I absolutely need a doorman, elevator, gym, nap room, golf stimulator, cryotherapy chamber, and panic room. Right?
For the most obvious statement in this newsletter, the cost of living in New York is pretty damn high. If you’re shelling out big bucks for your shockingly undersized space, in order to wrap your head around that price tag, you need a justification. Your friends in cities like Cleveland, Tampa, and even D.C., having tricked out spots for what would get you a room with no windows in an illegally converted apartment in Bushwick. As Benjamin Franklin says, “Comparison is the true theft of joy” and you see the exorbitant price you’re paying and goddamn-it, you’re entitled to living in the lap of luxury too!
Yet, welcome to New York – anywhere else in the country, the Palace of Versailles would be yours, yet here you are just a meager peasant.
When speaking clients, particularly relocation, often the first thing I hear is, “I need a doorman, elevator, gym, laundry, and would like full renovations…oh and I want to be in the heart of the West Village” followed by their price range which…does not cover any of those features and this is just completely unrealistic.
When I first tell people what their budget affords
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After we’ve seen a dozen things and they still don’t believe me
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So we’re going to quickly talk about how those features change price point, location, unit size, neighborhood and while I actually wish I was a wizard for so many reasons, I cannot make this stuff appear.
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So this may all sound like logic, but when you’re trying to qualify spending an exorbitant amount of money, sometime logic goes completely out the door. New York is mainly made up of two different building types – prewar buildings and postwar buildings. Prewars, as the name would suggest, were building before World War II, and are your 5-6 story walk up brownstone and tenement buildings that populate the majority of the Villages, a lot of the Upper West and Upper East Sides, and most of the long standing buildings in Brooklyn (Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, ect.). Postwars, as you can infer now, were built after World War II and are your larger buildings with a high number of units, elevators, and layered on amenities like doormen, roofs, and gyms. Considering this from an architectural standpoint, the prewar buildings obviously are the longer standing structures and present themselves in the hearts of neighborhoods and the most desired parts of the city. Seldom do these get taken down, due to air rights, zoning, owners holding onto them, and the hoops you have to jump through and politics at hand putting a condo in the center of a neighborhood like Greenwich Village. Neighborhoods that have popped up more recently, were once either ungentrified or industrial so the city gave developers incentives to build fancy new properties there to spur a transition. That’s why Financial District, Midtown, Hudson Yards, farther distances from subway stops, and less desirable neighborhoods like Long Island City and what-was-Williamsburg-ten-years-ago are prime spots to find these types of buildings.
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When developers building these massive buildings are designing floor plans, they can efficiently minimize square footage and maximize amenities to justify the price tag. That’s why average doorman studios are in the 250-350 square foot range and one bedrooms generally hover around 550 square feet. Conversely, with the older prewar walk up buildings, there’s only so many ways to splice up the floor plan while still maintaining proper plumbing so the square footage tends to be much larger, ceilings often a bit higher, and a lot of these have original detailing. Finding 800 square feet is doable in a prewar building; to find such in a postwar building is extremely difficult.
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Now that’s not to say you can’t find a doorman building in the villages….you’ll just have to fork over quite the price tag for it. With a doorman comes an elevator, laundry, usually a roof deck, sometimes a gym, and a handful of other amenities. Now those amenities require salaries (multiple doormen per building), have maintenance fees, usually require repairs, and factor heavily into the carrying costs. If you’re trying to be cost conscious with your search, the difference between a walk-up 350 square foot studio and a doorman/elevator unit of the same size can be quite sizable. With rentals, it at least adds $800-1,000 onto the price tag. For sales, you’re looking at a very mighty upswing as well.
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Now the question is, do you need one. So people inquire about doormen largely for two reasons: safety and getting packages. As we live in the era of Amazon now where every day is Christmas morning, I do understand the need of having someone to sign for packages. However USPS/FedEx leaves the boxes in a space in the interior of the building, so as long as you can grab it within a few days, the risk of having something stolen is quite low. Most carriers have smart boxes at local stores near your home where you can elect your goods to be left. In the case of something very important, I always have things shipped to my office (god bless my office manager who didn’t murder me for ordering a Christmas Tree to our office) and have also elected to ship directly to the closest post office for my own pick up.
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As far as safety goes, this sentiment is coming from a girl who lived on the South Side of Chicago and the West Side of Baltimore. I’ve also run very long distances through these neighborhoods and seen some pretty wild stuff; I’ve started to question if natural selection actually works seeing I’m sitting here writing this today. But safety wise, I’ve lived in Alphabet City (not the Alphabet City of the 1980’s, trust me) and now live in Chinatown, both near housing projects, and I must say New York is the safest city in the country. First off, there are always people outside. Be it 7am, 1pm, 11pm, 3am – you’re always sharing the street with someone else. Second, the police force in New York is nothing short of outstanding and omnipresent. I’ve walked home thousands of times alone later in the evening and am not necessarily an intimidating person – never have I felt unsafe. So as far as safety goes, again New York really never lets you be alone, and all for the good.
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So when assessing your wish list, before you throw a full amenity building on the list of musts, understand how that will grossly effect neighborhood, price point, unit size and if it is worth it. The inventory you see on Streeteasy represents the market and while there are great deals to be found, there are no hidden listing that are less expensive and exponentially better than what you’ve been seeing. Unfortunately living in New York is insanely expensive so if a doorman is a nonnegotiable, you must be willing to fork over more, downsize a bit, and have less control of your neighborhood choice.