"Watch these sporadically unemployed 20-somethings live in multi-million dollar apartments."
— Narrator in the Honest Trailer for Friends.
Jessica Jones: So you wanna tell me how a pro bono lawyer can afford a loft like this in New York City?
Matt Murdock: You can't tell now, but there's a neon billboard across the street. Keeps most people up at night. Not me.
Matt Murdock: You can't tell now, but there's a neon billboard across the street. Keeps most people up at night. Not me.
— The Defenders (2017), "Ashes, Ashes"
"New York's the greatest when you get someone to pay the rent."
— LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum"
Now about his apartment. It’s at the top of a classic brownstone, with balconies and tall windows, and in Manhattan would cost thousands of dollars a month, but he’s flat broke, see, and just to prove it, there’s a place where the plaster has fallen off the wall and you can see the bare slats underneath. He has art hanging all over his apartment, except in front of those slats. All Alex has to do is sublet, and his financial worries are over."
Jan is an absolutely normal San Francisco woman. She lives in a big landmark Victorian house, she's married to a librarian, and she works as the secretary to the local Catholic bishop. (So far, all that's wrong with this picture is the landmark Victorian house, which Jan and her husband, Nick, could not afford unless he owned the library and she were the bishop.)
— Roger Ebert on Maxie
"Sotheby's is a real estate agency. I'm a real estate analyst. They want your house bad. No one understands how you were permitted to build it. There are no records for the permits being filed. You combined two historical brownstones into one residence, which is unheard of. You added a garage and a pool which, alone, would cost over $25 million if the city would even allow for it. All this on the salary of two software engineers. It doesn't make sense."
— Harris Materbach to John Smith, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024)
