• I thought I'd live in New York City forever, but I hit my breaking point and moved to Nashville.
• I could enjoy many things I love about city life and get more space for less. I even fell in love.
• It's been about a decade since my move, and I'm happily living here with my husband and two kids.

New York or nowhere. It's a T-shirt and an Instagram, but it was also my personal motto for most of my young life.

I was born in the Bronx, got my first post-college apartment in Queens, spent nearly a decade in a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan, and brought my first baby home to Brooklyn.

In high school and college, I spent time living in Connecticut, Poughkeepsie, and Scotland, but always felt the draw back to NYC.

By age 30, I'd spent most of my life in the city, and was living my own NYC dream working at a buzzy women's media company.

I had never imagined living anywhere else. Then, I hit my breaking point.

After a reality check, I gave myself permission to leave New York

New York wasn't just my city; it was a huge part of my identity.

However, I was burned out at my job, underpaid, and commuting hours on the subway between Manhattan and my shoebox of an apartment in Crown Heights.

I was paying a nanny most of my salary just so I could have the privilege of … not seeing my newborn.

After each day speed-editing dozens of articles and pumping breastmilk in a closet at the office, I would sprint to the subway at 7 p.m. in hopes of seeing my son while he was still awake.

I would never make it back in time. I'd kiss his sleeping face, pay the nanny, and cry.

By the time my son outgrew his bassinet and needed to transition to a crib, it became clear my tiny apartment was too small for us.

A crib and an adult bed didn't fit in the space, so I gave the latter away and spent the last six months of my New York life sleeping on a bedroll on the floor.

And I finally gave myself permission to consider the impossible: leaving. I just wasn't sure where to go next.

Nashville wasn't the plan, but it was the answer

I knew I wanted to live in a city, but I needed somewhere cheaper (and way more chill) than New York.

I didn't want to relive my teen years in the Connecticut suburbs, or even that blissful but too-quiet year in college when I lived on the coast of northern Scotland.

I wanted my son to grow up in a real community: walking to public school and the playground and pizza parlor like I did as a little kid in the Bronx. I wanted to take him to museums and music venues.

Soon, Nashville was on my radar — once I factored in my other wants, it seemed like the biggest, most diverse, most affordable city I could afford.

I told my employer I was moving, and that I could quit or they could let me go remote. They let me keep my job. I bought a four-bedroom house in East Nashville with a monthly mortgage that was close to half my rent in Brooklyn.

My new block had coffee shops, bars, a pharmacy, a pizza parlor, a bodega, and a vintage store that was also an art gallery that was also a music venue. So Brooklyn! I felt right at home.

Sure, at first everything felt … slow. I didn't live near downtown, so the bustle dial was turned way down.

Initially, it was hard to sleep without sirens and shouting outside my window. But as the weeks turned into months, I started to notice I was breathing easier.

Nashville gave me more space — not just physical space (for a crib and a bed, imagine!) but space in my day that was no longer spent commuting, hauling a stroller up and down stairs, and rushing to the laundromat.

It gave me more accessible green spaces than New York had; my son and I could be out on a hike within 20 minutes, no Metro-North train ride necessary.

Without a long commute, I had time to make real dinners, to lounge on porches, and to get to know my neighbors. I made friends, joined a nonprofit, and started teaching yoga at the local studio.

I had the emotional space to date around casually and have fun.

When my son was 2 ½, I met one particular musician. He was calm but passionate, goofy but grounded, Southern polite but also punk rock. He loved my son.

By year five in Nashville, we were married. Year six, he adopted my son. That same year, our second son was born.

Moving was the best decision I was scared to make

There's a common fear among people who leave big cities that we're somehow giving up. I definitely felt it.

I worried that moving to a smaller city would mean trading ambition for comfort. My work changed, yes.

I later shifted away from a traditional media job into freelance and consulting work, but I'm making more money now since I'm paid per project rather than being expected to work endless hours for an unchanging salary.

Now, I work smarter, not harder. I live smarter. I've stopped defining myself solely by my ever-climbing corporate media job title, or my precious 917 area code.

Nashville gave me the space to grow in unexpected directions. I have a garden, I volunteer, and I made friends who didn't care about who I worked for. I built a community that is unparalleled in its supportive and radically inclusive nature.

This city isn't perfect, but it's become home. At the time, leaving New York felt like the biggest risk of my life. Today, I think of how scared I was of the best decision I ever made, and laugh.

It's been nearly a decade since I left New York, and although I still visit my "hometown" often and miss it dearly sometimes, I don't regret the move for a second.

Well, maybe I just regret not leaving 10 years earlier.

• NYC's mayoral frontrunner has a plan to overhaul the city's property tax system.
• It involves an analysis of billionaire Ken Griffin's 220 Central Park South apartment.
• Here's what it could mean for NYC homeowners from Staten Island to the Bronx.

When Ken Griffin purchased the most expensive home in America in 2019, it came with a hidden discount.

The palatial four-floor apartment at 220 Central Park South, which cost the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel nearly $240 million, is taxed at about half the rate of the average condo in the city, data shows.

Now, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old self-described socialist who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, wants Griffin — and scores of other wealthy homeowners in the city — to pay more. His plan, if instituted, could upend tax bills from Staten Island to Billionaire's Row in Manhattan.

In a policy memo published by his campaign, Mamdani pointed to Griffin's Central Park South apartment as an example of why he thinks an overhaul of the city's byzantine system is necessary.

Without mentioning Griffin by name, the memo called out the taxes charged for an apartment at 220 Central Park South that cost $228 million, what the memo described as "the most expensive home ever sold in the United States." (News reports at the time of the sale said Griffin bought the apartment for $238 million.)

The memo proposed taxing the apartment, and others like it across the city, closer to their actual sales values versus the complex formulas currently used by the city's Department of Finance, which valued Griffin's apartment at just $15 million on his most recent tax bill. Mamdani's memo said this change would lead to an annual property tax bill on Griffin's Central Park pad of $3 million — more than three times what it currently pays. Other New Yorkers could also see their costs rise — or fall — depending on where they live and the sales value of their homes.

A spokesperson for Griffin declined to comment. Records from the city's Department of Finance show Griffin's Central Park property was charged $841,000 in property taxes for 2025/26.

The $841,000 bill means that Griffin pays 35 cents of taxes per hundred dollars of the apartment's sales value. That's less than half the tax burden paid by condo owners across the city on average, according to a 2021 report by a tax reform commission tapped by the previous NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio. The average condo in the city pays 74 cents of taxes per $100 of sales value, according to the report.

Raising taxes on Brooklyn brownstones

Mamdani said the city's current method, which calculates values for condos and coops by comparing them with rentals, "heavily favors luxury and super-luxury apartments."

He said he would embrace reforms recommended by the 2021 tax commission, which suggested NYC use a "sales-based methodology to value all properties." That methodology, he said, would lower tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica in Queens and Brownsville in Brooklyn "while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones."

Tax experts agreed that the current tax system tends to favor tony neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, and Park Slope. Poorer and working-class communities in the Bronx and Staten Island have historically paid more as a percentage of the sales value of their real estate, they said.

Sebastian Hallum Clarke, a product manager at Google Maps who has studied the city's property tax system in his free time, highlighted that dichotomy in a blog post. Clarke detailed how a 96-unit rental apartment building in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights paid nearly six times as much in annual property taxes as a single-family Upper East Side mansion, even though the city's Department of Finance estimates similar values — $6.6 million versus $5.5 million — for the two.

"Every dollar in cost for a rental gets passed on ultimately to the renters themselves," Clarke said. It's "a broken system that is just completely unfair in terms of how much tax different classes of property are paying."

Part of the disparity is attributable to state-mandated caps that prevent the city from raising the assessed value on one- to three-family homes by more than 6% per year and 20% over five years.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, prioritizes property tax reform in an agenda packed with bold promises, including free bus service, a rent freeze, and affordable housing development. Other mayors have pledged to fix the system only to punt on the complex and politically fraught issue.

"The Dinkins administration did a property tax reform commission," said Martha Stark, a former commissioner of the Department of Finance during Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, noting how long the system has been under scrutiny.

"I just can't imagine that Mamdani would elevate that to the top of his priority list in the first term," said James Parrott, an economist who was on the 2021 tax advisory commission.