Anne Gole, a 20-something new Manhattan home owner; Linda Jaquez for the NYTimes
Today a co-worker sent me a NYTimes article profiling one of her high school classmates, Anne Gole. Anne is a 2011 graduate of Binghamton University who recently bought a 1-br apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side for $426,000. The article describes her plight, searching for the perfect home. When she found it, she put 35% down ($149,000), spent $30,000 on renovations and now pays a monthly maintenance fee of $1,000 in addition to her mortgage.
You may wonder how she did it. Apparently she "saved, saved, saved" by living with her parents in Tenafly, New Jersey for years while she worked at a large financial services company in Times Square. Moving in with your parents after college has become a frequent refrain for the recent graduate and choosing this option (if you should be so lucky to have parents within commuting distance) is certainly one of the very few ways a young person can gather enough scratch to make buying, or heck even renting, a real possibility.
Anne's building in the East 60s; Linda Jaquez for the NYTimes
I must admit that when reading the article I felt sorry for her. To have sacrificed so much to get so little seems wrong somehow. For the past three years, her prime fun-having 20s years, she's been doing the middle-age shuffle to the suburbs, commuting three hours a day. You would think that after all this time of living with mom and dad, nickel and diming and saving enough money to purchase a half-million dollar property that she could get a little more than a 1-br apartment where the luxury amenity is that the window faces the street and not the back of the building.
Some would tell me I'm out of mind and that Anne has made the investment of a lifetime in one of the world's most competitive real estate markets. It's true that Anne's discipline should be commended. She had a dream, she went for it and she conquered it. I just can't help but be massively disappointed by how unattainable New York City has become. I love it here, but if this is how to snag a piece of Manhattan, I'll forfeit to Anne.