not answering the question, but many parts of north brooklyn, NYC are other such areas. I'm looking at the exact same math problem. Paying 7k a month for a place that you couldn't possibly rent for more than 5k.

I have a couple basics I know by heart in awk, sed, and grep and those things enable me to be quick doing all sorts of stuff I need to do for large datasets on a daily basis. cat user_uuid_list | sed s/$/,/ sort of stuff. or anything tabular looking where I want specific columns (awk). maybe there are better ways, but I don't really care, as this works for me, is available everywhere, and I will never forget how to do it. I also use python for lots of stuff!

same. I remember the bottles of wine, scuba diver and claudia schiffer swimming in cottage cheese or something like that. Socks on the living room couch?

upstanding citizen who briefly rented from a slumlord (NYC) here. When it became obvious my landlord wasn't gonna give me my deposit back I just didn't pay the last month's rent. never heard another word about it. I left the place spotless, as I would've regardless of anything related to the deposit.

observationally, this doesn't seem to be the case. In NYC, the way it looks is that restaurants that were doing a brisk delivery business before the pandemic are still with us and a lot of great restaurants that were packed with in-person diners are gone. There are tons of exceptions. Source: Brooklyn.

I don't even care about the actual gold record or any accolades of any sort. I'd love to hear the gold record level pop song written by someone with only a vague understanding of music. I have 0 respect for most modern pop music, but that's complete nonsense.

if the question is whether pop music has ever been anything other than muzak written by AI to tick a number of emotional boxes, I think the answer is pretty obviously yes. That's a ridiculous conclusion. We don't have to dig very deep in the well of incredible pop music...all of Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. was the pop music of the time.