The Hunt: BoogieDowner Breakdown

Longtime BoogieDowner readers will recognize this now dormant weekly feature we used to run. Basically, we, like every New Yorker with a pulse, religiously read Hunt Honey Joyce Cohen's weekly article in the New York Times' Real Estate section about the travails of New Yorkers hunting for an apartment.

Previously we would re-cap the article and comment on what the person would have purchased in the Bronx for the same amount they had spent. To be honest, the whole thing got a bit tedious because of how much money all these people were spending. It's hard to find things over the $1 million mark in the BoogieDown unless you're looking to buy a whole building.

But, this past week's Hunt article struck us as being worthy of comment.

So the article is about an artist named Bryan Drury. Nothing incredibly noteworthy about an artist living in New York City. BoogieDowner was just taken aback by how intimately involved a grown man's parents are involved in his living situation. Mr. Drury is 27 and has mommy and daddy fly in from Salt Lake City to bankroll a $405K studio in downtown Brooklyn. I wonder if Mr. Drury feels financially emasculated at all?

Here are some choice excerpts that describe Mr. Drury's dentist dad:

"Once it was clear that Mr. Drury would be staying in New York after his graduation, it seemed prudent to trade renting for buying, said his father, Dr. Scot Drury, a dentist. In the summer of 2007, Dr. and Mrs. Drury flew to New York on a hunting expedition for a condo, planning to spend $350,000 to $400,000.
“We didn’t know anything,” Mrs. Drury said. “Bryan has never had a doorman. There’s hundreds of times we’ve gone by places and said, ‘How much do people pay for a doorman?’ [...]

“To be totally honest, I couldn’t care less,” Mr. Drury said. “Since my parents were the ones who bought the place, it was their investment, so that was their rationale.”
They paid $405,000. Monthly charges are $424. (He pays rent to his parents.) "

So BoogieDowner just wanted to highlight another example of Brooklyn real estate insanity... At least this guy is honest about having his mom and dad subsidize his lifestyle and we now have a concrete example of how trustafarians operate.

~ErLu