This... I'm originally from New York, and I know lots of good engineers who grew up there, but quickly realized that you don't make anything more for working in New York versus San Francisco, Austin, or Denver.
Yes, you can afford a place in Manhattan on an engineer's salary. But it's going to be too small for a family, and if you want a bigger place you're going to need to do a long commute. Compare that with other cities where a well-paid software engineer is at the top end of the income ladder and can rent out a full house for what they'd pay for a 2-bedroom in NY.
(And yes, it's even a lot more expensive than SF. I've looked at apartments in both cities - while rents in SF are comparable to New York, you're still generally getting a much larger place for the same price. That matters if you have kids.)
Brooklyn and Queens are nice (if not that much cheaper for the areas near Manhattan.) But if working in New York means you have to live 40 mins outside of Manhattan, or in Hoboken / NJ, what's the point of being in NY? Might as well be in Denver with a 4000 sq ft house.
It's unlikely that NY rents are going to drop a lot. If startups in NY want to attract more top talent, they're going to have to pay significantly more than startups in cheaper locales.
Once you live in Brooklyn, it's possible to go days without having to enter the city. Plenty of awesome neighbourhoods in the BK (Greenpoint, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights, Bushwick, South Slope, DUMBO). I saw a LOT of young professionals with families in DUMBO/Park Slope/Brooklyn Heights.
Certainly, if you're intent on living in the city, you'll pay a premium.
If you're going weeks without going into the city, why not live somewhere else instead of paying still really high rents (and yes, Brooklyn rents are still usually high compared to everywhere else but Manhattan.)
Great parties, concert venues, cafes, restaurants, parks, bars, and lots and lots of super talented people ranging from musicians in Williamsburg to artists in Bushwick. NYC is more than just Manhattan. It's also easier to bike around.
It's like thinking that the Bay Area is just San Francisco and that there is no reason to live in the BA if you don't go to SF.
I love Brooklyn, but the rents aren't _that_ different from Manhattan if you're in the "hot" areas. Maybe 30% cheaper, but not 70%. Yeah, there are 'low' rents if you're willing to live an hour outside the city, but if you're in Williamsburg or Park Slope, it's not really appreciably cheaper.
And at least for software engineers, you probably _do_ make more in SF than NY, since it's a much more competitive job market for hiring a good software engineer. Just look at the wars that have been going on between FB and Google over hiring top talent. There's still nothing like that in NY.
I came to New York for work, but stayed for the people. Most of my friends live in nearby neighborhoods or clos-ish areas of Brooklyn. Certainly if I worked in the city I'd socialize a bit more there, but I'm not going out of my way to go in on a regular basis.
My rent is probably about 30% cheaper than the equivalent place in Manhattan, and that's savings of about $475 a month, which is nothing to scoff at.
I don't even know where to start here. Leaving aside that a huge chunk of Manhattan has a longer commute to Union Square than even New Jersey, 80% of the city doesn't live in Manhattan.
If you fan out to the metro area, Manhattan falls to less than 9%. Do some of those people wake up some mornings wondering "what's the point", sure, but I promise you (or more specifically: other readers who haven't lived here) most don't.
Even if you're living in the outer boroughs, or Jersey City, you're still probably paying more for what you get than you would if you lived in just about any other US city. I grew up in NY and lived there for 30 years, and when I look at rents in other cities I'm just dumbfounded how much cheaper it is. I'm in a very nice area of LA (still supposedly top 10 for cost) and I pay about 1/3 of what I would in Manhattan or Brooklyn for an equivalent place - and I commute less than 15 minutes to boot.
I'm about to start work at a New Yrk startup, and I have had no trouble finding a place to live on my probably average salary. Granted, I am single and don't have children, but I imagine that's not uncommon for startup employees.
It's not uncommon, but there are also lots of potential employees that have wives and kids (70% or more, I'd guess)... they're basically locked out unless they either want to do a long commute, or live in a tiny place.
I've done a lot of hiring to companies both in NY and in other cities, and the "where will my kids play and where will they go to school" is a standard issue for anyone you're hiring over 30. The answer in New York is generally "somewhere a lot less nice than they would if you lived elsewhere."
There's little denying that NY rents / housing prices are way out of line with average income at this point. I've heard bankers making $500K complain that they have to move to upstate to get a decent sized house.
My biggest challenge in NYC has been the availability of dependable salaries for coders and designers from non-startups, especially from banking and finance. Start-up equity isn't as valuable here to people who can get great pay from a bank or hedge fund.
I see saying NYC needs some extremely successful startups, more engineers, or more product designers as well intentioned, but it's like saying mice need more bells on cats. Everybody agrees, but no one knows how to make it happen.
Also, Parsons has a design and technology program like NYU's ITP. I've taught at both and they're both excellent. There may be other programs. I've worked with two Cooper Union alumni (one artist-turned-graphic-designer and one engineer) and both were among the best people I've worked with.
'My biggest challenge in NYC has been the availability of dependable salaries for coders and designers from non-startups.'
I can't speak to programming/engineering jobs, but there's plenty of design jobs from non-startups. Almost every agency (including tiny ones) are based or have an office in NY. DUMBO has a ton of digital agencies. Motion graphics firms are centralized in Manhattan or in LA. Small ones can be found south of 14th or in Brooklyn. Easily the best city in the U.S. for design jobs.
Indeed, I think spodek's point is that the many non-startup design jobs (with "dependable salaries") in New York makes it harder to attract good designers to startups.
I currently live in Manhattan, and work for a start up in Manhattan, and I can assure you that it is very possible to live in NYC on a "typical" start up salary.
While I don't know what the true "typical" start up salary in NYC, I'll give you my experience: I interviewed with 7 start ups, and 6 of the 7 were offering a nice chunk of equity and salaries over $100,000. If you can't live in NYC on 100k, you're doing something very wrong.
A few lesons we learned in the last three years: we operated in Dogpatch Labs in union square for the first half of 2010 and the wireless was painfully slow. Some other teams actually brought in their MiFis and we used this to connect to webmail and calendars. Mabe this changed since then.
We then moved to our own office in Chelsea and the Internet is bad here, as we use Verizon's second best connection. Depending upon the location of your office or where you work in manhattan, you may have time warner, verizon, optimum, etc. and high speed Internet is usually a crapshoot.
Fios isn't that much of a crap shoot. And it's available in much of lower Manhattan.
I also know for a fact that many unassuming buildings have gigabit ethernet drops that connect directly or semi-directly to 60 Hudson or 111 8th Ave. Probably wouldn't be able to get access without some serious contacts, though.
Most of the co-working spaces I've worked out of have horribly inept people in charge of their network allocation. They use older WiFi routers that have trouble with packet collisions. They provision a 768k DSL line to serve 20 coworking spots.
As recently as two weeks ago, about 16 people overloaded the internet at a coworking space I was visiting. Someone else (not affiliated with the space; the space employee didn't know how to do this) mentioned that they'd initiated a dhcp reset and a couple minutes later everything was back. When I asked him how he knew the router password, he said: "Oh.. they were just using the factory defaults." TBH, I wouldn't want to conduct business over a wifi network whose router was using the default admin password.
Exceptional bandwidth is available in offices in NYC for reasonable prices. Cogent offers 100 Mbps service on their city-wide fiber backbone for 700 - 1000 / month. There are a number of other fiber / ethernet providers with similar service around 2X that price. Cogent is lit in many buildings in Manhattan and the list is available on their site. If you are in a lit building they can have you up and running within 3 weeks:
Isn't there a question about whether PayPal's employees were great entrepreneurs or if they benefitted from network effects?
Anyway, my impression is that the NY startup scene consists of a lot of high-profile startups. Could someone explain to me why these (or any other) startups should aspire to be PayPal-esque, aside from being absurdly successful?
He means that New York needs a PayPal mafia. I think we already got one with DoubleClick which spawned off an incubator that did Gilt Groupe, 10gen, and Business insider so far. The Lerers are doing their part as well to reinvest in New York. But Chris is right that it won't hurt to have a few more. If Gilt Groupe sells or goes public, I expect we'll see this effect.
I think Chris is confused about the magnitude of $100M to bring a top university. $100 million in infrastructure upgrades to under-used land to attract a university is a bargin. The income and sales taxes would earn back the $100M in no time. It is pretty hard to find $100M investment, that will bring $1B+ follow on investment, and a few thousand people on a payroll who use very few government services.
A few off the top of my head: Square (payments), Tumblr (blogging), Blip.tv (web series destination & distribution platform - disclosure, I work here), Admeld (remnant ad inventory yield optimization for high volume sites), Doubleclick (bought by GOOG a couple years ago), Indaba (music remix platform), a range of creative services (rga and mrm and the like eat souls, though).
There's a lot more here than finance, if you know where to look.
> You can rent a decent place in a cool part of town on a typical startup salary.
"Decent" and "typical" are open for interpretation, but I can tell that for most interpreters I know the expression above evaluates to False. :)