Unaffordable City

I must have been writing about how crazily expensive this city is but just reading another report on it I am shocked - this one featured a guy in Harlem who works two different McDonald's jobs and still doesn't have enough money to live, paying 75% of his income in rent!!! This is insane. Compared to that almost everyone I know is really fortunate but I have been asking myself quite frequently, how people with lower level jobs are even able to survive, given how expensive rent and other things are in the city and the answer is - they aren't! Usually they live further out and commute into the city or they share not just with one person like I am but with many people. I have heard of 4-6 grown men living in a one-room apartment just because rent is unaffordable...

Now that Mayor Bloomberg's last months in office have started, a lot of people look at what he has achieved and while the city is quite wealthy and business is not doing badly, the fact of the matter is that a lot of its population is poor or rather - there is a dwindling middle class. And this is not just the case in the city, I just learned that a lot of young families in Long Island move out to some of the suburbs because they will find decent schools out there. Apparently the system is such that the schools are financed by property taxes and thus in these areas property taxes are quite high, so what tends to happen is that young families move out there in order to send their kids to the schools but once their kids are off to college, they might well decide to move away again in order to avoid the high property taxes. Very interesting to me as it would have never occurred to me that you a.) select the are you live in by the available school and b.) you only contribute as long as you are also milking the system. I find this quite remarkable and probably quite typical for the individualistic nature of thinking in this country. Everyone needs to help him or herself first and then they might be thinking about others.