THE CASE OF THE MISSING MIDDLE CLASS: Money Madness in Manhattan

Shapiro, Walter

THE CASE OF THE MISSING MIDDLE CLASS: Money Madness in Manhattan by Walter Shapiro "For certain individuals—youManhattan is the only place to be.... In Manhattan, you made the necessary...

...Washington takes people who are a few notches up the financial scale—bureaucrats, journalists, and (a notch further up) lawyers— and makes them feel like kings...
...Through a mysterious conspiracy between New York banks and co-op boards (whose admissions standards would put Yale Law School's to shame), 25 percent has been decreed as the minimum downpayment...
...I'm often forced to take the subway home at night because, even though I'd gladly pay a hackie $5 to drive me 2.8 miles, I can't get a cab in Midtown during the evening rush hour...
...We knew that as journalists who had missed out on the Great Washington Land Rush, we'd never have a balance sheet like John Zaccaro's...
...Not even $90,000 a year (about a quarter of a million in 1984 dollars) could be sufficient recompense for that inevitable moment in late middle-age when I would stare at my boozy reflection in the shaving mirror and realize, "I've wasted my entire life selling mouthwash ." In the fall of 1968, in an essay for my campus paper, The Michigan Daily, I flatly asserted, "This disenchanted generation has found the values of materialism empty...
...You get the idea: a starter apartment with plasterboard walls and low, sprayed stucco ceilings...
...After another five years, though, it turned out that I was right about the difficulty of "adjusting easily"—and worse, that I was living out the difficulty myself...
...Part of the reason must be rent control, which has held the prices of some apartments so ridiculously low that it's pushed the uncontrolled part of the market out of sight...
...and 2) Damn it, I'm 37 years old, and I will live like an adult...
...Washington allowed us the luxury of enjoying what we regarded as a Beverly Hills life on Glendale salaries...
...True, the landmark building does have a small peculiarity: a particularly vicious ongoing battle between the rent-control tenants and the landlord that apparently dates to the LaGuardia administration...
...The Carter administration (in which I spent three years) was of recent enough vintage to remind us that one could eat off of earthenware plates and still hear the latest White House gossip...
...There are empty cabs on the street, but they are all flashing "on radio call ." Radio calls are reserved for blue-chip corporate accounts, so even the simple act of trying to flag down a cab is a reminder that in Manhattan— for all my seeming success—I am very much a second-class citizen...
...Since this was Ann Arbor during the angry 1960s, my point was so self-evident that it didn't need to be expressed: "But selling out to advertising would be wrong :' Advertising, a profession that in the 1960s was emblematic of the New York rat race the way investment banking is today, sapped the soul...
...3) Don't assume anything that isn't clearly stated in the newspaper ads: if it doesn't mention a dining room or closets, they're probably not there...
...The Serpent and the Big Apple I don't know whether the Labor Department has caught on yet, but apartment brokering is one of the growth professions of the 1980s...
...But friends constantly reassure us that we have A Great Deal— an original lease protected in perpetuity by New York's rent stabilization program...
...The ethics of this burgeoning profession are about what you'd expect: apartment brokers gleefully took us to see a new building that they were also advertising in The New York Times...
...But 18 months in Manhattan has laden me with a laundry list of I wants and I needs...
...Don't get me wrong, Washington should not be mistaken for Cannery Row...
...Reputedly, most Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartments are now what is called in the trade "all-cash buildings"—that means that co-op boards will reject as tenants anyone who is so financially shaky they require a mortgage...
...I didn't envy the K Street fixers and influence peddlers...
...I write about politics for Newsweek, and my wife, Meryl, is a television journalist...
...I don't care...
...It's hard to know why real estate keeps soaring in New York when it's been flat in Los Angeles and Washington...
...It's more important in New York...
...It doesn't help that Manhattan is an island, physically as well as spiritually, and can't get lebensraum by annexing big vacant counties on every side, as Houston and Dallas have done...
...Whatever has been going on in New York has driven away most people who aren't truly upper class—and I mean in the sense of money, not family name...
...We could have gone into debt for a BMW...
...The only gossip that seemed to matter revolved around who was paid $500,000 to stay after American Express took over Lehman Brothers...
...It was the highlight of the summer...
...California is the home of the leveraged deal—the 10 percent downpayment that you can translate into a $350,000 tract home, which leaves you moaning in the Jacuzzi about your mortgage...
...I stuck with journalism—and now live paycheck to paycheck...
...Instead, the multicolored sales brochure explains that The Montana has been "thoughtfully created to provide the ideal rental residence for professionals and young New York families...
...We moved in amid the glare of television lights: the tenants' association was holding a curbside press conference to decry the landlord's latest affront to their litigious sensibilities...
...In that sense, Washington was an upper-middle-class paradise...
...Have you been abroad recently...
...You won the recognition and enjoy the success you deserve...
...There's not much room for them now...
...The difference was that I felt satisfied...
...New York is always at least slightly nervous about something, and for the past few years money has been its obsession and fear...
...Let me explain the last category...
...Virtually everything worth having in New York is rationed by either money, waiting in line, or social class...
...What's an IRT...
...I blame it on Manhattan...
...It's hard to prove the case, but everyone feels the pressure from the "Eurotrash," who land at Kennedy with trunks jammed with francs and lire and immediately bid up the price of co-ops...
...I find it ironic (no, the right word is "painful") that the first counterpart from my radical days on The Michigan Daily to be lovingly profiled in Esquire was Bruce Wasserstein, "the billion-dollar merger maestro...
...It is embarrassing enough to explain to our Depression-era parents—let alone to the readers of this magazine—precisely what we pay in rent...
...Even on the West Side, the 25 percent downpayment requirement was enough to shunt us right on to the rental market...
...After three hours of aimless driving, we finally convinced a 17-year-old security guard to let us cool off in a residents-only community pool in Mount Kisco...
...Washington's social values could hardly be held up as ideals of sanity or balance, but a feedingfrenzy regarding money has not really set in there...
...From a recent solicitation letter by Manhattan, Inc., a new business magazine...
...It is tempting to compare Manhattan's real estate prices to those of California...
...In Washington, Frank Mankiewicz is now viewed with a mixture of sadness and scorn because at age 60 he seemingly has abandoned his liberal principles to take a job paying an estimated $100,000 a year with Robert Gray and Company, the megavoltage lobbying firm that resides in a building called The Powerhouse...
...By the time they finished dissecting its faults, even I didn't want to live there: two dark and dreary bedrooms, no charm, and only a sixth-floor view of the park...
...But being wellconnected journalists in Washington (an experience as heady as being a Moslem cleric in the holy city of Qum), we reveled in the reverse snobbery of our car and our apartment...
...Even high-priced lobbyists weren't born with a full Rolodex—it takes years in the vineyards of politics to assemble all those names and telephone numbers...
...My favorite the-rich-are-different story is about a friend who was doing a deal with an investment banker at an old-line firm that even Henry James might find suffocatingly High WASP...
...Thanks to patience and fortitude—and a hefty four-figure check to an apartment broker—we lucked into the Upper West Side apartment of our dreams...
...Compared to blue-collar workers, teachers, legal-aid lawyers, most federal bureaucrats (excluding those on pensions), some dentists, and many of my fellow journalists, I am doing sufficiently well in the take-home department to make all my complaints about money seem like the bleatings of Walter the Whiner...
...But there is a big difference—financing...
...Envy is rampant because compensation seems to bear such scant connection with justice...
...My problem is easy to diagnose: to write about Manhattan I have to discuss my attitudes towards money, which are not nearly as high-minded and filled with Naderesque self-abnegation as I would like...
...To convey the current flavor of the rental market in Manhattan, I visited a just-opened high-rise at Broadway and 87th Street pretentiously called "The Montana" (an adman's effort to conjure up an association with the fabled "Dakota," about a mile away...
...When I was in college, New York, big money and moral decay were inextricably linked in my mind...
...Anyway, as journalists, we were still in a position to chuckle constantly over status incongruities like driving to a black-tie dinner at the French embassy in our rusted-out 1972 Ford...
...For almost a year, I have been promising my friends at The Washington Monthly that I would write a personal essay on the financial and personal reverberations of moving to Manhattan after 12 years in Washington...
...They were, most assuredly, not People Like Us—and how they chose to spend their ill-gotten gains didn't really matter...
...The New York Times real estate section recently showcased the arrival of "East Side Affordables...
...If you're that ambitious young actor or poet, and you're so driven to break into the big time in the Big Apple that you'll wait tables and live in a tenth-floor walk-up and eat all your meals at McDonald's, Manhattan can be a hell of a bargain...
...That's social class rationing, and it applies to everything from ballet tickets to taxis...
...But Manhattan has left me brooding about whether these are enough to sustain a lifetime—or whether I'm the last sucker in a world of Bruce Wassersteins...
...As Meryl and I began the long search for a doorman building to call our own, we quickly learned the three ironclad rules of the Manhattan real-estate game: 1) Rental apartments are priced like taxicabs—$1,000 for the first square foot, $1 for each additional square foot...
...I am convinced that it is highly difficult for anyone who has been aware during these turbulent few years to adjust easily to the prosaic life of American affluence...
...Most of those who remain have seen money come to'dominate their lives...
...The only difference was that instead of having plenty of money and a meaningless job, I had a meaningful job and worried about money all the time...
...According to New York magazine, a would-be tenant in Trump Tower took the phrase "all-cash building" literally: he showed up to see an apartment carrying suitcases crammed with $1,000 bills...
...Never heard of an apartment broker...
...The financial compromises came easily and involved surprisingly little sacrifice...
...Wasserstein, the 35-year-old godfather behind dozens of nonproductive mergers, gets a Park Avenue apartment and the sobriquet, "a new kind of American prince...
...now I can afford to eat raspberries and most people can't...
...But didn't there used to be room for others, too—people who weren't starryeyed and in their twenties and ready to view any indignity as part of the grand adventure...
...Yes, taxis...
...Apartment brokers illustrate the age-old principle that if there is a scarce commodity some middleman will step in to allocate it for a fee...
...Neither had we until we moved to Manhattan...
...Senior partners at law firms like Covington & Burling don't have to augment their incomes by addressing envelopes at home...
...By Manhattan standards, that's a paltry price for a soul...
...Easy enough in theory, but the words just wouldn't come...
...What made the status deprivation so painful was, of course, the financial shortfall that accompanied it...
...We are scab tenants paying market rents, veritable Pinkertons in a building filled with rent-striking Joe Hills...
...That's what 18 months in Manhattan has done to me...
...Something here makes it hard to think of anything other than how much money yeti don't have...
...And that, in turn, has created a panicked mentality that only drives the real estate market up more...
...I'm not sure of all the reasons, but life in New York has become so expensive (people who make $50,000 a year and have kids are practically below the poverty line) that money has become the theme of Manhattan life...
...It's the old square footage problem again: an empty lane in an Olympic-sized pool is about the size of an $85,000 apartment on 96th Street...
...That works out to $28,400 a year in rent—a bit above the median income for American families...
...a house in Potomac and a membership at Burning Tree didn't seem worth the ethical compromises and, frankly, the tedium the fixers and peddlers must endure...
...In Manhattan, journalists are roughly on a social par with dentists—and I find myself at least two social notches beneath the nice people on Madison Avenue who charge me $30 for a haircut...
...Virtually nothing we really cared about was off-limits...
...Even in Washington, we thought the notion of a summer house was ridiculous...
...In Washington, I never doubted my choice of journalism as a profession...
...One desperate Sunday in August, we set out for Westchester County like Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl...
...But it didn't seem to matter...
...During the last few years I lived in Washington, I indulged the same tastes...
...Big money in Washington usually comes only after a generation of assiduous ticket-punching: the right law school, the right clerkship, six or seven years piling up those billable hours as an associate, and then a series of further indignities as a junior partner...
...Borrow from them ." Luckily, the free market has begun to respond to the cries of the middle-class in distress...
...When we bravely confided the total amount of our assets to a real-estate broker, she snapped, "You have parents, don't you...
...In a strange way, it's because Washington is an upper-middle-class version of the wholesome American small town, in which free parks and good public schools can make life comfortable for people who don't have much money...
...Gotham jitters Nothing comes cheap in New York, but the price of real estate is what drives everything else up...
...Enough whining...
...It is not accidental that the only truly full-sized pool in Manhattan is in a health club attached to a subsidized apartment complex for artists...
...This around-the-clock claustrophobia, of course, creates new needs and new expenses...
...My apartment in New York is spacious (more on this later), is on the increasingly fashionable Upper West Side and is filled with the essential trinity of Yuppie appliances—a Cuisinart, a video recorder, and an "I'm not here right now" telephone answering machine...
...I figure that it has cost Meryl and me $30,000 a year, before taxes, to indulge my two Damn Its: 1) Damn it, I'm entitled to live in Manhattan...
...Manhattan's version of the bargain life gets harder to face when you're over 30—and let's not even talk about having kids...
...You got the big breaks...
...Part of the problem was, quite simply, our profession...
...Inescapable fact of life: Manhattan is filled with people who are raking in obscene sums of money...
...I've become obsessed with finding a pleasant place to swim...
...Walter Shapiro writes about politics for Newsweek in New York and is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...For all I know, the same thing may be happening-in Palm Springs or Newport...
...It was easy to ignore the Reaganite makeminemink set...
...I can still see Myself leaning on a bunk bed in a freshman dorm at the University of Michigan, saying portentously, "Of course, I could go to New York, take a job in advertising and make $90,000 a year...
...The up-front cash required for a small two-bedroom apartment was more than the total purchase price of either of our parents' homes...
...In Washington our social position was based on what we did, whom we knew, and what parties we were invited to—and not how much we made...
...we chuckled at the wedding announcements that mentioned homes in Bala Cynwyd and Bar Harbor...
...a major New York developer confided that even he had failed to find one for his mother-in-law...
...We now have better jobs, earn roughly 30 percent more money, and, in the process, have tumbled down four social class levels...
...2) Contrary to myth, there are no bargain rentcontrolled apartments left...
...These brokers will find you an apartment, but only in exchange for 15 percent of a year's rent...
...Instead of a house in Cleveland Park, we made do with a huge apartment (complete with the usual complement of Inner City insects) in Adams Morgan, a transitional neighborhood that could be described charitably as funky...
...If Washington's milder insanities can have such a distorting effect on its actions, what damage will New York's money mania work...
...Maybe that says something about me...
...Apart from food and a few vacations in Europe and the Caribbean, Meryl and I were pretty much inured to the temptations of the new age of avarice...
...Let me tell you about my writer's block...
...Suddenly, I've begun to wonder whether during the 1960s I wasn't too self-righteous about rejecting money as a factor in choosing a career...
...If material comforts could be objectively measured, there might not be that much difference between the way I lived in Washington and the way I live in New York...
...I don't deny the intangible satisfactions of journalism— the ego rewards, the excitement, and the continuing sense of moral purpose...
...This is a nice neighborhood (we now live just a block away), but it is not a prestige address, one apt to appeal to minor Saudi princes or Eurotrash...
...But Manhattan has laden me with a laundry list of I wants and I needs...
...Even in the get-me-rewrite days when journalism was a blue-collar profession—and every reporter owed six weeks' salary to the local gin mill—there was always the heady satisfaction of knowing secrets denied to mere mortals...
...New York is different from Muncie, and always has been, precisely because it has those people...
...Prices may be comparable in Manhattan, but a seat at the settlement table requires an infinitely higher downpayment...
...The purchase price of the new co-ops was indeed affordable—$85,000 for the standard onebedroom...
...An "underpaid" lawyer—on Wall Street of all places—was recently lamenting "those damn kids, barely out of high school who don't even talk proper English, but because they're good with numbers, they're making $200,000 to $300,000 a year on the floor of the exchange...
...At a dinner party just days after our arrival in Manhattan, we had to patiently endure the complaints of one such couple, who found their eight-room co-op "too cramped for words ." Recently, I listened quietly while two friends discussed the deficiencies of an apartment on Central Park West selling for $875,000...
...But unless I'm opening on Broadway, or closing the discos, 1 can't book a table for 8:30 even if I call two weeks in advance...
...But in Manhattan, I have discovered to my chagrin that I know the wrong secrets...
...Things that other people take for granted—quiet, for example, or sunlight shining into your room—are extras in New York...
...Suffice it to say, that by leaving Washington our monthly payments went up 170 percent...
...We felt sufficiently secure in our social position to say, in effect, "Hey, look at us—we don't need to drive a Mercedes to feel important...
...A foreign coin...
...There was one catch: each of these walk-up apartments measured exactly 350 square feet, and the developer was lowering the ceilings to squeeze six floors into the formerly five-story tenement...
...But I'd guess there are a dozen 25-yearolds on Wall Street who earned more last year than Clark Clifford...
...In short, while there were lots of people in Washington who had more money, they couldn't make us feel deprived...
...Tables in expensive restaurants are jammed together damask napkin-to-damask napkin in a gastronomic replica of the subway...
...Panic is what the obsession with the Eurotrash is largely about...
...As a well-connected journalist in Washington, I reveled in the reverse snobbery of my 1972 station wagon and AdamsMorgan apartment...
...The rent: about $2,400 a month for a decent-sized two-bedroom, river views, of course, extra...
...The fear of crime translates into higher prices for buildings with more doormen and extra locks...
...instead, we drove a beloved 1972 station wagon that looked as if it had been bought off a used-car lot in Caracas...
...I am constantly wanting and craving and coveting...
...As Michael Kinsley has pointed out, New York is the ultimate "grandfather-clause society," where those who are protected by rent control (like an uncle who pays about $400 a month for a six-room apartment right off Fifth Avenue) or who bought at the bottom of the market in 1975 today can live a Georgetown life on GS-11 salaries...
...The arrogance of those who have been grandfathered in is breathtaking...
...But it says more about Manhattan...
...In Manhattan, space is at a premium, and that affects everything, not just real estate...
...Regarding power, fame, access—yes...
...Even though you're tired of hearing it from New Yorkers, it is the financial and cultural capital of the world, the center of intellectual life and mass communications...
...Most of what I covet—like the summer house on the ocean— will always be beyond my reach as a journalist...
...But after two steaming summers in Manhattan, we were ready to crack...
...There are health clubs galore, but the pools have the size, the look, and the feel of freight elevators...
...Ten years after I wrote that, I would have found my youthful ideas about New York and moneymadness laughable...
...At parties, I would find myself pontificating about Mondale to an empty room, while three investment bankers were huddled in a corner playing my-deal-isbiggerthan-your-deal...
...For those things people would kill more quickly than they would for money...
...A woman friend of ours has a square-footage theory of life: 400 square feet to live alone, 600 to sustain a relationship, 800 for a marriage, and 1,000 for the first child...
...I have always had a soft spot for youarewhat-you-eat as a guide to life...
...I'll admit that there are still ways to live in New York for not much money, apart from being on welfare...
...Cafe Luxembourg is a Haut Trendy West Side restaurant that boasts excellent food, surprisingly reasonable prices, and the dubious allure of dining in the same room with Andy Warhol...
...Political gossip has as much social cachet as explaining the theory behind a successful Tupperware party...
...When my friend accidentally dropped a subway token on the rug, the man from High WASP said, in total seriousness, "What's that...
...But in spite of what many would consider very good fortune, I still feel unable to support what I have always considered the middle-class lifestyle, and perhaps as a result, I've become terribly obsessed with money...
...Eighteen months ago, Meryl and I moved to Manhattan...
...You learned the rules of the game...
...Merrill Lynch has been laying off stockbrokers as nonproductive losers because they earn less than $80,000 a year...
...a kind-hearted developer was rehabilitating a turn-of-the-century tenement at Second Avenue and 96th Street where gourmet pasta shops give way to the bodegas of Spanish Harlem...
...In fact, I have wondered in a horrible moment or two whether advertising would have been so bad after all...
...In Manhattan, you made the necessary contacts...

Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11


 
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