>...the topic of conversation among locals, both locals who knew each other and locals who just met one another, was about where they're living, how much their rent is, what kind of battle they had to go through to get the place ...
New Yorkers have been doing this for decades upon decades. When I moved here in the early 2000s I thought it was weird too, but it's totally normal to ask those sorts of questions of each other here. It's been difficult to "make it" here for as long as New York has been New York. My grandmother once told me towards the end of her life about how she and my grandfather had tried to live in NYC back after WWII and how hard it was, how they didn't last long. I didn't even know they had lived anywhere besides the Boston area until then.
It's been the storyline of many sitcoms at least going back to at least the 90s set in Manhattan. The Andrea Doria episode of Seinfeld immediately comes to mind...
New Yorkers have been doing this for decades upon decades. When I moved here in the early 2000s I thought it was weird too, but it's totally normal to ask those sorts of questions of each other here. It's been difficult to "make it" here for as long as New York has been New York. My grandmother once told me towards the end of her life about how she and my grandfather had tried to live in NYC back after WWII and how hard it was, how they didn't last long. I didn't even know they had lived anywhere besides the Boston area until then.