Los Angeles had 17 times New York City's number of new residential foreclosures in May, according to a new report from research site PropertyShark. The nation's second-largest city had 5,308 new foreclosures in May, compared with 313 in New York.

The report defined a new foreclosure as a property scheduled for a foreclosure auction during the month.

The L.A. comparison's the good news. And so is the fact that the number of new foreclosures in New York dropped in May for the second consecutive month, falling 4.86 percent from April.

However! Compared with last spring, foreclosures in the city jumped. The May 2008 number represents a nearly 50 percent increase from the number in May 2007. As the chart above shows, there's been a general increase in new foreclosures in 2008, especially in Queens and Staten Island.  read more »

Los Angeles' residential forceclosure rate in April was 13 times that of New York's, according to a new report from PropertyShark (PDF).

Los Angeles recorded 4,540 newly scheduled foreclosure auctions in April, up an astounding 466.8 percent from the number in April 2007. New York City recorded 329 foreclosure auctions in April, up 84.8 percent from April 2007, but down from March of this year. New York's foreclosure rate per household in April was 0.011 percent. L.A.'s was 0.145 percent.  read more »

Mocking Los Angeles is a time-honored pastime for New Yorkers. We cling to the L.A. that Woody Allen imagined in Annie Hall: a culturally barren land of liposuction and libidos, a crass, one-industry town full of phonies. Sure, the weather is better on the West Coast, we tell ourselves as we trudge the city’s sidewalks for the ridiculous procession of slushy weeks from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day. But look at the trade-offs they make in sunny California: traffic, pollution, sub-par museums, second-rate theaters, no seasons.

Lately, the younger generation of Manhattanites seems to be rejecting the L.A. stereotypes perpetuated by their parents. Some plan to settle back in New York after their spells on the West Coast, but others have come to call L.A. home.  read more »

We all know one—that friend or relative who split New York City recently for the common cascade of reasons: high home prices, high rents, high living costs, high noise, high stress, or too much getting high or all of the above.

And when these people exit our five boroughs, they really exit: City Comptroller Bill Thompson’s office analyzed the Census Bureau’s recent American Community Survey and found that about two-thirds of the 190,150 people age 25 to 64 who left in 2005 moved not to the green suburbs to get just a daily break from the city grind, but outside of the metro area altogether.

Nearly a quarter of them split for the South, with 14.9 percent settling in Florida and 5 percent in Georgia, especially Atlanta. (And, no, the Florida settlers weren’t all ancient—far from it: over 90 percent were under 65.) Another 4.4 percent went to California. Only about 36 percent settled in New Jersey or elsewhere in New York state.

About 40 percent left big-city life altogether, opting out of the metro region as well as out of those large cities that traditionally compete with New York. L.A.? It claimed 2.6 percent of our people; Boston, even less at 2 percent. Wheezing Philadelphia (motto: Please Let Us Be Your Sixth Borough! We Got Rid of the Rocky Statue!)—claimed 3 percent; San Francisco and Chicago less than 2 percent. Atlanta led all cities with 4.5 percent. The rest of the percentages were dotted all over American exurbia.

In the end, of course, who went where depends on why. New Yorkers with younger children were more likely than childless people to leave the city, according to the comptroller, and those that left and stayed in the metro region—most of them still work in the city, trading the costs of living here for longer commutes.  read more »

Q. Last year, the Metro section published a one-week series of daily articles (on Sept. 29, Sept. 30, Oct. 1, Oct. 2, and Oct. 3, 2006) about a toilet-related controversy at a chess match in Elista, Russia, in the republic of Kalmykia.

Is Kalmykia considered part of the New York metropolitan area?

-- Max

A. Dear Max: I have always considered Kalmykia to be the city's sixth borough.

While inventory here dropped in the first quarter of 2007, inventory in markets like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., increased. In the quarter ending March 31 in Manhattan, the inventory of unsold homes on the market was down 0.2 percent from the quarter before, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel. (It was also down more than 14 percent from the first quarter of 2006.)

Obviously, last night's Apprentice was taped long before Grazergate. But still, with the commotion over the Times selling out to celebrities for promotional purposes, it was an unhappy coincidence.

For anyone interested: Team Kinetic created the more eye-catching supplement, won the task, and got to see their work in the Sunday Times. They did not guest edit the op-ed pages.