I've never lived in NYC, but I go there once or twice a year since the mid-90s and I have to say, the city he's describing, and the city I visit are apparently in different, alternate realities. I don't go there for the startup scene, so I can't comment on that but I can comment on lots of the other absurd nonsense:
1) $2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.
He's obviously in the wrong part of town and can't figure out how to use the real estate section of the NYT. Extend your commute on the subway by 15-20 minutes a day, or live in Queens or something and you'll shave 70% off of that for a place twice as large. In 10 minutes I found a dozen 2 bedroom apartments for $1600 in Queens. You want to live in an expensive area, then that's what you get. When you model a place like NYC, it's better to think of it as a much larger area. A few blocks is like a few miles of price differentiation elsewhere. Don't like what's right here? Go walk 10 minutes in any direction and you'll be someplace completely different.
2) ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere.
I have no idea what he's spending money on. Even if he was pulling down only $60k a year (unlikely as a quant), your apartment is only 1/2 of your gross income. Even after taxes you have like a thousand a month to live on at that rate and no car expenses. Being a quant @ GS, I'd figure you're pulling down another 30-40k/yr gross anyways so you can still have a nice night out once a month. NYC is really not an expensive place to eat. I don't think I've ever paid more than $7 for a stuff me to the gills breakfast. And a decent date-meal for two ran <$120 with drinks. Apparently the author never figured out how to operate a Deli or a Diner.
3) can't fit in socially with the wrong social group that I'm just dying to be part of blah blah
Cry me a river, go to different bars and stop hanging around with people who won't let you into their clique/you already have a girlfriend (at the time) what are you doing picking up chicks? Color me confused.
4) In San Francisco, people don’t pay two months’ rent to a real estate pimp: they create Craigslist and make the pimp obsolete.
I wasn't aware that San Francisco had managed to abolish Real Estate agents. It's funny because craigslist serves other parts of the country and we still have Real Estate agents....
5) The intellectual candle-power isn’t there
And the elsewhere goes on to pine that everybody he wants to hang with is ivy-league. The only thing that he said that makes any kind of sense is that the educational makeup of the in-city schools is all wrong for tech startups. I mean there's NYU-Poly I guess, but that's small fry, Princeton is not really that far away (an hour more than Stanford is from downtown SF by car). But there's a ton of schools with great engineering programs within a day's drive from the city (MIT for example). Am I supposed to understand that the entire educational system of the North East and mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. can't out-compete Stanford? Again, color me confused?
6) One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés
What? At this point I'm not even sure the author has even been to NYC. Which is besides the point, the point he's making is, "you can’t have startups or revolutionary political movements without cozy cafés to dawdle, work, and plot in." Because as I noticed before, the author failed to figure out how to operate a Deli or a Diner. He also failed to figure out how to operate a public park, a bookstore, a coffee shop, a donut shop, a bench, a stoop and numerous other public places other than an office where you can sit and meet for long hours in the city. Protip, there's this fantastic huge public place you can use in NYC called "Central Park" absolutely free. If that's not "cozy" enough, there's a bunch of smaller parks like Madison Square all dotted throughout the city. If you want to eat while you forment revolution, there's like a Starbuck's on every single block in the city. http://kottke.org/05/01/maximum-starbucks-density Even in 2005.
7) The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks.
I know food can be subjective, but seriously? I'm definitely sure that tales of living in the city are grossly exaggerated and/or he was confused with living in Tampa, FL or something. No wait, I'm sure I've seen a cafe there.
7b) blah blah blah, people in SF really all want to be farmers
Wonderful, if you live in a place with some dirt you can till without getting a fine, you can farm it. NYC is not such a place. Deal with it.
7c) Even the skeeziest convenience store in Daly City or Oakland has a drinkable collection of California wines on offer.
Like I said, I don't live in NYC, but last I remember was being able to pick up some Sonoma Valley vino at every 7-11 along the East Coast for <$10.
7d) In three years of living in New York, I never ate someone else’s home-cooked food even once.
See #3. You.hang.out.with.the.wrong.people. I'm not sure I can put it more plainly than that. No wonder you couldn't afford anything.
One thing NYC is famous for is locally grown produced trucked in in the wee hours of the morning to sell in small stalls. The NYC butcher was the model of meat procurement until the grocery store and strip malls ended that across the country. For goodness sakes, the whole city is basically a farmer's market. You know what's doing gangbusters business? Whole Foods. I barely know people in the city, and I've never lived there, and I've had more home-cooked meals than this poor sap.
8) blah blah home depot in NYC only sells nail clippers and 10 cent nails.
This is really just a jab and the relative masculinity of New Yorkers compared to San Franciscoers. Whatever, the author got eaten up and spit out by the city and simply couldn't handle it, now he wants to spend the rest of his days cultivating asparagus in a plot behind his house. It's really amazing how so many of the tallest buildings in the U.S. can be in one city with no hardware stores in site.
He's then absolutely enamored by a real Home Depot, no doubt anchoring a strip mall someplace, and a big box electronics store as proof that SF is a hacker's paradise. yawn, I live in the suburbs and have half a dozen of each within 20 minutes of my house. By this standard, Anytown, US is twice the hacker's paradise than SF since most places have a Home Depot, a Lowes, a local lumber yard, a garden nursery, a stone quarry, a Fry's, a Best Buy and two Radio Shacks.
9) Three years in New York, and I went north of 14th St maybe three times. Trips to the Met excepted, of course
Facepalm. No wonder nobody would talk to you in a bar, it's not because you were a quant.
You gave me a point-by-point rebuttal, so I'll give a similar counter-rebuttal.
1) Queens is way too far away from lower Manhattan. Believe me, I tried looking elsewhere. It wasn't much cheaper. The solution I ended up with was moving into a tenement in LES with the girlfriend, who had a lease dating back five years. That was the 'cheap' way to go.
2) I'll quote the managing director on my desk: you need about 500K a year to live normally in Manhattan with a family. That's like 10 families in the flyover states.
4) At least in 2005, if you tried using CL to find an apartment in NY, you'd find it completely taken over by broker spam. As Craig Newmark himself mentioned in a recent interview, de-spamifying the New York CL rentals listings was one of his biggest challenges. I can't imagine it's much different now, although I'd love to see otherwise.
6) Dude, Starbucks isn't a cafe'. The fact you're even counting them proves my point about New Yorkers.
7c) Actually, New York delis can't sell wine by law, probably as a kickback to the liquor store owners. So good luck finding that bottle of Sonoma at 2am on Friday. I never did.
8) Yeah, and try getting to those big box stores from Manhattan. It starts with a subway ride to midtown to rent a car from one of the agencies next to the Queen's Midtown tunnel....
9) Eh, actually they did talk to me, once I dropped the G-bomb, which is kind of the point of the post. I wasn't a startup geek when I was in NYC.
1) Brooklyn or Jersey City is completely doable. I can be at the WTC in 10 minutes from JC. It's where I've met a bunch of Wall Street traders and programmers. I'm paying slightly more than you were and I have a 2500 sq. ft. loft (no broker).
2) Yes, that's Manhattan. Although I lived in a 5 floor walk up in Morningside Heights for $1000/month, 2 person share. About a 15 minute ride to Wall Street on the express train.
6) Ever been around NYU? Tons of places.
8) 23rd between Broadway and 6th is a Home Depot. But then again, you don't go above 14th.
How are you people measuring this time to travel? It seems a lot of people here only count the time on the train, disregarding the time it takes to get to the train station, wait for a train, and get from the station to the destination.
It seems people talking up this method always minimize the journey.
From my front door to the WTC station takes 10-15 minutes, assuming I hit the train when it arrives at the Grove street station. When I was working in an office on Chambers, that meant 15-20 minutes -- door to door -- to get to the office. Subways generally run on a predictable schedule.
I've been in the NYC metro area for 10 years now. 5 of those years were spent freelancing/contracting/starting businesses. Nothing beats the 15 foot commute from my bed to my home office, but I'll take the public transportation system in NYC over the commuting traffic nightmares of the rest of the country any day. Compared to my commute in SoCal, 1-1.5 hours every weekday on the 405 for a drive that takes 25 minutes on the weekend, I absolutely love the NYC public transportation system.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not disputing your central claim that NYC tech scene is a pale shadow of the Bay Area scene. But your arguments for why that is are bizarre and nonsensical.
1) I was just picking someplace random. It's not a two hour commute from anyplace in the city to any other place (unless you count coming in from as far out as Jamaica or Mt. Vernon during rush hour I guess). But there's plenty of places 10-20 minutes outside of the Financial District that are way less. BTW CL is not the only place that lists apartments. There's a 2 BR in the NYT real estate section for $2k/mo in Ft. Greene right now. That's <25 minutes, bring a book and there's a ton of >500 sq ft. places on the Island for <$2500/mo.
2) I guess that's true if you want to live in a building with a doorman in a 3 bedroom apartment and an au pair. I wouldn't call that living "normally" in Manhattan though. I'm also mystified with the requirement to live directly on the island. There's other boroughs that are much cheaper. At that type of income, you're looking at around $10-$13k/mo in housing costs. There's not a lot of places you can't live in the city for that.
4) I don't disagree, that's why there's a half dozen other cheap/free ways to find apartments in cities.
6) I will agree that the cafe culture in NYC is not nearly as prevalent as places that are ~70deg year round. Heck, there's more cafes in the D.C. area. But they are there. I've actually had some very nice evenings sitting outside sipping a latte and chatting about the weather. But restricting yourself to cafes and only cafes is like going to Paris and talking about how the Tex-Mex food culture sucks. You know the old saying "When in Rome..." In NYC you do delis, coffeeshops and diners, not cafes. The last time I was in the city a month ago I spent half a day in a deli responding to email next to a guy hacking out some code. It's not like they kick you out so long as you buy something.
7c) All I can say is, I've never had a problem finding cheap CA wine in the city. I usually go out and pick some up and bring it back to my hotel instead of paying $30-60/btl at a restaurant. Much more satisfying and not terribly hard to find - did nobody in your social group in 3 years ever figure out where to buy a bottle of wine?
8) I think my point was that it's not necessary, nor does it make sense to equate big box hardware stores with a hacker's paradise. I mean, I guess if "hacking" has changed meaning to mean "I need some lumber and an industrial dehumidifier" then you make sense. Calling SF such a place because you can get all your gardening and plumbing needs taken care of at one store just simply is nonsensical.
9) Hang around superficial people and they'll expect superficial things.
Choose a random cafe in SF, and I bet it will not be filled with hacker-types. Choose a random person in SF to talk to, and I bet they will not care about startups either. It's all about who your friends are and where you hang out.
Did the OP actually try going to any NYC hacker meetups? Did he go to any NYC hacker spaces? When he was at parties, did he even mention his interest in startups, or did he himself perpetuate the myths he describes?
I worked 2 blocks from Wall St. for 4 years and came in from Hells Kitchen in midtown (20 minute total walk + train ride). Here is an apartment which is a few blocks from Times Square, Central Park, and Broadway's theater district for $1,295 per month. Hell's kitchen is packed with great bars, and restaurants, pizza, cafe's with free internet and cheap awesome Thai and Chinese food for delivery. It's 15 minutes from NYU and 30 minutes from Columbia University: http://www.trulia.com/rental/3011545407--W-48th-New-York-NY-...
Well, every development job I've had has been a ten am start. Most people I know out here(finance, advertising, marketing) start a ten too. Then again all of my buddies that work in finance work in boutique agencies so maybe it's different at the big shops.
I agree that hanging out with the Wall Street types, going to Wall Street bars, and living in Wall Street apartments probably skewed his perception of NYC's tech scene greatly.
But, hackers like myself who hang out with hacker types, go to hacker bars, and live in hacker nabes probably are probably equally skewed, albeit in the opposite direction. It's people like me who are shouting from the hilltops that NYC is the new SF, when in reality it's probably somewhere in between these two extremes.
I actually don't disagree with his central thesis that the NYC startup scene doesn't rival the Bay Area scene. What I disagree with is his bizarre characterization of NYC. It's like if I were to write a blog about D.C. and all I could talk about where the endless mile upon mile of endless monuments and golf courses with a KFC at every green.
I lived in New York for ten years (most of it in Washington Heights), and I can't agree with you enough.
Except for the home-cooked meal thing. My ex-girlfriend and I delivered an entire Thanksgiving feast to a friend's apartment when we discovered our stove had stopped working (and probably hadn't been working for months), but cooking food was a relative rarity. New York is the only place I have been where people throw birthday parties for each other in a local bar.
I don't see why this is so odd. I live in Seattle and most everyone I know, who lives in the city, throw parties in bars and restaurants. Who wants to deal with dirty dishes, potential strangers stealing stuff, wine on the carpet, broken glass, lack of seating, lack of glasses and plates, parking, etc? Even if you have the room and dinnerware to accommodate that many people, it's just easier to go to a bar.
If you work until midnight every night and you've got the dough, it's probably worth paying extra to live near work. Commuting from Queens to Wall Street would totally suck, especially if you're putting in long hours.
I worked on wall street for a bit, and lived in Brooklyn Heights -- my commute was about 10-15 minutes (including walking). It was more than $1k cheaper than what the author was paying. I was always surprised that the guys at work never even considered Brooklyn as an option.
I don't disagree that that would be a haul. But complaining about high rent in a high rent neighborhood is like complaining that your Ferrari is too fast. It's not like there aren't other places to live in the city not really that far from the financial district.
The guy used to work at GS. Although not everyone can be forced into a stereotype based on their function and where they work, you still have to keep that in mind; since it does tend to affect who you hang out with, where you live, and what you do after hours.
1) $2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.
He's obviously in the wrong part of town and can't figure out how to use the real estate section of the NYT. Extend your commute on the subway by 15-20 minutes a day, or live in Queens or something and you'll shave 70% off of that for a place twice as large. In 10 minutes I found a dozen 2 bedroom apartments for $1600 in Queens. You want to live in an expensive area, then that's what you get. When you model a place like NYC, it's better to think of it as a much larger area. A few blocks is like a few miles of price differentiation elsewhere. Don't like what's right here? Go walk 10 minutes in any direction and you'll be someplace completely different.
2) ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere.
I have no idea what he's spending money on. Even if he was pulling down only $60k a year (unlikely as a quant), your apartment is only 1/2 of your gross income. Even after taxes you have like a thousand a month to live on at that rate and no car expenses. Being a quant @ GS, I'd figure you're pulling down another 30-40k/yr gross anyways so you can still have a nice night out once a month. NYC is really not an expensive place to eat. I don't think I've ever paid more than $7 for a stuff me to the gills breakfast. And a decent date-meal for two ran <$120 with drinks. Apparently the author never figured out how to operate a Deli or a Diner.
3) can't fit in socially with the wrong social group that I'm just dying to be part of blah blah
Cry me a river, go to different bars and stop hanging around with people who won't let you into their clique/you already have a girlfriend (at the time) what are you doing picking up chicks? Color me confused.
4) In San Francisco, people don’t pay two months’ rent to a real estate pimp: they create Craigslist and make the pimp obsolete.
I wasn't aware that San Francisco had managed to abolish Real Estate agents. It's funny because craigslist serves other parts of the country and we still have Real Estate agents....
5) The intellectual candle-power isn’t there
And the elsewhere goes on to pine that everybody he wants to hang with is ivy-league. The only thing that he said that makes any kind of sense is that the educational makeup of the in-city schools is all wrong for tech startups. I mean there's NYU-Poly I guess, but that's small fry, Princeton is not really that far away (an hour more than Stanford is from downtown SF by car). But there's a ton of schools with great engineering programs within a day's drive from the city (MIT for example). Am I supposed to understand that the entire educational system of the North East and mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. can't out-compete Stanford? Again, color me confused?
6) One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés
What? At this point I'm not even sure the author has even been to NYC. Which is besides the point, the point he's making is, "you can’t have startups or revolutionary political movements without cozy cafés to dawdle, work, and plot in." Because as I noticed before, the author failed to figure out how to operate a Deli or a Diner. He also failed to figure out how to operate a public park, a bookstore, a coffee shop, a donut shop, a bench, a stoop and numerous other public places other than an office where you can sit and meet for long hours in the city. Protip, there's this fantastic huge public place you can use in NYC called "Central Park" absolutely free. If that's not "cozy" enough, there's a bunch of smaller parks like Madison Square all dotted throughout the city. If you want to eat while you forment revolution, there's like a Starbuck's on every single block in the city. http://kottke.org/05/01/maximum-starbucks-density Even in 2005.
7) The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks.
I know food can be subjective, but seriously? I'm definitely sure that tales of living in the city are grossly exaggerated and/or he was confused with living in Tampa, FL or something. No wait, I'm sure I've seen a cafe there.
7b) blah blah blah, people in SF really all want to be farmers
Wonderful, if you live in a place with some dirt you can till without getting a fine, you can farm it. NYC is not such a place. Deal with it.
7c) Even the skeeziest convenience store in Daly City or Oakland has a drinkable collection of California wines on offer.
Like I said, I don't live in NYC, but last I remember was being able to pick up some Sonoma Valley vino at every 7-11 along the East Coast for <$10.
7d) In three years of living in New York, I never ate someone else’s home-cooked food even once.
See #3. You.hang.out.with.the.wrong.people. I'm not sure I can put it more plainly than that. No wonder you couldn't afford anything.
One thing NYC is famous for is locally grown produced trucked in in the wee hours of the morning to sell in small stalls. The NYC butcher was the model of meat procurement until the grocery store and strip malls ended that across the country. For goodness sakes, the whole city is basically a farmer's market. You know what's doing gangbusters business? Whole Foods. I barely know people in the city, and I've never lived there, and I've had more home-cooked meals than this poor sap.
8) blah blah home depot in NYC only sells nail clippers and 10 cent nails.
This is really just a jab and the relative masculinity of New Yorkers compared to San Franciscoers. Whatever, the author got eaten up and spit out by the city and simply couldn't handle it, now he wants to spend the rest of his days cultivating asparagus in a plot behind his house. It's really amazing how so many of the tallest buildings in the U.S. can be in one city with no hardware stores in site.
He's then absolutely enamored by a real Home Depot, no doubt anchoring a strip mall someplace, and a big box electronics store as proof that SF is a hacker's paradise. yawn, I live in the suburbs and have half a dozen of each within 20 minutes of my house. By this standard, Anytown, US is twice the hacker's paradise than SF since most places have a Home Depot, a Lowes, a local lumber yard, a garden nursery, a stone quarry, a Fry's, a Best Buy and two Radio Shacks.
9) Three years in New York, and I went north of 14th St maybe three times. Trips to the Met excepted, of course
Facepalm. No wonder nobody would talk to you in a bar, it's not because you were a quant.