Can't Cut It In Brooklyn? Try Buffalo.
Want a three-bedroom apartment on the park with front and back porches, an office and stained glass windows for $795? Try Buffalo. New York Magazine has the tale of a Brooklyn couple who decided to forsake their $1,300-a-month Sunset Park pad for bigger and better digs on New York State’s western frontier. Several ex-New Yorkers…
Want a three-bedroom apartment on the park with front and back porches, an office and stained glass windows for $795? Try Buffalo. New York Magazine has the tale of a Brooklyn couple who decided to forsake their $1,300-a-month Sunset Park pad for bigger and better digs on New York State’s western frontier. Several ex-New Yorkers wax philosophical about their post-NYC lives, too. I don’t miss my old life in New York,” one says. “I only miss the life in New York I know I never would have had.
Where the Urban Dream Life Is Going Cheap [NY Mag]
Buffalo Neighborhood. Photo by jeffk42.
Buffalo, too cold? compared to where? Montreal? Toronto? Minneapolis? Stockholm? St. Petersburg? Those places are cold, Buffalo is just snowy. It has a nice climate actually.
To Canadians, it is south of the border.
I suggest everyone check out the web site Buffalorising.com, which is the Brownstoner.com of Buffalo. The city is not dying, and there is lots of new development in the works. Plenty of festivals and great restaurants, and a huge artist community.
If the city were dying, why is the median price increasing in this disasterous real estate cycle? The median price is about $120,000. But if you exclude the east side, a giant hell hole (think the South Bronx of 1980 with houses instead of apartment buildings) where homes sell for $10,000 and less, the median would be a lot higher.
I love the quote – I missed the life in NYC I know I never would have had.
I know an artist in his late 40’s who lives in a crappy 1-bedroom rental in Williamsburg with his wife and kid. If I were him, I would have moved to Buffalo (or Rochester, or Syracuse, or Albany, or Pittsburgh, or a dozen other places) a long time ago.
Buffalo does seem too geographically challenged to ever have any sort of real resurgence. Just too damn cold.
As a NY native whose family showed up in Ellis Island in 1910, I’d like to bring to your attention a slogan from the worst parts of the 1970s:
“New York City, if you don’t like it, leave”
If you are interested in Brownstoners talk about cow towns like Buffalo as the ‘next wave’, just because of a little economic slowdown, please feel free to go. The real NYers have survived a lot worse, and we will still be here no matter what.
As for all you new transplants who think NYCers actually act like the cast of Friends and/or Sex in the City and who complain that you can’t afford your $75 T-Shirts and $3000/mo rent, please understand that we really don’t want you here. You are ruining everything that makes NYC great. Hope you enjoyed your vacation in NY, you tourists. Feel free to go as soon as possible. Bye!
The whole world doesn’t want to BUY… in fact, this “we must buy” phenomenon is very new. The housing economy was always a few owners and the vast majority renters. But the inversion of this relationship is not a proper inversion… folks buy like they rent.
Buying with the intention of selling in 2 years. That’s one of the many reasons housing prices have gone loony! And why we keep having various sorts of “bubbles” that are destroying our economy and society. Real estate is constantly in a “flip” mode now. There was a time when a 30-year mortgage was an actual long-term commitment and folks looking at less commitment rented. That seems reasonable.
Real estate was always a stable investment because folks that could *afford* the property bought it… and over the LONG RUN had a good quality return on their initial investment and the upgrades and maintenance they put into the property. The current “method” of paying $1.8 million and selling 3 years later for $2.5 million is nuts. It makes real estate into an extremely risky environment and puts way too many people in the position of being fiscally overextended (a lot of times because they don’t have much choice…)
I can’t believe they already have snow in Buffalo…it’s not even Labor Day.
I have a lot of friends from Buffalo. They are all getting out. It’s a dying city and anyone that grew up there has either left or is planning to. There are no jobs and it’s getting worse. Rochester as well. I lived in the area for 5 years. You can buy houses in Buffalo for under 10k in rough neighborhoods FYI.
If they don’t think that property values in Buffalo are ever going to appreciate, then maybe they have better things to do with their money.
The median home price is $60,000, and David and Jamie are still renting. Strange.