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Don’t complain; you choose to live there

I was having a private conversation with a reader recently — and if this reader wants to identify himself and give details, feel free — in which the reader made a compelling case for why he doesn’t feel sorry for friends and acquaintances who live in expensive big cities and work at high-powered jobs, but […]

I was having a private conversation with a reader recently — and if this reader wants to identify himself and give details, feel free — in which the reader made a compelling case for why he doesn’t feel sorry for friends and acquaintances who live in expensive big cities and work at high-powered jobs, but who tell him how “lucky” he is to enjoy his life in a small town. Reader said something to the effect of, “Save your bitching — you choose to live there. Nobody’s forcing you to pay exorbitant rent working yourself to death in a job that keeps you from spending as much time as you like with your family. You could always move. But to do that would mean taking yourself out of the middle of the action, and the status you derive from living there and doing those things. You have to choose, but having made your choice, live with the consequences and quit complaining.”

I thought about that conversation just now reading Megan McArdle’s latest post.  She points to a Daily Caller story looking up the addresses of those arrested in the Occupy Wall Street protest in NYC. Eighty percent of those arrested are white. Interestingly, a startlingly high percentage live in luxury accomodations. Ten percent of those arrested gave home addresses in domiciles worth $500,000 or more. And:

Among addresses for which information is available, single-family homes listed on those police intake forms have a median value of $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied housing units in the United States.

More:

While it would not be fair to conclude that the arrested protesters are fully representative of a movement that is not completely understood, this information forms the most complete snapshot yet of the demonstrations’ more militant participants.

It also reinforces the persistent critique of protesters as entitled, upper-class agitators with few legitimate grievances.

McArdle says she didn’t agree with this at first, given that the cost of everything is so high in New York (and, she might have added, in the other Northeastern cities from which the arrested protesters hail). But then McArdle, a native New Yorker, reconsidered, saying that there’s an irritating habit people who live in NYC, San Francisco, and similarly pricey cities have of thinking that living in places like that is “something that just happens to you, like getting cholera.”

But more to the point, if you own a $795,000 one-bedroom apartment that you are eventually likely to pay off, you own a very expensive asset far beyond what most ordinary Americans could ever hope to accumulate.  You can sell that place and move to a red state and live very well, any time you want.  Most red-staters can’t do the reverse.

After all, to state the obvious, that apartment costs so much because many, many people want to live in New York.  And no matter what the song told you, it is not actually true that all of the best things in life are free.  Living a subway ride away from all that New York has to offer is really great, and also, really pricey.  Which is one reason that I don’t live there any more.

Living in a blue state is a choice.  If coming to New York meant that you had to put four people in a three bedroom apartment that’s uncomfortably far from a subway line, instead of buying a nice little condo in Omaha, this does not mean that you are not “really” better off than your counterpart in Omaha; it means that you have chosen to consume your extra wealth in the form of “living in New York” rather than in the form of spacious real estate, cheap groceries, and an easy commute.

When I lived in New York, it was necessary to explain the astronomical cost of living to my folks to help them understand how it was that I could make so much money but save so little. Realizing that this was an unsustainable way for a family to live in the long run was a big reason we left NYC, which we dearly loved, for Dallas, which was a lot more affordable.

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