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Moving to New York City from DC, Manhattan middle class neighborhood for single college educated heterosexual male, affordable studio apartment, no gays or housing projects
I was wondering where in Manhattan a single college educated hetero guy can find a middle class neighborhood that is not too overly upscale & expensive (not just yet anyway) yet not in the "hood" or dominated by gays.
I know Ny IS EXPENSIVE but i dont know the dempgraphics of Manhattan very well.
Join the legions of people who cram 5 in an apartment suitable for one. Just grab a futon and lay it on the floor.
well I was hoping to find an affordable studio apt for a year, then go to grad school next yr and live in grad school housing after which i should be able to land a good job and move to fairly upscale manhattan area. but for this next yr until then I would like a place that is livable for young middle class educated guy.
you know, a place where I can walk out of the bldg without a bunch of crips, bloods, and ms-13 loitering around
the fact that the op refers to himself as college-educated, hetero, young, and middle class but is off to grad school next year, 'should be able to land a good job and move to fairly upscale manhattan', and has a problem with gay people is obnoxious. look into easy new york, canarsie, far roc, south bronx (or...i think you hip cats are calling it 'sobro' these days), or jamaica. i think the boys out there got somethin' for you.
Yeah straightshooter is just being sarcastic, if you can't tell.
OP, I am sorry to inform you of this, but I dont' think any such place exists in Manhattan. If you are willing to cast you net wider into the outerboroughs you can probably find what you are looking for.
Possibly the closest thing to what you are looking for is Hells Kitchen, but even that is expensive and shouldn't be considered middle-class by any stretch of the imagination.
Let me break down Manhattan for you in simple to understand terms.
Below 96th st on the east side and 110th on the west side its all very expensive ($2000 and up for a 1br) buildings with tons of yuppies and a good number of gay people thrown into the mix. You can find gay people all over the city however they do tend to congregate in certain neighborhoods of the city like the Village and Chelsea. Whatever ethnic white neighborhoods used to exist in this area of Manhattan are long since gone and now its a big mix of mostly white people, but from all over the place. Of course there are a lot of Chinese people down in Chinatown and the lower east side, but for the most part south of 96th E and 110th W is dominated by rich/upper class white people.
North of 96th E and 110th W is definitely more working class/lower class, depending on the neighborhood. On the East side is Spanish Harlem (El Barrio) which is populated mostly by Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. Central Harlem is mostly a black neighborhood, and to the north and west of Central Harlem you'll find a lot of Dominicans especially around Washington Heights, but basically all the way up to the northernmost tip of Manhattan in Inwood. In all of this neighborhood there is only one spot where white people live and thats the western part of Washington heights, also known as "Hudson Heights" for real estate purposes (which is north of 180th st, south of Fort Tyron Park and to the west of Broadway all the way out to the Hudson river). This is an old German-Jewish neighborhood that is still dominated by Jewish people but there is a large inflow of Yuppies/Hipsters moving into the neighborhood (a sure sign that rents will continue to increase).
While Hudson Heights isn't as expensive as the rest of the white neighborhoods in Manhattan, it is still pricey, espeically by Harlem/Washington Heights standards. For a 1br apartment in this neighborhood you should expect to pay about $1,500 a month.
Now if you are willing to move outside of Manhattan you can definitely find what you are looking for in lots of other parts of the city. Many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens are normal, non-ghetto, middle class places where the rents for a 1br is around $1,000 - $1,2000 a month.
*sob*...please, God! not another hip, snappy, polo-shirt-collar-up-wearing, sandals-wearing, ex-frat boy, outsider in my neighborhood. we're bursting at the seams, God...please help us!
I was wondering where in Manhattan a single college educated hetero guy can find a middle class neighborhood that is not too overly upscale & expensive (not just yet anyway) yet not in the "hood" or dominated by gays.
I know Ny IS EXPENSIVE but i dont know the dempgraphics of Manhattan very well.
Middle class in Manhattan. Sorry your out of luck. Poor and rich is what you will find. Just stay south of E 96th/W 110th and away from any housing projects
Well its kind of a rough call for me. Yeah I'm not the biggest fan of random people from other parts of the country moving into the area, but if they don't move here then random immigrants certainly will.
So it basically boils down to, would you prefer Bay Ridge to become hipster-ville or would you rather prefer it become Little Beirut? Personally I lean towards the hipsters.
If everyone in the outerboroughs doesn't want their neighborhood to change then they should do the following two things:
1) Have more kids, and I mean lots of them
2) Don't move to the 'burbs or encourage/let your friends and relatives move their.
Nobody seems to be doing either of these things though and as a result neighborhoods change, some more drastically than others though. These neighborhoods can either become more upscale (hipsters) or downscale (random 3rd world immigrants). Take your pick.
Quote:
Originally Posted by straightshooter
*sob*...please, God! not another hip, snappy, polo-shirt-collar-up-wearing, sandals-wearing, ex-frat boy, outsider in my neighborhood. we're bursting at the seams, God...please help us!
Nobody seems to be doing either of these things though and as a result neighborhoods change, some more drastically than others though. These neighborhoods can either become more upscale (hipsters) or downscale (random 3rd world immigrants). Take your pick.
That's why my neighborhood rules all. When all the old Jews were dying and being slowly replaced by poor immigrants, middle-class Manhattanites (and I mean the Irish and Jews) who were being priced out by Yuppies came in. Within five years, the neighborhood must've gone from forty percent White to sixty something percent. Been seeing lots more White Kids in the neighborhood. Gives me hope that when the old Jews die, somebody can replace them.
I hope the rich Yuppies don't come in though. The last thing I would want is to be forced to live in Yonkers, or worse: WISCONSIN.
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