Doctor
$500,000

Peter and his wife, in their late forties, are executing the Herculean feat of raising not two but three kids in Manhattan. A prominent New York endocrinologist making more than $500,000 a year, he has been a vigorous proponent of raising children in the city for years -- since long before the city's vaunted renaissance made it popular once again -- partly because he helps recruit doctors to teach at a local medical school. "Sure, I could feel richer someplace else, but my kids have a certain amount of sophistication because it is such an urbane and heterogeneous place to grow up," he says. He says he is "addicted" to the city's museums, concerts, and theater, and so are his kids -- they stop into the Museum of Natural History for twenty minutes and go to exactly what they want to see. "It is a myth that you have to have a backyard," he says.

Growing up in the city, his kids have friends at all income levels, from working-class kids they meet in sports leagues to classmates at private school. They grew up understanding that people have different budgets and make different choices. One of his children, he says, came home from first grade and asked, "Did you ever think about being an investment banker? I don't know what an investment banker does, but my friend's dad is an investment banker, and he doesn't seem to work nearly as hard as you do, and they take much better vacations."

But Peter has begun to wonder if his children will ever be able to afford a life like his for themselves. He recently packed his kids off for sleepaway summer camp and took them out to the theater the night before. They ate at a modest restaurant -- $200, without beer or wine. ("What, are you going to tell your kids not to have dessert?") And then they saw The Music Man: four mezzanine seats, $340. ("Going to the theater -- isn't that part of life in New York?") With a cab ride home, that family night cost him almost $600.

As he loaded them onto the bus, he thought of his daughter heading to college and trying to move back to town. "I thought to myself, My kids can't come back," he says. "Will a kid graduating from college be able to spend $2,000 for a studio apartment? How can she start out unless she is going into business? Should I encourage my kids to go into investment banking? It is a real question how welcoming the city will be to anyone else -- a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an artist."

Wall Street's looming prominence in the local economy has changed the character of the town, Peter maintains. When he arrived in New York, young professionals had options -- cheaper housing in Morningside Heights, Kips Bay, Brooklyn Heights -- but everything is expensive now. The city's newfound safety helped retain families who would have left, pushing up apartment prices, and the boom on Wall Street has inflated the price of everything else. "There were always investment bankers; New York was always Wall Street. But people weren't paying $20 million for apartments," he says.

Even with "a pretty nice income," he says, the expense of city living seems forbidding. A doctor or lawyer with two or three kids will want a seven-room apartment -- mortgage and maintenance about $8,000 a month, or $96,000 a year. Tuition in New York is about $20,000 a kid -- $60,000 for three kids. "If you are in that salary range -- $500,000 to $750,000 -- do you want a weekend home? Unlike people who have endless money, we have a mortgage on ours," he says. The mortgage payments on the weekend house are about $5,000 a month, not including paying for an alarm system, someone to mow the lawn, transportation, and other incidentals. "We're on Long Island," he says, "but it's not even near the beach."

Affording those basics takes an after-tax income of $210,000, or about $400,000 before taxes, and that is just the beginning. Everything in New York costs more than it would somewhere else. "You go to a nice local Italian or French restaurant, you are going to drop $100 for two people. But isn't going to restaurants part of living in the city?"

People like him are becoming an endangered species, he says. "Professionals like us used to be considered affluent, but in this community, we are considered working-class! We can have such a much more comfortable life outside the city that there is a constant exodus of people leaving, and it is getting a lot harder to get professional people to come here. The economics of the city right now are pushing out a professional class, getting rid of the doctors and law professors and academics, the ones who make the city vibrant and come up with new ideas. Generating new ideas is what makes a city great. New York is suffering a real brain drain. If I was new to the city today, moving here would be totally out of the question. There is no way that a doctor like me could expect to pull it off."