NYC24 | The New New Yorkers

All I Want Are Windows and a Stove
By Courtney McLeod

By day Julie Kim works as a paralegal at a Midtown law firm. By night she hits the streets of Manhattan looking at apartments. She’s willing to shell out $1,000 to $1,200 a month for an apartment, but after three weeks of steady searching – and 50 apartment visits – she’s still calling her friend’s couch home.

“I’ve been looking on Craig’s List like it’s my job,” said Kim, who recently moved to the city after graduating from Wellesley College, near Boston.

Photo by Courtney McLeod

Northern Manhattan is one of the last places where people find cheap housing in the borough.

Podcast: Roommate wanted.

BLOG: The Manhattan Apartment Hunter.

Kim’s not alone. For many 20-somethings
who are moving to New York City for their first job or for graduate school – and making less than some apartments go for in a
month – they’re finding that finding an affordable Manhattan apartment can
be as challenging as finding a bargain at a Barneys department store.

Cheap apartments in Manhattan – those that go for less than $1,000 a month – are becoming a rarity. Often the only option is northern Manhattan, meaning Washington Heights, Morningside Heights and Harlem.
In the past year rental prices have risen
6 percent, according to a report from Citi Habitats, the city’s largest realtor. Many realtors attribute the rise to a slackening housing market – more people want to rent these days, not buy.

Beth Nichols, 27, recently came to New York City to find an apartment. She’s moving to
the city this month from Springfield, Mo., to attend graduate school at Columbia University.

Nichols wanted to live in a safe neighborhood on the Upper West Side so that she could walk home from Columbia late at night. More than that, she was looking for a place she could call home.

“I’ve done the whole air-mattress-on-the-floor thing with your clothes in a box,” she said. “You can only do that once.” After looking at a handful of places – which included a dark and dank two-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up with a 45-year-old-man as a roommate – Nichols ended up subletting one room in a four-bedroom on the Upper West Side for the summer with the intention of taking over the lease.

She’ll be paying $875, which is $200 more than the mortgage she pays on her three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Missouri.

An apartment less than $1,000 can be snapped up in mere hours, said Bob Eychner, president of the Manhattan Association of Realtors. Since few cheap apartments come on the market, he said the best way to find a deal is to wait, a luxury that many apartment hunters, particularly those moving to Manhattan for the first time, don’t have.

Katy Lathan, 22, was lucky. She moved to Manhattan from Seattle in the spring to take an internship at Major League Baseball’s online division and lived in her sister’s studio in Brooklyn Heights for two months while she looked for an apartment of her own. Lathan wanted to live in Manhattan, but since she was staying in Brooklyn Heights, she decided to look at a couple of places there. One was a one-bedroom that was $1,000 a month, but a roommate was sleeping on an air mattress in the living room.

“She hadn’t posted that on the message board,” Lathan said. As if that wasn’t enough, Lathan said, “She blew me air kisses on the way out.”

She passed and kept looking. Eventually, she found an apartment on the Upper West side for less than $900 a month, which was her cap. It may be cheap by Manhattan standards, but it’s half of Lathan’s monthly income.

But, it’s worth it, she said. “I moved from the West Coast, and I wanted to get the Manhattan experience.”

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