All eyes will be on New York Thursday night as the Yankees open their World Series tilt against the city of brotherly love. Should be an interesting matchup, with the Phillies as the defending champions. Both teams have relatively new stadiums that tend to produce a lot of home runs, so there should be plenty of fireworks. Plus, New York natives Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are scheduled to perform at Game 1, and apparently Michelle Obama may be in attendance.
But where would renters prefer to call home right now? We stack up the Philadelphia rental market against New York City rentals.
- According to Rentometer, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Philly is $1,625 per month compared to $4,500 in Manhattan. If you actually lived in the Bronx near where the Yankees play, you'd pay closer to $1,300.
- The crime rate in "Ill-adelphia" is nearly 2.4 times higher than New York City.
- Unemployment is 1 percent higher in Philly, at just over 10.4 percent.
- Both cities have great institutes of higher learning and museums, whether it be UPenn, Columbia, NYU, etc.
- The mayors of Philadelphia and New York City could not be more different, with Michael Bloomberg a media-savvy billionaire, and Michael Nutter as a long-time city "reformist" councilman.
While New York's median rental may scare many away, there's plenty of more affordable areas outside of Manhattan. Rentometer shows median rents in Brooklyn are more like $1,050 per month, and Hoboken's median is listed at $1,450, both of which are cheaper than downtown Philly. Further outside of New York, there's Jersey City, but at some point, why live in the city if you are going to spend most of your time more than an hour away by train.
Philadelphia seems significantly more affordable than New York, but with a lower crime rate and lower unemployment, we'll take the Big Apple right now.
