff a lot of us have to scrounge out on our own.</p>
<p>In terms of what type of job makes you rich? Stuff that isn’t one-on-one, I think. Stuff that can potentially sell to the masses. Sure, a dentist or doctor can make money seeing patients, but the doc who writes the book on how to be healthy that hits the bestseller list is the really rich doc.</p>
<p>As others on the thread have pointed out, income is different from wealth. Henry Louis Gates has written about the long term impact of property ownership in African-American families. Many who are well off today had ancestors who were able to acquire (and hold on to) land right after the civil war.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18gates.html?pagewanted=all[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18gates.html?pagewanted=all</a></p>
<p>I am not wealthy enough to live comfortably on the upper east side. However, my children continue to benefit from being the descendants of a family that has owned land more than 200 years. Land ownership created enough income to send generations of children to college and into professions.</p>
<p>I wonder how many really wealthy people (those living high on the hog in Manhattan) come from truly impoverished backgrounds? I wonder how many come from families that have owned land from generations.</p>
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<p>Hmmm, you mean to say that they made money the old-fashioned way – they inherited it?</p>
<p>Note socioeconomic eliteness was a much bigger factor in admissions to elite (HYP) universities in earlier times. They strongly favored students from specific prep schools which were not necessarily academically elite, but had socioeconomically elite students.</p>
<p>It was only in the late 1950s that Princeton admitted a freshman class with majority public high school graduates; at the time, elite universities had internal controversies over whether they should admit more public high school graduates, who tended to be stronger academically, versus more prep school graduates, who tended to bring more parental donations with them. The remnants of this conflict are the still-existing legacy preferences in admissions. Of course, some of the prep schools have also upgraded their academics to elite levels since then, mirroring the elite universities’ greater emphasis on academic eliteness. It is also true that the socioeconomic elite can provide their kids with more opportunities to reach the academic elite level, though the kids have to have more of their own ability and effort than before, when inherited socioeconomic eliteness was a bigger factor by itself.</p>
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<p>Yes, Manhattan is very different from New York City. Manhattan is one of 5 New York City boroughs, along with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. About 80% of NYC’s population lives in one of the 4 “other” boroughs, i.e., not in Manhattan. Land is far more expensive in Manhattan, as is housing. Per capita income in Manhattan is far higher than in the other boroughs. Population density (residents per square mile) is roughly twice as high in Manhattan as in either the Bronx or Brooklyn, 3 times higher than Queens, and almost 10 times higher than Staten Island which largely consists of neighborhoods of middle-class, single- family homes. And even these figures understate the difference, because the Manhattan figures include neighborhoods in northern Manhattan–Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood that in many ways more closely resemble the Bronx or Brooklyn (in terms of income, density, demographics) than Manhattan from, say 110th Street south to the southern tip of the island.</p>
<p>So I think you need to be really careful with comparisons of income and cost of living. If the figures are for New York City, that’s going to include the 80% of city residents who don’t live in Manhattan, and the 85-90% of New York City residents who don’t live in the parts of Manhattan that tourists regularly visit and ambitious college students aspire to. </p>
<p>Just to give you some idea: for the week ended Aug. 22, 2012, the average listing price to purchase a residence (in most cases an apartment) was $4.7 million in TriBeCa, $3.9 million in SoHo, $3.3 million in the West Village, $3.3 million in Midtown Center, $2.8 million on the Upper East Side, and $2.1 million on the Upper West Side. In East Harlem, which has become a “hot” neighborhood, it was $1.2 million. Farther north in Manhattan, it was $787K in central Harlem, $501K in Washington Heights, and $325K in Inwood. Those are all in Manhattan.</p>
<p>In Brooklyn, there are a few pricier neighborhoods like Boerum Hill $1.4 million, Brooklyn Heights $1.3 million, Park Slope $1.1 million, but most neighborhoods ranged from around $300K to $750K or so.</p>
<p>In Queens, one beachfront neighborhood, Neponsit, tops out at $1.1 million, but most neighborhoods range from $170K up to about $550K.</p>
<p>In the Bronx, there are a couple of pockets in the $700K-$1 million range, but in most neighborhoods average listing prices ranged from around $100K up to around $500K. </p>
<p>In Staten Island, average listings ranged from about $275K up to about $500K, with a few neighborhoods higher.</p>
<p>As you can see, it’s a night and day difference. Most New Yorkers can afford to live in New York City; most can’t afford to live in Manhattan, and certainly not in the neighborhoods where an average apartment costs $2 to $5 million–i.e., the parts of New York that starry-eyed college kids dream of.</p>
<p>San Francisco is more like Manhattan than like New York City as a whole. It’s compact, largely surrounded by water, and dense, with high land costs, high housing costs, and high per capita incomes. Not all of San Francisco is upscale, but then neither is all of Manhattan.</p>
<p>The wealthiest person I know started with one but now owns multiple Boar’s Head cold cuts delivery routes.</p>
<p>Back to the inherited money issue, I do sense in some of these families we have gotten to know that the more recent generations have not really plowed money back into the family coffers all that much. There’s a vibe that the family money softens the edges of their professional income lives somewhat but that these families aren’t earning big capital themselves. And occasionally, I think I sense a certain anxiety among some of them. </p>
<p>I do not envy them in the slightest. And many have been very sweet and welcoming to our DD and to us. It’s been interesting.</p>
<p>If somehow my DH and I made really Big Money, I’m sure we’d try to pass it on to our kids in some wise way.</p>
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<p>Could it be that the inheritor generation grew up used to an expensive lifestyle of the ultra-wealthy ultra-high-income people, but find that maintaining such a lifestyle when they are merely high-income means that they are spending more than they earn, and that their anxiety is about running out of inherited money to fund their lavish lifestyle?</p>
<p>Someone needs to invite Alumother to this thread.</p>
<p>^^ LOL</p>
<p>Sometimes those raised without money concerns don’t feel the need to plow it back into the family coffers. They are free to consider other things besides money making. NOT speaking for anyone… just an observation. Inheritances can be a safety net, not a jumping off point to more wealth. Big money allows choice.</p>
<p>Thanks bclintonk, very informative. Having never been to New York, nor anywhere on the east coast besides Florida, I wasn’t really sure how the city was laid out.</p>
<p>I save money by volunteering. I am too busy to shop.</p>
<p>I’m somewhat curious as to how family money works - and I’d guess that it could work in various ways - does some matriarch or patriach control it and dish it out. Do the kids send money back in for redistribution? Are there trust funds that are on auto-pilot?</p>
<p>I used to work for the patriarch of what was then one of the wealthiest families in the world in a firm that handled affairs of others similarly situated. In this case, the big, big money was initially earned by the FIL. The husband grew up middle class, served with distinction in World War II, went to law school and became partner in a white shoe firm. He did well on his own, but he married the billions. The couple had kids who all had the best educations possible and went on to use family capital to start businesses that became very successful and employed hundreds or more people, with many more service providers making good money from them. The money was always held in trust for the mother in various complicated ways and when she died, control passed to her husband. He provided a staff for the entire extended family in an office in NYC to do things like schedule family member visits at their countless homes, use of the planes, managing the staffs of their homes and offices. That kind of thing. Each kid got a set amount of capital (large amount, but not staggeringly so), along with a great education and a strong work ethic. The kids all grew their initial investments into real fortunes of their own through hard work and expect their kids to do the same.</p>
<p>Another family I worked for was a super-wealthy family, where the father made the fortune coming from abject poverty because he had something that people all over the world wanted to buy. He and his wife are spectacular philanthropists and their kids got good educations, but not at the level of the other family. Dad controls every penny and every aspect of the daily life of his family, none of whom have ever done a thing productive except bear his name.</p>
<p>So it varies.</p>
<p>With regard to the Manhatten/San Francisco theme; </p>
<p>OP, we have lived in both NYC suburbs, and San Francisco suburbs, and you really should experiment with that. Husband and I are both MD’s, although not the big earner types, and we like to say living in a suburb allows us to party like rock stars in “The City”. True, it is not the same, but Brooklyn in particular, near a subway, is a pretty sweet deal.</p>