Realtor runs down the accuracy of pop culture apartments and homes
Realtor/reality TV star Ryan Serhant runs down examples from Friends, Spider-Man, and more
TV Features Television shows
A shitty house or apartment on TV is very, very different from a shitty house or apartment in real life. We all just sort of accept this, ignore that even our most famous middle-class cartoon families live in fantasy worlds, and decide not to believe that any movie or TV depiction of the real estate market is remotely connected to our actual lives.
Until, that is, someone like realtor and Million Dollar Listing New York star Ryan Serhant comes along to remind us of what a bunch of pop culture living arrangements would look like in reality.
Serhant gets into a bunch of different examples, letting us know which ones are true to life and which are unrealistic. We learn that Spider-Man actually can get evicted by his landlord frighteningly easily for being chronically late on rent in the Sam Raimi movies and that, true to the first season of American Horror Story, a California realtor would have to tell buyers that lots of people have been murdered in a ghost house.
When it comes to sitcom apartments, things start out fairly realistic—having an extra roommate living in The New Girl’s (enormous) rental would be a big issue for a landlord concerned with occupancy regulations. But then they get a bit less grounded when Serhant turns to Friends and a character like Monica living in a giant West Village apartment that he estimates would go for between $7,000- 9,000/month on a chef’s wages. In the lucky event that it’s a rent-controlled place, it makes sense, though that still makes Monica an exception.
In short, the shows and movie Serhant picks are fairly true to life, just so long as you’re willing to chalk up the size, location, and general structural integrity of a lot of pop culture dwellings to good fortune—which, if you’re more familiar with rentals like Charlie and Frank’s apartment in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, still seems pretty absurd.
[via Digg]
Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]
32 Comments
Do you pay per ghost, or is it a lump sum for “haunted”?
Well, as someone who recently purchased in a co-op in NYC that was formally a mortuary: you typically negotiate tenancy agreements with the spectral occupants post-signing.
It’s kind of dumb to go after the Friends apartment from perspective of how much the West Village costs these days, because while it was always unrealistic, prices in the 90s and early 2000s were much, much different than now. He tries to pretend like the difference in price is solely inflation, when real estate everywhere but especially New York has been increasing far faster than inflation (you know, that’s why the housing crisis is such a problem.) Likewise, Parker’s room isn’t actually super-terrible, but the guy is way off on how easy it is to evict people. New York has tons of tenant protections (one reason why renting is so expensive! Because it’s super expensive to kick someone out!) Peter Parker is a college-educated white guy, not some illiterate immigrant who doesn’t know their rights and can easily be bullied. If he wanted to fight he could drag out eviction for a long time, especially since the courts are often super-slow. This is why landlords will hire people to gut apartments, intimidate residents, and try and force them out that way. And finally: the guy doesn’t seem to know the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. Rent stabilization prevents landlords from arbitrarily jacking up the price of rent, true, but that lady on the UWS with a $1300 payment is almost certainly in a rent-controlled apartment, which in theory applies to long-time residents living in old buildings but further drives up the price of housing for everyone else because there’s tons of people living at “their grandmother’s place” despite the fact that it should convert to a market rate apartment upon grandma’s death.I moved to New York in 2016, and both places I’ve lived have been rent-stabilized. Rent stabilized apartments are actually super-common (whether or not landlords inform tenants of this, and follow the laws regarding increases, is another matter.) TLDR this guy doesn’t know enough about what he’s talking to make a video about it (which seems worrisome, if he’s supposed to be a real estate guy professionally.) But hey, Youtube.
I agree in that I think Monica’s apartment was always somewhat of a mystery, but as time has gone on, it has grown from “wow, she’s pretty lucky she found such a nice place, surprised she can afford it” when it first aired to “shut the fuck up, this is impossible and even kind of cruel and insulting to show us this” today. I was a teen in suburban New Jersey in the 90s and Friends always felt kind of aspirational to me in that the lifestyle seemed fun and hip and cool but not out of reach. These days I make six figures and I don’t think I could afford to live in Manhattan, certainly not in a way my family and I would be happy. For comparison sake, the peers I knew who were moving to NYC in the mid/late 90s straight out of college – the older siblings of friends – were not moving to downtown Manhattan but were moving to Queens or Brooklyn. By the time I got out of college in 2003, anyone who was working in NYC at an entry level had been priced out to Hoboken. I did have one friend who moved to Manhattan after school and was working on Broadway as some kind of gopher/PA. She was sharing a tiny studio apartment with two other girls in a massive warren of a building with teensy windows. It legit felt like a prison cell. I think they cooked all their meals on a hotplate. I did find the video fun, though I don’t know enough about real estate to be bothered with the inaccuracies of what the dude is saying.
I moved to NYC in 1990, and they still would have had a hell of a time paying the rent on that Friends apartment back then. It’s more now, yes. But that’s still pretty damn steep.
Of course, which is why the conceit in show was explicitly that she had a cheap price inherited from a relative (so rent control, not rent stabilization.) But acting like it would still the equivalent price back then when factoring in inflation is misleading to the point of just being flat incorrect. No one, and certainly not me, is pretending like they aren’t unrealistic apartments for people whose lives revolve around sitcom hijinks and not gainful employment.
It’s also hard to, like, build a tiny TV set that’s to perfect scale of a tiny NYC apartment, and give the actors room to move around, and place all the cameras and lights and block many different scenes over the course of hundreds of episodes. The sets are built big because that’s just easier to work with from a production standpoint, and then one of the writers gets cute and puts in a throwaway line about how it’s a rent-controlled unit. Videos like this basically suggest in bad faith that Hollywood people are out of touch with how everyday people live, and they probably are, but this specific issue (middle-class sitcom characters living in huge apartments) is all about the practicality of television production.
As clearly stated in the show, Monica was illegally subletting her apartment from a Great Aunt (or something like that). None of these “takedowns” of her place and its rent for the past 2 deacdes mean anything.
Yeah, it was her grandma’s rent controlled apartment. I bet the landlord was super happy when they moved out at the end of the series so he could jack up the rent to 5X what Monica was paying.
But we’ll get another one in 6 months: “DID YOU KNOW THAT MONICA FROM FRIENDS COULDN’T AFFORD THAT BIG APARTMENT?!”, and so the content mill churns on, until the heat death of the universe.
That and all the “Ross was really a horrible person” takes are getting so tired. Find something new to say.
I’ll accept that. I was obviously busy that night!
Her grandmother. “So, if anyone asks, I’m 70-something old lady.” (Is what she told Joey in a flashback episode to before the show started.)
“He tries to pretend like the difference in price is solely inflation, when real estate everywhere but especially New York has been increasing far faster than inflation (you know, that’s why the housing crisis is such a problem.)“The first time I was ever in NYC was when I moved one of my best friends (and former roommate) to lower Manhattan (think Alphabet streets area). It was decent, it was small, tri-level, but did at least have a serviceable kitchen, an outside balcony, and an elevator (not a walk-up, I think he was on the 7th or 9th floor). I asked him how much this was costing him. He gave me the long story, but the short end is that he had his accountant do some “creative math” to show that he made over six figures, because the management company wouldn’t even let him see the place if he wasn’t making that. In 2003 he was paying $2300/month for possibly 600 square feet.I moved to L.I. (Nassau County) in 2017 and pay $800/month for literally a bedroom and a shared kitchenette with two other guys. It’s insane. Luckily my landlord likes me and since I’m on the road for work a lot, she cuts my rent in half when I’m not there. But I seriously don’t understand how anyone can survive to live in NYC at all.I’m surprised he didn’t bring up the condo that Frasier had in Seattle. There is no way a radio shrink could afford that place.
He is a real estate, influencer professional. Aviod at all costs.
I mean, of course the guy whose job is literally, in name, selling “Million Dollar Listings” has no idea about rent control, rent stabilization, and tenant protections.
Peter Parker is a college-educated white guyBeing a New Yorker, he may be more intimately familiar with housing laws than I was (he also had Aunt May and superpowers, but that’s not what I’m taking issue with), but as a college-educated man, I can tell ya that college doesn’t prepare you for the real world much more than high school. I can easily imagine a college student (as Parker was in 2) being bullied by a landlord.That’s part of the charm of Spidey, innit? He has superpowers and is smart enough to create artificial, super-strong webbing, but he’s still gotta’ scrounge up rent money. Even taking away the superpowers, it’s not uncommon to be really smart or really good at something, but go your whole life without being taught to, say, do your taxes.
This isn’t a new criticism though. People made plenty of “nobody could afford the Friends apartments” jokes back in the show’s heyday.
Funny how these kinds of shows go after “Monica’s” apartment, but not “Chandler’s” (or whatever his name was), which apparently was across the hall. Wonder what the difference is?
Chandler’s apartment was smaller and shittier.
Um, it was WAY smaller, shittier, and had two people splitting it**theoretically. although Chandler had to cover Joey numerous times.
Chanandler. Chanandler Bong.
At the beginning of the show Ross, Chandler, and Monica were sometimes divided from Joey, Phoebe, and Rachel because the former group generally had steady jobs and the latter didn’t, but Chandler had a middle management white collar position nobody understood and Monica was an aspiring chef; I think it’s reasonable to assume that particularly in the earliest seasons he made a lot more money than she did.
Millions of New Yorkers live in apartments like Joey’s and Chandlers. Far, far fewer live in the other apartment.
“Apartments on TV would cost more in real life” is the lowest form of cultural criticism.
Have you seen “Ellie Kemper KKK Princess”?
The Spider-Man example is extremely incomplete. Yes, Pete’s landlord could evict him for non-payment, but there are many tenant protection complexities that this ignores.A big one is Warranty of Habitability. There are specific laws in most cities about the condition of rental units that landlords are legally obligated to meet. A tenant withholding rent because a landlord fails to meet that standard is a risky but common strategy to get shit done: it forces the landlord’s hand, and they either fix the issue or evict (which is far more effortful and costly.)If Pete and his landlord’s situation escalated to eviction court, that’s an angle Pete could take: “My door never functioned properly, leaving my apartment unsecured and creating a fire risk when it jammed. Withholding rent was my only recourse.” It’s up in the air how receptive a judge would be to this argument (you’d usually need to produce documented evidence of this back-and-forth and proof of the landlord’s negligence), but a potential outcome could be that Pete would owe back-rent without interest on condition the landlord fix his goddamn door.
The most unrealistic part of Spider-Man was Peter Parker struggling to pay rent on his NYC apartment while his aunt lost the mortgage on her two-story house elsewhere in the city. I know native NYers who lived with their parents well into their 30s because this is one of the most expensive cities in the country and if you can you might as well.
Seems like every two or three years some dipshit comes to the conclusion that apartments in TV and the movies are unrealistic and writes a column or makes a video about it.
Seems like every two or three hours.
cmon buddy. It’s WAY more frequent than every 2 or 3 years.
Jumping on the “this guy is wrong” train, but as a FRIENDS fan rather than anything respectable (lol).Monica was illegally subletting the apartment from her Grandmother.It is NOT the Chef’s salary that should be called into question.This is stated multiple times in the show.—As for you Chandler commenters, he earned a LOT of money.He even got several raises and promotions throughout the show’s run.—Do a modicum of narrative research before pop-culture video making c’mon!
Could I BE any more of a nerd right now?