Howard is a 37-year-old freelance writer who has had possession of the same small Greenwich Village one-bedroom since 1968. His current rent for the fifth-floor walk-up, under the rent control system, is a little under $100 a month. On the open market the apartment would probably bring $1,000 a month. This is not to say that it is a palace. In fact, it does not even have a bathroom. There is a shower next to the kitchen sink; other matters toilette must be accomplished in the water closet, which is down the hall across from another apartment.
There are those who are not so frustrated. There are those who have found the city`s housing market to be a gold mine. Most of those in this category are rental tenants in buildings whose owners decide to go co-op. Under New York state law, in order to make such a shift the landlord must get at least 15 percent of his tenants to buy their apartments. Since the tenants invariably band together and sign ''no-buy'' pledges at the first mention of co-oping, the owner is forced to offer them their units at prices far below the market value. Having bought their apartments for a song, the new owners can then turn around and sell at enormous profits.
One not-so-unusual example is that of an Upper East Side couple who bought their desirable three-bedroom apartment in 1982 at an insider`s price of $200,000. Two years later, they sold it for $600,000. At that point they decided it made sense to leave the city. Moving to St. Paul, Minn., they found a beautiful home for $150,000, paying another $50,000 as capital gains tax. Then they both retired early, living off the income from the remainder of their windfall.
The cost of an apartment is by no means the only financial curse of the typical New Yorker. Although a careful shopper can find some exceptional values at a plethora of discount stores scattered all over town, on the whole just about everything is more expensive here. This is especially true of those diversions for which New York is aptly renowned.
While indulging in the opera or a fine French meal is clearly a discretionary expense, there are certain costs everyone must bear. Housing is one of them; taxes are another. Most New Yorkers seem only vaguely aware of how overtaxed they actually are in comparison to almost all other Americans. Maybe it is just as well they don`t know.
Residents of New York City experience the double pain of paying both a state and a local income tax. On income over $17,000, the combined rate is roughly 14 percent. By way of comparison, a single taxpayer here who earns $25,000 a year and takes the standard deduction is subject to a state-city income tax of 8.7 percent. That same person living in Los Angeles would pay a state income tax of 4.6 percent. And in Chicago, a mere 2.4 percent. (Neither Los Angeles nor Chicago has a city income tax.) Because New York`s dual tax is steeply progressive, those in the higher income brackets are socked much harder. A single person earning $50,000 in New York City will thus pay--in addition to his federal income tax--a whopping 11.5 percent, compared to 7.7 percent in Los Angeles and 2.45 percent in Chicago.
The illustration becomes more graphic when dollar amounts are employed. The single New Yorker earning $50,000 can expect to pay some $4,500 more in state-city income taxes each year than a comparable Chicagoan. That`s about $375 a month. While it is difficult to make direct comparisons on apartment rents from city to city, my own admittedly unscientific study of both markets suggests that a $500 apartment on Chicago`s North Side would run something on the order of $1,300 in Manhattan. Considering only two budget items--rent and local taxes--one arrives at the astonishing figure of $1,175 a month as the difference in the cost of living in New York and in Chicago.
There might be some justification for the inordinately high tax rates here if there were any evidence that the taxpayer received comparable services in return. Quite the opposite is the case. With much of its housing stock and basic infrastructure dating back to the 19th Century, New York is quite literally a city falling apart. It is not all that uncommon for buildings to simply collapse. City streets and expressways remain riddled all year long with potholes large enough to consume a Volkswagen. Sewer mains burst with some regularity, flooding entire neighborhoods. Nearly all subway stations are damp, crumbling and littered visions of Hades, and the system`s track beds and switching mechanisms are so decrepit that fires and serious accidents resulting in passenger injuries often are considered too commonplace to make the local newspapers.
Public school systems are troubled in almost all big cities, but in New York the problem is exacerbated by the high cost of living. While parents in Philadelphia or Cleveland or Baltimore might be able to stretch their budgets and pay $4,000 a year in private school tuition for their child, parents in New York, saddled with exhorbitant rent and taxes, usually cannot afford that option. They are thus left with no choice but to send their children to a public school, which can be outright dangerous, or to move to the suburbs. Many avoid the dilemma by not having children in the first place.
Concern over safety and fear of crime are endemic to New York, and with good reason. A 1984 Rand McNally list of all 329 of the nation`s metropolitan areas ranked according to their rates of violent crime placed New York at the very top.
where it is possible to purchase, along with the Racing Form and a Hershey bar, all of the above drugs in large quantities, over the counter.
The city`s high crime rate certainly can`t be blamed entirely on the police department. Another contributing factor is, again, the high cost of living. Except for the aging and dwindling band of rent-control winners, Manhattan has become a place with only two kinds of people: the rich and the poor. And nowhere else in America are these two classes thrown together in such close proximity. Even the poshest precincts of the Upper East Side are only a few blocks removed from dismal tenements filled with welfare tenants eking out an existence while awaiting with dread that day when they too will be illegally evicted from their apartments to clear the way for yet another renovation. Those who refuse to go can expect harassment from the landlord, harassment that in many cases in recent years has taken the form of heating shut-offs in midwinter, arson, beatings and even murder.