What makes living in New York worth it?<\/a><\/p>\nSara Robinson boarded a Greyhound bus from Oregon to New York City to attend Hunter College in the early 2000s, bright-eyed and eager to pick up odd jobs to fuel her dream of living there.<\/p>\n
For a long time, she made it work. But recently, that has been more challenging than ever.<\/p>\n
Right around her 40th birthday, Ms. Robinson began to feel financially squeezed in Brooklyn, where she had lived for years. Ms. Robinson (no relation to this reporter) was also feeling too grown to live with roommates.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a child,\u201d she said, \u201cyou don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to have a roommate at 40.\u201d She decided to move into a place of her own: a one-bedroom apartment in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island.<\/p>\n
After she moved, the preschool where she\u2019d worked for over a decade closed. Now, she works two jobs. She is a seasonal employee for the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, working from Tuesday to Saturday. And on Monday nights, she sells concessions at the West Village movie theater Film Forum, which pays $25 an hour plus tips.<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson, now 45, loves her job as an environmental educator at a state park on Staten Island. Her team runs the park\u2019s social media accounts and comes up with event programming, like a recent project tapping maple trees to make syrup.<\/p>\n
But the role is temporary. Her last stint was from June 2024 to January 2025. Then she was unemployed until August 2025. Ms. Robinson\u2019s current contract will be up in April, unless she gets an extension or a different parks job opens up.<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson\u2019s biweekly pay stubs from the parks department amount to about $1,300 before taxes. She barely felt a difference, she said, while she was out of work and pocketing around $880 every two weeks from her unemployment checks. (Her previous parks gig paid $1,100 a check.)<\/p>\n
Living in New York\u2019s Greenest Borough<\/p>\n
\u201cIt used to be, \u2018There\u2019s no way I\u2019m moving to Staten Island,\u2019\u201d Ms. Robinson said. \u201cBut the place is close to the water. I\u2019m three minutes from the ferry. The rest is history.\u201d She lives on the third floor of a multifamily house, above an art studio and another tenant. Her rent is $1,600 a month, plus $125 in utilities, including her phone bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf my situation changes, I don\u2019t know if I could find something similar,\u201d she said. \u201cSo much of my New York life has been feeling trapped to an apartment. You get a place for a good price, and you\u2019re like, \u2018I can\u2019t leave now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Staten Island is convenient for Ms. Robinson\u2019s parks job, but it\u2019s become harder to justify living in a borough where she knows few people. It takes more than an hour to get to friends in Brooklyn, an especially hard trek during the winter. After four years of living on Staten Island, Ms. Robinson feels somewhat isolated.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll my friends on Staten Island are senior citizens,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s great. I love it. But I do want friends closer to my age.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of Ms. Robinson\u2019s friends, Ray, took her on nature walks and taught her about tree identification, sparking an interest in mycology, the study of mushrooms. This led to a productive \u2014 and free \u2014 fungi foraging hobby during unemployment. She has found all sorts of mushrooms, including, after a month of searching, the elusive morel.<\/p>\n
The Budgeting Game<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson doesn\u2019t update her furniture often, but when she does, she shops stoop sales in Park Slope or other parts of Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like a treasure hunt,\u201d she said. \u201cYou could make a whole apartment off the street, off the stuff that people throw away.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also makes a game out of grocery shopping, biking to Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown to go to stores where there are better deals. She budgets about $300 for groceries each month.<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson bikes almost everywhere, sometimes traveling a little farther to enter the Staten Island Railway at one of the stations that don\u2019t charge a fare. She spends $80 a month on subway and ferry fares, and $5 a month for a discounted Citi Bike membership she gets through a credit union, though she usually uses her own bike. She is handy and does repairs herself.<\/p>\n
There are certain splurges \u2014 Ms. Robinson drops $400 once or twice a year on round-trip airfare to Seattle, where her family lives. She also spent $100 last year to see a concert at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.<\/p>\n
She said she has many financial saving graces. She has no student loans and no car to make payments on. She doesn\u2019t get health insurance from her jobs, but she qualifies for Medicaid.<\/p>\n
She mostly eats at home, though sometimes friends will treat her to dinner. She repays them with tickets to Film Forum movies.<\/p>\n
Nothing Beats the Twinkling Lights<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson\u2019s friends often talk about leaving the city \u2014 and the country.<\/p>\n
Two friends have their eyes set on Sweden, where they hope to get the affordable child care and social safety net they are struggling to access in New York.<\/p>\n
Ms. Robinson can\u2019t see herself moving elsewhere in the United States, but she is entertaining the idea of an international move if she can\u2019t hack it on Staten Island.<\/p>\n
Yet the pull of the city is hard for her to resist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just get a rush when I\u2019m riding the Staten Island Ferry across the bay,\u201d she said. \u201cYou see all the little twinkling lights. It\u2019s this feeling of, \u2018everything is possible here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That feeling, plus the many friendly faces Ms. Robinson sees every day \u2014 the ferry operators, the conductors on the Staten Island Railway, her co-workers at Film Forum \u2014 are what tie her to New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy savings are not increasing, so there\u2019s that,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been OK so far. I think I\u2019m going to figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5286,49713,9,24,56,63,134,136,135,62145],"class_list":["post-148225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-budgets-and-budgeting","tag-cost-of-living-and-affordability","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news","tag-tompkinsville-staten-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}