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Finding A Manhattan Apartment (Or Close To It)

Posted in Travel by Elliott Back on July 10th, 2007.

I’ve been looking for an apartment. Let me tell you my story!

Brooklyn, 4-5th Avenue and 27th street

I met the guy and saw the place, which was a cute, affordable studio in Brooklyn. The neighborhood was primarily hispanic and quite nice. I thought it was mine until he gave it to a girl. So, the first apartment search ends in sex-discrimination against me, whom all of you know is at least as clean as most women. Or, maybe showing up in a sweaty runner’s garb complete with position plaque from my 3.5 mile run counted against me.

Brooklyn, on the 5th train route

I got there early so I scouted a 10 block radius around the dilapidated building, but everyone was staring at me the whole time. It was like I entered a country where a cute, skinny, white boy in a dress shirt and pants was unacceptable. I had thought NY was a homogeneous mix, but actually it really has bubbles of segregation and isolationism pocketing it. Today I ended up in the wrong bubble, where everyone was African American and didn’t like a white face in their part of town. I didn’t want to stand the guy up I arranged to see the apartment with, so I showed up, made friendly smalltalk, expressed concerns about fitting in in their neighborhood (which the building manager couldn’t allay), and then took off. It seemed like a nice place to live, with lots of kids, and fun, and happiness in the air… but just not for one of me, whatever that might be. I got less hostile looks in Shanghai.

Midtown East, with the pushy brokerage company

This was the best so far, a nice studio between 1st and 2nd on 45th Avenue for just $1600 a month. I told the brokerage company that I was willing to put 1 month’s rent as a deposit to take it off the market. Then they went good cop / bad cop on me. The broker who showed me the place encouraged me to do that, and hinted that they could definitely hold it a couple of days, while the head broker said they couldn’t and that if I were to proceed my “$1600 deposit” would be forfeit in the event that I changed my mind.

After listening to a lot of very pushy talk about how fast the market moves, how I’ll never find such a great bargain again, etc, I told them that the opportunity cost was too high not to check out some other places I have arranged to see. Staten Island v.s. Midtown:

Staten Island Midtown
30m to work 25m to work
14% of my gross salary 30% of my gross salary
Free ferry to work $100/mo subway to work
Probably not close to much Close to clubs, etc, party!

If the Staten Island place is in a good location in Staten Island, it’s definitely going to be a much better deal for me than living in Manhattan. I’ll be saving $600-700 a month, after tax money that I can then invest, or put into repayments against my student loans. At $500 a month I would theoretically pay them off in 6.5 years. At $1100 a month, I would be paying them off in just 2.6 years. And I’ll save $5000 of interest payments.

The nice thing about a fast-moving liquid market is that in a week everything is changed, and I can pull out my checkbook and sign a place on the spot, as good a deal as the week before, maybe better. Things aren’t static, which means as much buyer opportunity as there is seller opportunity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 6:14 am and is tagged with good cop bad cop, manhattan apartment, boy in a dress, homogeneous mix, brokerage company, block radius, apartment search, sex discrimination, 45th avenue, train route, search ends, isolationism, midtown east, white face, dress shirt, 5th avenue, smalltalk, garb, dilapidated building, segregation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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