Five different members of the New York Mets have lived in the same Manhattan apartment. It's not that weird, really.
The best way to understand New York City -- an enormous and contradictory and disconcertingly expensive large town located near New Jersey -- is of course to think of it as a giant apple. Just a great big red (or green) apple, with a stem -- that's the Bronx -- packed full of vitamins and nutrients. It is not for nothing that New York is known as The Big Apple, for that truly is what it's most like.
I, and a few million other people, live together inside of this giant apple. Think of all of us, in this metaphor, as little bits of apple-meat. All these little component apple bits, paying outlandishly high rents and wondering over $8 beers whether it might not be perfectly fine, all told, to live inside a nice Bosc pear or something.
Another way to understand New York City, though, is as a series of real estate transactions. This is kind of a bummer way to think of anything, admittedly, but it is probably closer to the truth than The City Which Is Also A Large Fruit bit is. New York is a city of owners and renters; many people that own their homes in New York are, for all intents and purposes, still members of the renter class.
There is simply too much uncertainty in the equation for it to be otherwise, and the extent of their ownership pales relative to the super-scale ownership of the developers that terraformed these neighborhoods and built these big buildings, extracting the maximum possible patronage and subsidy from the city along the way. It is not just New York City that works this way, of course, but New York City really works this way.
New York City's East Side (Getty)
A consideration of New York real estate is complicated and dull and un-fun, and undoubtedly even more tedious to those not stuck inside this delicious apple of ours than it is to those of us who are. But the split between owners and renters helps explain how and why five different New York Mets have lived in the same Manhattan apartment, never more than two at a time, since the beginning of this season.
Ike Davis and Josh Satin, who began the season living there as roommates, are now playing and living in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas, respectively; Kirk Niewenhuis lived there for a stretch and Jacob DeGrom and Eric Campbell are currently roommates in the apartment. (The place is in my neighborhood, as it happens, although I've yet to see any of the five out at this neighborhood's only really good bar.)
This situation struck our friends at Curbed New York as curious. The Mets, Jeremiah Budin notes, "basically live like recent college graduates, sharing rental apartments, subletting from their friends, and taking the train to work." For all the jokes to be made about how this story reflects the (um) affordability and fungibility of the Mets roster, it's more notable for highlighting the extremes of the owner/renter dichotomy in the city. Manhattan is the borough that makes big league baseball players live like grad students.
All of the players mentioned above, with the exception of the departed Davis, were earning the MLB minimum salary of $500,000. That is an extremely good salary to earn, by any standard, although it goes less far in New York City than it does most anywhere else. It's not that people earning that sort of money couldn't own an apartment in New York City -- although it would be difficult for them to buy in most parts of Manhattan -- so much as it is that the uncertainty of their status and screwed-up, top-heavy perversity of New York City's real estate marketplace make renting (with roommates, and with a MetroCard) a more workable and mostly better idea. These Major League Baseball players, earning a half-million dollars a year, are still fundamentally as "renter" as it gets. Only some of this is a New York thing.
Young Mets players can afford only micro-accommodations like these for themselves and their pets. (Getty Images)
And the Mets owners, to neaten this binary up, are quite literally owners. Despite managing their baseball team with the sort of steely business competence and entrepreneurial foresight more generally associated with a failing Jamba Juice franchise, the Wilpon family's Sterling Equities owns and manages over 1,900 residential units, including a great number in New York. (Sandy Alderson, before he took over as GM of the Mets, owned a unit in the Wilpon-developed and owned Sterling Plaza, on East 49th Street.) The city recently handed the Wilpons the right to develop the semi-wasteland around CitiField, which they appear poised to do every bit as poorly as you might expect.
Watch the Mets closely enough, over a long enough period of time, and it's natural to seek a retreat into metaphor; the alternative is standing there in the unflinching light of day, watching Chris Young pop up with runners on second and third. But while the apartment-hopping details of The Apartment Of The Five Mets are interesting enough, the overarching metaphor is jarringly plain. The Mets are New York: diverse strivers of varying promise working at and for the pleasure of unaccountable and only faintly worthy owners, and living a lot more peripherally and parlously than we might expect.
That's New York. So is the understanding that, despite all that, it's more appealing to deal with all that than it is to confront the alternatives.