NYC has got its own charm for New Yorkers
I was born & raised in India, and have lived in Pittsburgh, Buffalo NY, Miami & presently am an established suburbanite near Orlando, Fl. I have & continue to visit NY city every 3 months for a complicated knee reconstruction for Dr follow ups.On these visits, after my medical stuff is taken care of, I usually keep a day or so for going around & essentially loafing around the city, visiting with some long term friends. I enjoy every bit of it !!!!!, I do find & understand the city is pretty expensive even for anyone with some means.
I think the opportunities NY city provides to a educated professional for further education & training are limit less. It is a place where you can rub shoulders with the best & worst of / in people. It turned out the best for my complicated knee replacements at least after being operated at many hospitals in the central Florida area.This is the place where you find many Maddoffs, the bankers who lost our billions, charlatons & also the place where a lot of philantrophy to the tunes of millions & billions is seen
There are many places in the city who will take a chance on an immigrant, because the culture of taking risks, banking on something new, to a different way of doing things, looking for a different idea is very much ingrained in the psyche of New Yorkers much more than in many other cities.The competition is intense, the survival of the fittest is very much the rule, your hunger for achievement (whatever the goal maybe) & the work you put into it, will decide the final result more than any pedigree, color of the skin or an uncle X. These are much more pronounced than in other places.
Many successful people in other places have at some stage in their lives been at the doorstep of, got what they came for & left the City for the comfortable less costly places around the country. When People all over the world think about & take the risk of putting their comfortable lives on line for a chance at success in USA, many times they do not think of other cities but NY in the country.
Then after they get(achieve) what they once came for, they miss the place of most collective brains & the competition(More is learned from one another) in other cities & suburbs & some return to the City(as some of my friends did). They do not want to loose their professional skills which made them what they are today & try to gravitate to places where they can find more of the same of & more often than not the road leads back to the city(for the self imposed rejects from the suburbs)
When I saw the Video, of a MIT (A very competitive school) schooled Oriental Man & a dentist wife with 2 kids, I think some of the above reasons may apply to their lives.
I do not think they are ignorant of the fact, that they CAN AFFORD on 400K a very comfortable lifestyle, with less crime, a house with much more room, afford the best of area schools, a couple of nannies, a garage full of cars in hundreds of places around the country. I think their brains are wired differently, they will miss the above aspects of the NYC. They must be thinking about the insipid life of cutting the lawn(Gee what is this green stuff
), going to the homeowner's meetings, not finding any aspirations left in their neighbor who is scared about loosing his comfortable present, no museums, not enough of diversity or their Ethnic stuff they are used to in city, no scientific/technical library close by or more so nobody to discuss their stuff with at their level ... etc....They are scared about the suburban decay setting in.
This is by no means stating that NY city life is better than a life in suburbia, it is JUST AN OPINION of what people like these may look for in a place. I am a confirmed suburbanite like many of us on the forum, but do have long term friends in these situations whom we visit with on occasions like when I visit NY city, & like in many situations we think they are/and they think we ARE CRAZZZZZYYYYYYYYY .
To each their own, I guess
Warm regards
