The City I Love
I Can't Afford

I am a prodigal New Yorker. Born and raised here, I grew up firm in the conviction that The City was a proper noun, and I defended its right to those capital letters against all comers. Chicago? Please. Los Angeles? That's in California, isn't it? London? Paris? Has-beens. New York was The City as far as I was concerned. I couldn't imagine living any place else.

I was not alone in this fierce loyalty; New Yorkers are often criticized for being self-satisfied about their city, especially when talking to outsiders. There's no shortage of complaints to be heard -- about housing, subway fares, taxes, etc. -- when New Yorkers talk among themselves, but pride always wins out over these petty complaints in the end.

Not that New Yorkers are provincial. Perish the thought. For the past 17 years, I've wandered, living in Westchester County, north of New York, then New England and, for the past five years and some, in Europe. In that time I've been to Rome and Paris and visited Hong Kong and have had to admit, grudgingly, that the world is big enough for more than one great city.

But New York was still The City. And this summer I returned home at last, eager to show it off to my wife, who grew up in the suburbs, and my three children, two of whom were born in Belgium and none of whom really knew New York at all. The youngest of them isn't yet one year old, but the older two think speed is measured in kilometers per hour, so some acculturation was clearly going to be necessary. But not for me. When the immigration officer at JFK stamped our passports and waved us through with a "Welcome home," I took it personally. We were home, back to stay in the greatest city in the world.

Much would have changed since the late 1980s, I knew. Rudy Giuliani had proven that this ungovernable city could be governed, and entire neighborhoods that had once been frightening were now desirable. On a trip back to New York with my wife a couple of years ago, I partook in a pub crawl down Avenue A to celebrate my older brother's birthday. "When we get out of the subway," I cautioned my wife, "stay by my side and look straight ahead, like you know where you are and where you're going." My warning was unnecessary. To my surprise, Avenue A was not only no longer creepy; it was hip, even well on its way to passé.

Likewise the neighborhood of Chelsea, where I'd attended junior high. It was the violence and educational mediocrity of that school that helped drive my parents out of the city when I was in my teens, but it now sits in a neighborhood that I can't afford.

When my family fled the city in the 1980s, subway cars were covered in graffiti from floor to ceiling and Bernie Goetz was in prison for a shooting on the subway that, in its day, had somehow encapsulated the mood of a city in which muggers felt more at ease than their victims. The Yankees were perennial runners-up. It was a harder city to love then.

In the New York to which I've returned, crime is down precipitously, the subway cars are clean and air conditioned, and Times Square is more glitz than sleaze. My surprise at these transformations struck my old friends as quaint, something they took for granted. But my most profound shock was sticker shock -- how could a mere mortal afford to live in this revitalized, gentrified city?

Grumbling about rents is a New York pastime, of course. Back in the 1980s, an old drinking buddy of my father's, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School, had once, in despair over the cost of housing in Manhattan, offered to rent the space under my parents' dining-room table for use as a bedroom. My parents never did take him on as a subletter, and Frank McCourt, having written a couple of best sellers in the interim, can presumably afford an apartment of his own now. But as I started to assess New York City real estate, that old family story seemed less and less amusing. I even began to wonder whether Mr. McCourt might now have a dining-room table with some space he wasn't using beneath it.

In the New York of today, the West Village of my childhood would be out of reach, so I contemplated the unthinkable -- moving to a borough that I had, in my youth, only passed through when my brothers and I would venture out on the subway to Rockaway Beach.

But even Brooklyn has gone real-estate crazy, especially if you limit your search to neighborhoods with decent public schools. After seriously considering a two-bedroom basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights going for far more than we could afford, the reality hit home. New York might be great -- greater than ever in many ways -- but it was beyond our financial grasp. We regrouped and started to look in the suburbs. Which is where we ended up.

My kids would not, after all, get to know the city as I had, from the inside. My triumphal return had turned into a strategic retreat to Westchester, and I -- I -- would be a commuter.

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