Why not subscribe?

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Real estate porn?

That’s the description one commenter put on this NY Times article, describing the difficulties with the “middle” of the New York City real estate market.

Moving up to a two-bedroom may be the biggest challenge. Sales have been relatively strong at the upper and lower reaches of the Manhattan market, but the middle, which is made up largely of two-bedrooms in the $1.4 million to $3 million range, shrank to 29.4 percent of the market in the third quarter, down from 37.9 percent in the same period last year, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

Yep, that’s what the Times writer (Michelle Higgins) considers the MIDDLE.

The comments are both brutal and funny. Here’s some:

image

What about that “grad student”?

“I don’t want to stress about my apartment selling and not having a place to go,” said Karim Tartoussieh, a graduate student at New York University who for two months held off listing his prewar Chelsea one-bedroom while he searched for a two-bedroom for $1.5 million to $1.8 million.

This is not the graduate school I recognize.  Armed with this information, it’s not hard to find a likely biography: http://centerforthehumanities.org/speaker/karim-tartoussieh 

Karim Tartoussieh is a doctorate candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently finishing his dissertation on Digital Disobedience, Culture, and Citizenship in Egypt.

So Tartoussieh is a graduate student in the humanities. One suspects there is some family money.

Disclaimer

I admit I have never lived in New York (and at these prices, I'm not likely to).

No comments:

Post a Comment