There are a lot of issues raised in this story, but what really catches me is the price of a studio apartment. Sure, it’s interesting to learn that lower Manhattan is refilling disproportionately with guys, but what kind of guys?
The Web site for the William Beaver House in Lower Manhattan, where the cheapest studio apartment now goes for $950,000, features a photograph of two women seductively nibbling corn on the cob. A biography of the building’s mythical mascot, a martini-toting beaver-about-town, reveals that he hangs out “where life is sleek and times are thrilling.”
The sales pitch for the 47-story building, going up at the corner of William and Beaver Streets across from Delmonico’s, is unabashedly capitalizing on, and perhaps perpetuating, a phenomenal population shift downtown. Men now outnumber women there by a ratio usually found in towns with all-male colleges, military bases and prisons, and in a few enclaves in Silicon Valley, with high concentrations of engineers and workers in other male-dominated fields.
Since 2000, men, mostly between ages 25 and 44, have accounted for more than three-fourths of the population increase in Lower Manhattan. As a result, according to a special census calculation, the sex ratio there increased to 126 men per 100 women in 2005, from 101 men per 100 women in 2000. In the rest of Manhattan, and in the city over all, there were only 90 men for every 100 women.
In poorer areas of the city, murder and incarceration have led to a higher ratio of women to men. But in the bombed out lower tip of Manhattan it is the opposite, owing to the male-dominated culture of Wall Street and the astronomical costs of real estate. The cheapest studio apartment in this new building is $950,000? That is just staggering. A studio apartment, for those that don’t know, is usually a no-bedroom apartment with a bathroom and perhaps a galley kitchen (if not a mere hotplate). It’s the kind of space a college student is willing to tolerate, not a high paid financial analyst or broker. Paying a million dollars to own a studio apartment is hard to justify…unless you really, really value being able to walk to work.
I’m not sure what to make of this development, but it doesn’t augur well. Things are getting dangerously out of whack. Something about this makes me feel like the market is headed for another big adjustment.
