Madeline Leung Coleman
Appearances
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Madeline Leung Coleman, and I'm a features writer for New York Magazine.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Something that everybody in New York City is aware of and definitely are talking to their friends about, which is the sheer number of people in New York City who are subsidized in some way by their parents. What are some of the obvious tells? I think the most obvious tell and the thing that many people are familiar with living in New York City is when someone suddenly buys an apartment.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And it's often someone who you might feel that you're kind of on the same track with. Like you have a pretty good idea of how far The salary that they make would actually go because, you know, from your own experience of how far it doesn't go. And then all of a sudden your friend tells you that they're looking to buy and it's like, what? It's surprising the first time.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And then after that, you start to just be like, OK, here we go. We did a series of 14 interviews with people whose parents are giving their money in some way. And that's ranging from paying for down payments to paying for child care to, you know, an allowance that's coming in every month.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And the editors who are leading the charge on this were Paolo Seves and Julia Edelstein, with some help from some freelance reporters as well. And what they found was that First of all, that many more women were willing to open up about the money that they were getting, which I thought was fascinating.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
But some of the stories that stuck with me included the one about a woman who works as a teacher. Her husband works in finance and they live in Murray Hill. And her real estate journey started when her parents bought her a studio apartment at age 24. And that led to her eventually being able to buy a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with her partner.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
You know, she's had so much help, but she's very confused about what class she belongs to. She says, I can't tell. Am I a trust fund kid or am I middle class? I don't even know what middle class is in Manhattan.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Yeah, part of it is class resentment. Part of it is everyone's own struggles to figure out how to make it in a city that is so expensive and so hostile to people who are not extremely wealthy. And so if you know someone who, you know, by the way, you love them. You know, they're your good friend a lot of the time when you're having these questions go through your head.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And you just want to know why. Why is it that they're able to be in this situation when other people you know are not?
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Finding a place to live is the biggest one. And it isn't just about buying. It's also about renting. Landlords demand that you make an income that is usually about 40 times the monthly rent, which is crazy and doesn't actually indicate anything about what you can afford. But as a result, a lot of people can't prove that, so they need to get a guarantor. That will often be a parent.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
that are my age had help from their parents in Subway. And at the same time, salaries obviously have not increased to anywhere near what they would need to to cover this kind of thing, especially when you're just starting out. But then it really goes all the way through life of the generations we're talking about.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
So we spoke to people who are in Gen X through Gen Z. And, you know, even the people who are in their 40s or even in their early 50s, They say that they have to rely on their parents to help them pay for daycare. Or if their kids need to go to a specialty private school, then their parents will help them pay for that.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
It could be covering the space between when you lose your job and when you get a new job. I just was recently laid off.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Guilt and shame are definitely the through line, but they emerge in ways that are kind of surprising. You might think that it only would be that people feel guilty that they have more than others or that they're ashamed because they think it makes them part of some kind of reviled class of some kind.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
But a lot of it is really just because people are ashamed that they can't afford everything they have on their own.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
It's actually about that old thing of American individualism and the idea that if you can't buy an apartment on your own, then maybe somehow you're less of an adult. Or if you can't pay for your kid's school, your daycare on your own, like you may be kind of messed up somewhere, like you took a wrong turn along the way.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
There's a few people who talk about feeling like they were middle class for their entire lives. But then as soon as they were adults and trying to make decisions that were really expensive, their parents suddenly were like, you know what, we can help you with that.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And those people seem kind of gobsmacked at their good luck, honestly, and quite grateful, but also maybe embarrassed because they're now having to adjust to a class position that they didn't grow up thinking they were in.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Everybody thinks they're middle class. Yes. And that could mean someone who owns their apartment in Manhattan. That could be somebody who... is living in the outer boroughs, but they are paying their rent every month, you know, and they're like, they're not behind, they're not drowning in debt, like that can mean middle class.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
You could also be drowning in debt and feel middle class, you know, like we hear that the middle class is being squeezed. It's absolutely true. As I was doing research for this story, I found that apparently the median income for a millennial in New York City is $59,000.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
So I think it's important to say that you can survive here without your parents giving you that money. However, you won't necessarily be what we might call economically secure here. But we know for sure that there are many New Yorkers who live here living below the poverty line. In fact, it's almost a quarter of New Yorkers. The poverty rate in New York is about twice what it is nationally.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
And that won't be a surprise to anybody who lives here. But I think it's also important to say that a lot of people are just getting by. Like, yes, they might be paying their rent. They're buying groceries. Basically, not eggs, obviously, because who can afford them? But they're buying other things. You know, a lot of people are living, but they're not making savings.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
OK, like they're not they're not getting on stable footing. If they were to have some kind of health emergency, they would be in trouble.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
You know, if something happened to their apartment, let's say they live in a basement apartment that gets flooded during one of those flash floods that happen increasingly and they don't have renter's insurance, like they've got nothing to help them deal with that kind of thing.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
There's also plenty of New Yorkers who are living at that point and then being helped by their parents to push them over it. You know, and I think that's really what we're talking about here. Because a lot of the people who are getting help by their parents aren't living extravagantly.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
A lot of them are living what appears to be a pretty normal life by the standards of what we previously considered to look like middle classness, right? Like they have stable housing. They have a, you know, what we might call a normal job. But for whatever reason... They just don't have the concerns of their peers.
Today, Explained
Sugar daddies and mommies
Like they're able to take vacations, they're able to send their kids to a private school, whatever. The difference is not usually just between not having anything or living in like, you know, a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side. It's more about, are you able to live without being afraid about money day to day?