Would you pay one million dollars for a burial plot? You might if you want one in New York City where the competition between growing populations of living and deceased residents is driving up both real-estate and burial costs, reports Bloomberg News.
"At the end of the day, it's like any other piece of real estate," Amy Cunningham, a New York state licensed funeral director, told Bloomberg News. "Prices have conspired to put burials out of the range of most people's budgets."
One thousand New Yorkers die every week and Manhattan is running out of room for them, the report went on the say. A 756 square-foot mausoleum site in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn costs $320,000, and an 1,800 square-foot single home located just across the street sold for $245,000 in 2009. According to real-estate website Zillow, it's worth $1 million today.
That's a lot more that even Mayor Ed Koch paid Trinity Church Cemetery in 2008. The plot he bought for himself just five years before he died at the age of 88, cost just $20,000. That's practically a bargain compared to today's prices.
Koch may be among the last New Yorkers to be buried in Manhattan. Shortly before his death he told The Associated Press, "I don't want to leave Manhattan, even when I'm gone. The thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me."
But there are more than 100 cemeteries to choose from across the river. Cunningham told Bloomberg News that leaving New York can cut the cost by 75 percent. A single rural plot in upstate New York can cost as little as $500, and if you're really looking to save, it can be cheaper to have your ashes scattered at sea or stacked on top of your dead spouse, Bloomberg News said.
As if that weren't expensive enough: The median cost of a funeral in the U.S. has shot up from $700 in 1960 to $7,000 in 2012, the National Funeral Directors Association told Bloomberg News.
Christopher Coutts, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State University in Tallahassee, said the price of funerals, along with shifting cultural and religious attitudes, explains why cremations may become increasingly common.
In 2012, 43 percent of Americans chose to be cremated; in 1960, that number was 4 percent, the association said. In London, 70 percent are cremated, while there is virtually no alternative to cremation in Tokyo.
Architects and urban planners are thinking of new ways to dispose of human remains, Bloomberg News writes. Eco-friendly folks may enjoy Green burials, which do not use embalming or metal caskets and are about $3,000 compared to $10,000 for traditional way, Bloomberg News stated.
But, according to Bloomberg News, Promessa Organic based in Nosund, Sweden claims to be the greatest of them all. The developing procedure calls for freeze-drying bodies in a tank of liquid nitrogen and then pulverize them. But unlike cremation, the process wouldn't release toxins such as mercury into the air.
London passed a law in 2007 to tackle its own burial ground shortage. According to Bloomberg News, it allows authorities to dig up graves that are at least 75 years old to make room for new ones. But that's not the case in New York, where boroughs have been reluctant to use their powers, according to University of York's Cemetery Research.
