Escape From New York to These Cheaper (But Still Great) Places
Residents in Harlem (left) would save money by moving to the Eight Arrondissement in Paris, home to the Champs-Élysées (right). Photo: Angel Chevrestt (left), Getty Images
By Amber Jamieson
No matter where you live in New York City, you can afford to live in the nicest neighborhoods in the world’s best cities, a real-estate survey shows.
Residents of Harlem, for example, would save cash by moving to the Eighth Arrondissement in Paris, home of the Champs-Élysées, because the average cost per square foot is higher in Harlem ($963 vs. $944), according to a new comparison map developed by NeighborhoodX, a real-estate Web site.
Artsy East Village residents would pay a nearly identical price per square foot ($1,354) in the sandstone terraces of Belgravia in London, where Russian oligarchs buy homes for $150 million ($1,367 per square foot).
A sample neighborhood comparison: Roosevelt Island to Ostermalm in Stockholm, Sweden.
Denizens of East New York in Brooklyn pay $303 per square foot for a typical two-bedroom apartment. For $24 more, they could lift a pint in a flat in Old Town in Edinburgh, Scotland, and dwell among the maze of medieval cobblestone streets where author J.K. Rowling lived while writing about Harry Potter.
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Constantine Valhouli, the founder of NeighborhoodX, a new site that provides consumers neighborhood-level real-estate data, calls the chart a tool for those who might say, “I’m sick of New York. Where else in the world can I afford to live?”
The data show “our regular existence here could afford an incredible existence there,” Valhouli said.
Mayor de Blasio’s old ’hood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where prices average $1,098 per square foot, is priced similarly to Leblon, the most exclusive beachside suburb of Rio de Janiero, within walking distance of the famed Ipanema and Copacabana beaches.
Apartments in Queens’ Murray Hill cost an average $482 per square foot, pricier than the fanciest section of Madrid, an embassy enclave called Salamanca ($454).
Morissania in The Bronx, one of the Big Apple’s most affordable neighborhoods at $231 per square foot, is on par with the plush Kolonaki area in Athens, Greece ($228), where residents walk in the footsteps of Plato, Socrates and Alexander the Great with views of the Acropolis.
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Valhouli says he wants the map “to fuel that fantasy” and show that it’s actually attainable.
“We’re so used to the New York prices being standard, we forget there’s whole other parts of the world,” he said.
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