I guarantee you I've run this search more times than you have, and attended many of these open houses before grudgingly paying considerably more for what would be a modest apartment in most other cities. Your ability to find 1000sf listings for $1.2m doesn't exactly prove EGR's point that $1.2m amounts to setting a…

There are probably lots of airfare deals to Cancun coinciding with college kids' winter breaks, but not sure that be my first choice for a family vacay. (I take your point, though, that not all international flights are outrageous and it depends on your destination).

I admittedly haven't watched the WSJ video, but most articles adopting this view assume the family lives in a high-cost area, often NYC or surrounding suburbs. For a paper based in NY, not unreasonable. And Gawker is an NY-centric blog (though, I admit, more abashedly-so than it once was.)

It's an accurate thing to say, if an inconvenient thing to hear. And if you've only heard it from middle class Americans attempting to win arguments, you should take a page from HamNo and read Peter Singer more.

Colloquially, when most people (including the original Gawker, when it billed itself as a Manhattan site circa ~2004) say "Manhattan," they're mentally excluding basically everything above 96th Street. I personally have lived in Harlem, but I would not say it's reasonable to expect all families to live there.

How so?

If I search flights from NYC to London (any London airport) now for random dates in February, the cheapest fares on Kayak are $800 per person (not including tax, etc.). If I try dates in May, prices look about the same — the very-cheapest flight is $686, but the next one shoots up to $1092. Are you using miles or…

I don't have or want kids, but let's pretend that I have a husband and two kids and we want to visit Paris. Pretty popular destination, which theoretically can be done at a variety of price-points. We go during the kids' winter break from school — let's say second week of Feb, departing from NYC.

Yeah, except international flight could easily run $1500 per person. That's assuming coach and maybe a layover.

Interesting — Are hotels in Egypt inexpensive as a rule? I will totally admit that Mena House looks nice, yet even the advertised rates via TripAdvisor are < $200. Then again, the only place I've traveled extensively in the mideast is Dubai.

Yeah, but that's a domestic trip, and it's still more than triple the $2k budget the other poster suggests.

And my $400k household income would go really far in Mississippi, but...

I mean, I guess it's how you define "cushy." If you want your kids to see London or Paris, for example, then even a hellacious coach-class odyssey with multiple layovers will set you back ~$1k per person. For airfare. For a family of four, you haven't even landed yet and one-third of the $12k budget is spent.

I am probably your age, and don't use a travel agent. But nor am I going to schedule trips or choose destinations based on whatever "deal" I can scrounge off a social discount site. You're right — I do assume that you're traveling alone and staying in shitholes, or else snapping up rooms people wouldn't want, at…

I'm not counting government-subsidized housing, Harlem, or child abusers hypothetically warehousing their kids in 500sf roach-infested "apartments."

>I feel poor because I actually can't afford to buy groceries until I get paid this Friday, so I'm skipping dinner tonight.

>Difference: when you make $400k per year, you can cut expenses and still have leftover money. When you make $9/hr, there is nothing to cut.

If you are paying ~$200/night (at the high end, once you subtract airfare) and are staying at nice hotels, your travel footprint must be pretty limited.

It must be nice to live somewhere where $1.2m buys enough space to raise kids. Remember when gawker was an nyc (actually, a manhattan) publication?

If you think Ferguson is the most important news story of the decade — a decade which has seen genocide, drone-killings, a global economic crisis entailing mass foreclosures, the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Japan, the ongoing war in Gaza and a fucking Ebola epidemic — then you don't deserve to lecture anyone…