I can't speak to the bedbugs problem, I've been lucky I suppose.
My (now) wife & I both got well paying jobs at banks out of college almost 20 years ago. Our entire signing bonuses went to apartment fees & deposits. We were each in a situation where 1 paycheck per month went to the rent. Neither of us had a dishwasher, let alone a washer/dryer, central air, any aircon.. etc. Our buildings had bugs&rats, and walls thin enough to hear neighbors phone calls.
Marrying and moving up to nicer places, we still had no washer/dryer across the next 2 apartments.
Finally when we felt like we had "made it" in our mid-30s, we bought a new condo and finally have a washer/dryer. It cost more than my parents, in-laws, and sister's homes combined.. and then multiplied by two. It has only 2 beds (not 3 like the aforementioned homes). My kitchen has a stove the size of a fisher price play kit, and the oven doesn't fit standard sized baking trays. I have only 1 zone AC which can't manage to keep the different rooms within +/-5F of each other.
I could live like a proverbial king in 95% of the rest of the country on this budget.
$0.60 per mile is $6k per year at 10k miles per year, which is a decent amount of driving. $9k per year at 15k miles per year.
However, you can usually get more than 200k miles/10 years out of a car, so those costs above are very high end costs. Unless you opt for luxuries, I think annual car spend can easily be brought down to $6k, or $500 per month. Even less if you opt for liability only insurance, and live in a place that does not require you to drive 10k miles per year.
You definitely spend more than $10-12k/year once you have a family for even a modest amount of space.
And that's the average cost of car ownership, it's easy to find a cheap car.
Many NYers need to construct elaborate fantasies to delude themselves that actually living in NYC is totally economical/convenient/rational, and not just their personal preference. Something about a river in Egypt.
In reality while it's fun, its also often inconvenient, expensive, or both.
Yes, people talk about their rent and their apartments (amongst many other things!), but it's because it's one of the things they all have in common— they rent. And because we loved to collectively complain about things.
And not once in the 10 years did I have bed bugs. I think I knew one other person with them (barring I'm sure a few who never shared).
All that being said, there is absolutely a housing shortage AND things in NYC are tougher than anywhere else. But I liken NYC to the doughnut added to the baseball bat when batters warm up— once you take it off (and live anywhere else) everything feels easier.
It works ok in your 20s because you may not have pets/kids/ailing parents/etc to worry about. And you don't realize that you are treading water while your friends outside the city are moving onto more established phases of their lives..
New Yorkers have been doing this for decades upon decades. When I moved here in the early 2000s I thought it was weird too, but it's totally normal to ask those sorts of questions of each other here. It's been difficult to "make it" here for as long as New York has been New York. My grandmother once told me towards the end of her life about how she and my grandfather had tried to live in NYC back after WWII and how hard it was, how they didn't last long. I didn't even know they had lived anywhere besides the Boston area until then.
There's a lot going on in NYC, possibly more than anywhere in the world. And in fact, that's why people want to move there.
There's no long term stability to be had, so it's no wonder that people left when given the chance in the form of increased remote opportunities and a lifestyle "reset" in the form of covid.
"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere ..."
.....
And yes, we look the same
Both pumping steel
Both sweating
But you know she got nothing to hide
And I got something to hide here
Called desire.
I got something to hide here
Called desire
And I will get out of here
You know that fear potion is just about to come
In my nose is the taste of sugar
And I got nothing to hide here
Save desire
And I'm going to go
I'm going to get out of here
I'm going to get out of here
I'm going to get on that train
And I'm going to go on that train
And go to New York City
I'm going to be somebody
I'm getting
Going to get on that train
Go to New York City
I'm going to be so big
I'm going to be a big star
And I will never return ...
>Literally so many people want to move here, but you look on all of streeteasy on a given day and there’s like 500 apartments. In a cities of millions.
I'm currently in my mid-30's. Throughout all of my 20's, I thought it would be a blast to live in NYC. Then I had a good stretch where I visited it a whole bunch of times, hanging out with friends and family who lived there, and you know what I noticed? Unless you were an older family member who owned a home/apartment, every younger person was renting and the topic of conversation among locals, both locals who knew each other and locals who just met one another, was about where they're living, how much their rent is, what kind of battle they had to go through to get the place, what kind of battles their friends went through to get their places, and then they'd compare the different amenities they had or didn't have. I watched these same conversations - some of which were told like war stories - play out again and again and again and again.
Then, you get into the whole issue of bed bugs, how prevalent they are in NYC and how much of a nightmare it is to deal with them, and you realize that life in NYC is largely spent just trying to figure out how to have a place to live, and it suddenly feels incredibly stupid to bother to try and move there. The nightlife and entertainment and culture, as cool as they are, just aren't worth it if you're constantly hassling with such a basic need.
But that's just me. /shrug