Property Prices Are Up, Even Underground

Even in death, you can’t escape the property bubble. Every week, about 1,000 New Yorkers die. Manhattan is running out of room for them. Farther out in Brooklyn, plots are going for record prices. London costs are rising, and in Asian megacities, where cremation is the norm, space for urns is in short supply. “At the end of the day, it’s like any other piece of real estate,” says Amy Cunningham, a New York State licensed funeral director. “Prices have conspired to put burials out of the range of most people’s budgets.”

Leaving the five boroughs of New York City can cut the cost by 75 percent, Cunningham says. But not everyone is willing to do that. Former Mayor Ed Koch may be among the last New Yorkers to be buried in Manhattan. He paid Trinity Church Cemetery, overlooking the Hudson River at Broadway and 155th Street, $20,000 in 2008, five years before he died at the age of 88. “I don’t want to leave Manhattan, even when I’m gone,” Koch told the Associated Press at the time. “The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me.”