You're doing the math on a car you can't park
If you're a homeowner in a brownstone in Brooklyn, a walk-up in Queens, or a prewar co-op on the Upper West Side, you already know the problem before you've picked a make or model. There's no driveway. There's no garage attached to the house. Whatever you buy is going to live on the street, or in a garage you pay for by the month, and that changes almost every decision you'd normally make at a dealership.
People moving here from places with attached two-car garages tend to shop for a car the way they always have, then get surprised later by what street parking and New York winters actually do to a vehicle. The buying decision and the parking reality need to happen at the same time, not one after the other.
Alternate side parking will find every weak spot in the car
Alternate side parking rules mean you're moving the car multiple times a week, often early, often in a hurry, often into a spot that's tighter than it should be. That's a lot of low speed contact: curbs, bumpers, mirrors clipped by delivery trucks. Before you buy, ask the dealer directly what a front bumper, a mirror assembly, and a rear quarter panel cost to repair or replace on that specific model. Some cars are cheap to fix. Others, especially ones with sensors packed into the bumper for parking assist, are shockingly expensive for what looks like minor damage.
This is something you can research yourself before you sign anything. Call a local body shop, not just the dealer, and ask what they see most often on that model and what it runs.
More on this from Buying A Car When You Have No Driveway.
Street parking means real exposure to salt and freeze thaw cycles
New York winters aren't brutally cold most years, but they are wet, salty, and inconsistent. A car parked on the street gets road salt sprayed up into the wheel wells and undercarriage all winter, then sits through repeated freeze thaw cycles that work salt deeper into any seam or scratch. A car with a garage to retreat to overnight sheds a lot of that. A car parked on the street twenty four hours a day does not.
Ask about the manufacturer's rust warranty and whether the model has known corrosion issues in the northeast. Dealers who sell a lot of cars in this region usually know which models hold up and which ones show rust on the rocker panels or rear wheel arches within a few years. If a salesperson can't answer that question, that's worth noting.
No driveway means no easy place to wash or maintain the car yourself
Homeowners with driveways rinse the salt off in their own yard on a Saturday. You can't do that on a New York street, and most alternate side spots don't leave room for a bucket and hose anyway. That means the car depends more on paid car washes and undercarriage rinses through the winter, which people either forget to book or skip because it's one more errand.
When you're at the dealership, ask what maintenance schedule they'd actually recommend for a car kept on the street in this climate, not the generic owner's manual schedule written for someone with covered parking. It's a fair question and a dealer who deals with city customers regularly should have a real answer, not a shrug.