They can't all be millionaires, right?

May 5, 2008 6:25 AM

Something that's always confounded me about Manhattan and San Francisco in particular: Where do the middle-class families live? Suburbs, obviously, but surely there must be some that live in the city proper. But where?
posted by yalestar to society & culture (31 comments total)

Well, there's Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island to consider as part of NYC proper. There are also some pretty quiet residential neighborhoods in Manhattan that aren't super-expensive apartments. Heck, in Brooklyn there are even single family houses listed on Zillow.
posted by mkb at 6:33 AM on May 5

Middle class is a relative term. If you're asking, where do all the nuclear familes making $75,000 live, well, it's not possible (practically speaking) for that family to live in Manhattan, although it is possible in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Similarly, someone from Khazakstan might wonder where all the "middle class" families live in Fond du Lac, as to that person, middle class means income of $300/year. (I don't know anything about Khazakstan, including how to spell it)
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:36 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]

In rented apartments, the same place the vast majority of people who aren't millionaires in Manhattan live?

If you're specifying families, at least by my observation you see fewer children in Manhattan, which is nice, but they're certainly around.

Some friends moved to this large complex and when I would visit them I would tend to see more kids running around.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 6:39 AM on May 5

The middle class families I know can live anywhere in Manhattan. Some of them live in the rent-controlled or rent stabilized apartments where they lived as children (these apartments can be passed to relatives in certain circumstances). Others have managed to find affordable apartments through brokers, friends, or luck. Many have moved to more affordable areas like Washington Heights and Inwood which have that magical combination of lower rents, larger apartments, and burgeoning gentrification. Also, they live in much smaller places than they might in the suburbs. It's common for kids to share rooms. So a family of four in a two bedroom is par for the course. But truthfully, many of my friends have left once they start having kids- to Brooklyn or NJ. The middle class is being driven out of Manhattan at an alarming pace.
posted by kimdog at 6:41 AM on May 5

Noe Valley in SF seemed very middle class to me. Well, as opposed to where I was in the Mission.
posted by freya_lamb at 6:42 AM on May 5

It's not impossible to find decent rent in Manhattan. My sister lived there for a while on less then $40k/year although I think she had pretty crappy digs.
posted by delmoi at 6:44 AM on May 5

I have lots of friends in San Francisco who are arguably middle class, or at least earn a middle class income (though not sure exactly what qualifies). They live in much smaller spaces than those elsewhere, in rented apartments and spend a good deal of their income (30-50%) on housing. They spend less on other things (it is possible to eat pretty cheaply in SF) and have virtually no savings. Or they live with roommates. Some have stayed in rent-controlled apartments for many years and couldn't afford to move elsewhere in the city if they wanted to.
posted by picklebird at 6:46 AM on May 5

What do you mean by middle-class?

All sorts of areas in SF are part of the "city proper" including The Sunset district and the East Mission and Crocker-Amazon and even Hunters point, all accomodating people in poverty as well as those with modest incomes.
posted by vacapinta at 6:48 AM on May 5

And yes, this is true for those with kids as well.
posted by picklebird at 6:48 AM on May 5

Just to put a finer point on "middle-class": I mean two working parents, like maybe a teacher and a programmer, a couple kids.

Granted, I've spent very little time in SF & NYC, but my impression was that it was populated by the very wealthy and single people with roommates, and some housing projects here and there.
posted by yalestar at 6:55 AM on May 5

Last time I was in San Francisco, I stayed with a nice family in Noe Valley. Married couple (he a programmer, she a non-profit researcher), two kids, non-fancy cars, modest town house. Lifestyle-wise, definitely middle class. Income-wise? Far from it.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:00 AM on May 5

Well, the Mission is packed full of two-working-parents+kids - many of them are Latino, some are recent immigrants, some aren't. Some of these folks are probably at or below the poverty level, but many aren't. My next-door neighbors (who aren't Latino, FWIW) include two moms (a couple) who have two sons, and a mom-and-dad+two kids couple. All the adults have "professions" - lawyer, academic, etc.

San Francisco is expensive, in terms of housing, and there are lots of people here who have roommates for much longer than might be "normal" in other parts of the country, but it's not impossible to live on a middle-class salary here, even if you have kids.

Recent statistics (which I'll dig up when I get to work, if I can) do show that when people have kids, or are thinking about it, they do tend to leave the city for the suburbs. This has as a lot to do with wanting more space and better schools.
posted by rtha at 7:05 AM on May 5

I've spent very little time in SF & NYC, but my impression was that it was populated by the very wealthy and single people with roommates, and some housing projects here and there. Not so.
posted by JimN2TAW at 7:05 AM on May 5

Noe Valley, Glen Park and further south down the peninsula is where the middle income families in the SF area tend to be.
posted by Koko at 7:08 AM on May 5

I'm just coming out the other side of the apartment buying process in Brooklyn. Let me tell you- Brooklyn is BIG. On its own, it would be the 4th largest city in the U.S. There are a lot of working/middle-class neighborhoods. For every Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights there are a dozen neighborhoods you'll never hear of unless you live here. Hell, I've lived in Brooklyn for over 10 years and couldn't tell you where Prospect-Lefferts Gardens was until recently.

Also, remember that real estate in NYC wasn't always so berserk. You could easily buy a townhouse in Brooklyn as a middle-class family in the 70's/80's.
posted by mkultra at 7:50 AM on May 5

Some neighborhoods in SF you've probably never heard of: the Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, Ingleside, the Richmond, the Sunset, Balboa Park, Bayshore, Outer Mission, Sunnyside, West Portal, Western Addition, Vis Valley. Parts of Glen Park & Bernal Heights too, though not so much anymore. Think southern & western neighborhoods. These are all full of single family housing, too, not just apartment living.

Oh, and nobody living in Noe Valley is "middle class," lifestyle-wise, income-wise, or any other kind of -wise.
posted by kelseyq at 8:01 AM on May 5

About 2/3 of NYC's residences are rentals, and about half of those are rent-regulated (mostly stabilized, some still controlled). Average stabilized rent in Manhattan (in 2005) was $1300 while average market rent was $2200. That's where our middle class lives.
posted by nicwolff at 8:14 AM on May 5

I grew up in San Francisco (the Mission), half with my single mother, half with my re-married father, with two more kids. I would characterize my parents as lower middle class, bordering on poverty when I was young, and lower middle class bordering on middle class when I was a teenager.

San Francisco and New York both have relatively low proportions of kids to adults, but it's entirely possible to live there as a family. It depends whether you consider square footage or fancy public schools the be-all-end-all of raising a child.
posted by YoungAmerican at 8:30 AM on May 5

Not the cities you're talking about, but if you're really, really interested in inner city living, here's a report on housing in the City of Westminster, London. (In this instance, we're talking about Westminster the borough, a local authority in London, which includes most of the centre of the city and some more residential areas around the edge, not any of the other things 'Westminster' can refer too). The report basically says that there's no middle class in the borough, because there's a shortage of the kind of homes middle class people want to live in, that is: three bedrooms, a garden and a parking space. So Westminster is basically constituted of the very rich (who can afford the massive 4-storey mansions) and the poor (who need to live near work because they do shift work), with few in between.

I've never quite got my head round the conclusions, but I think it suggesting that it's ok to let the middle class move out to the 'burbs and commute in (despite earlier saying that such an inbalanced population isn't healthy). There is very little space for more developments in the area, apart from an old barracks site which they are going to convert into housing. At the moment, I think they are still ironing out exactly what form the housing's going to take, there is a requirement that all new developments include 50% social housing, but the percentage usually ends up being much lower. I doubt (especially given our new mayor) that they will force them to build many 'affordable' middle class homes.

I do youth work in the area, and we have kids from both ends of the spectrum, but not a lot in between. It makes for some very weird situations, but somehow we make it work. That being said, there are some 'middle class' families, but from what I can tell, they have been in the borough since the year dot, and they mostly live in social housing (and apartments, not houses).
posted by Helga-woo at 8:32 AM on May 5

In Brooklyn, we bought a house with an inherited down-payment. Since it was a 2-family house, we could rent an apartment and live in the rest. The rent we collected went straight to the mortgage payment--it covered almost two-thirds, meaning we were paying less per month than renting. Of course, once you added in all the repairs and improvements, we were spending a lot more. We bought in 2000 and sold in 2008. I don't know where the people buying these days get the money. Our wage income rarely broke 50K. One answer might be that all the middle-class people moved in when it was cheaper. I don't know where you'd go if you were middle class trying to move in now. Someplace with gunshots, I guess, or an hour-and-a-half subway commute.
posted by rikschell at 8:41 AM on May 5

The disappearance of the middle class is a world-wide phenomenon, see this German-language video: "The Last Member of the Middle Class".
posted by thomas144 at 9:06 AM on May 5

We live on the edge of Ingleside, near Balboa Park, in San Francisco (one of the neighborhoods no one's ever heard of). There are kids in every other house on the block and everyone's a family, except for the one house filled with a few City College students.

My neighbors (that I know the profession of) are blue collar, pink collar (secretarial, etc.) and MUNI drivers. Kids share bedrooms (as the standard floor plan is a 2bd/1 bath) and lots of grandparents seem to be live-in (illegal inlaw suites are common throughout the city).
posted by Gucky at 9:12 AM on May 5

In San Francisco we (one programmer, one non-profit worker) lived in the Outer Sunset in a one-bedroom apartment. It was considered less desirable because not much is going on out there, but we loved being across the street from the ocean and one block away from Golden Gate Park. Our neighbors in the same building had three kids, and I think they were both teachers.

I'd say the area skewed highly in favor of families, with a healthy dose of surfers sharing apartments.
posted by mikepop at 10:09 AM on May 5

I concur with mkultura, and add that your inability to think of middle class NYC neighborhoods might be a function of residential racial segregation

I respectfully assume you are not a working class New Yorker of color, b/c if you were, I believe you'd know the answer to your question. It would be "Where I live."

In New York City, a majority-non-white city, many of the household incomes that would qualify as middle class elsewhere in the country are earned by black, Hispanic and immigrant families concentrated in working class, mostly non-white neighborhoods that Manhattanites, or even hipster Brooklynites, don't give much (or any) thought to: Richmond Hills, Jamaica, Flushing, Elmurst, Corona, Flatbush, Bushwick, etc.

I know a lot about NYC, but very little about SF. But would the answer there be Oakland?
posted by hhc5 at 11:52 AM on May 5

Oh, and nobody living in Noe Valley is "middle class," lifestyle-wise, income-wise, or any other kind of -wise.

This is the one part of your response I disagree with: I worked as a landscaper in the City and had many middle class clients in Noe. My friends who are most emphatically not middle class (self-employed gardener + student) rent a two bedroom cottage in Noe Valley.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:53 AM on May 5

I live just a few blocks from the Union Square in San Francisco, and make around 95K. Granted, some people call it "the tenderloin", and I live alone, but whatever - it can be done.
posted by plexi at 12:54 PM on May 5

But would the answer there be Oakland?

I don't think Oakland is known for being "middle class."
posted by plexi at 12:55 PM on May 5

In addition to the above: Hoboken and Jersey City, while located in NJ, are closer to much of Manhattan (via PATH train) then much of Brooklyn/Queens/The Bronx, and as such are home to a number of middle and lower class folk who work in NY.
posted by fings at 1:12 PM on May 5

tons of middle-class families live in apartments in the city. the kids often share bedrooms, and offices double as guest rooms. you just make do without house-sized space and two (or even any) cars. you get your groceries delivered and do your gardening at the community garden down the block. the city is quite livable once you get the hang of it.
posted by thinkingwoman at 2:27 PM on May 5

I don't think Oakland is known for being "middle class."

No it's not, but that doesn't mean there aren't a hell of a lot of middle, upper middle, and wealthy people living here. Check out Rockridge, Grand Lake, Glenview, Crocker Highlands, Redwood Heights, Claremont, Montclair, Shepherd Canyon, and Sequoyah Heights real estate prices. There are probably more middle class households in Oakland than San Francisco, percentage wise.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:56 PM on May 5

No offense intended, but have you been to New York? There are expensive areas and there are poor areas. The middle class lives in between.
posted by gjc at 7:22 PM on May 5