Is New York Secretly Affordable?

Interesting article.  Makes very good points, including this:

For starters, let me say that the data is picking up something real, though I think, not quite what the report implies. New York has almost no middle class in Manhattan, and it's shrinking fast in the rest of the city. But New York is actually a pretty okay place to be poor in a lot of ways. The city offers more subsidies, higher up the income scale, than almost any place else in America. There's a whole lot of subsidized housing of various sorts. There are (if you are lucky, or have lived there a long time) still rent-controlled units around. A full third of New York City's citizens are on Medicaid. And there are various other means-tested assistance programs for people whose incomes would make them middle class anywhere else. People a little higher up the socioeconomic ladder do not ever see this social-service-assisted world, because they're not eligible for it (or wouldn't dream of applying). But there are a fair number of poor families in Manhattan living in more space than, say, a couple of book editors in Brooklyn.

Sounds like a terrible model for a society.