NYC is a large city; there are parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have very reasonable commutes into Manhattan (particularly lower Manhattan), and other parts wi

NYC is a large city; there are parts of Brooklyn and Queens that have very reasonable commutes into Manhattan (particularly lower Manhattan), and other parts with extremely long/essentially impossible commutes. The part of Brooklyn that I live in is somewhat cheap, and it takes me about 35 minutes on average to get to Lower Manhattan. I pay about $1600 a month in rent, sharing a 2 floor 3BR with a roommate. The people I know in the area pay similar amounts. I went to high school in the Bronx; it has good and bad areas like everywhere else in the city, but I think its bad reputation is largely undeserved. My guess is that we’re going to see a lot of “rebranding” of Bronx neighborhoods to make them more palatable over the next decade. (And note: all boroughs in NYC are both residential and commercial, so lots of people don’t commute into Manhattan at all.)