Does That Include the Curtains?
Published: December 24, 2004

For anyone looking for an easy way to measure the distance between the big city and the American heartland, there is the new highest-end price for a New York apartment: $44 million. For good measure, the co-op building requires payment in cash, which gets around the sticky problem of finding a mortgage that jumbo.

Luckily, that seems to have been no impediment for the reported buyer, the media mogul and billionaire Rupert Murdoch. For his money, Mr. Murdoch gets a Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex that has 20 rooms and 8,000 square feet, not counting the terrace overlooking Central Park. (For those with much more modest needs and means, the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan goes for a mere $1 million, without the view.)

For New Yorkers, this sort of news creates a swelling sense of pride and despair. For the rest of the nation, it calls forth a single question: Can you imagine what that kind of money would buy here?

If the daydreamer happened to live in Muncie, Ind., the subject of a study on middle America 75 years ago, the answer is: quite a bit. Mr. Murdoch could have bankrolled the whole city budget for 2005 - $36 million - with enough left over to buy several homes. A big house with a front yard and a backyard can be had in Muncie for under $150,000. And that needn't be paid off up front.