
[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Sullivan, now 27, decided early this year that it was finally time to “give myself the sense of stability you lose when a parent dies so young.” Besides, she said, “I was ready not to live with a roommate.” Louis, her mother died and left her a small inheritance. Sullivan graduated from Washington University in St. The walk to her office at Maude, a sexual wellness company, where she works in marketing, was 20 minutes.Ī year after Ms. She paid $1,250 a month for her half and filled her room with vintage finds. The walls were textured, the bathtub purple. Her last rental was a large two-bedroom in Williamsburg, “a wild unicorn of an apartment above a vape shop,” she said. Giroux-Doehring said.Lily Sullivan spent years bouncing among rentals and roommates, happy to explore different Brooklyn neighborhoods but never quite finding the right place. “It’s a gamble you take with every apartment,” Mr. So they also looked at smaller buildings in the Williamsburg area.īoth had lived in places where they could hear noises the neighbors made - even coughing and sneezing - and they worried about that in badly insulated new construction, where they listened for creaky floors or TVs audible in the hallways.

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“They looked like all the other apartments you see in modern high-rises.”Īll the buildings were offering several months of free rent, which concerned the couple, who were planning to stay longer than a single lease term and thought they wouldn’t be able to afford a big rent hike when they renewed the lease. “Nick described those apartments as cookie-cutter,” Ms. They all had nice kitchens, and the one-bedrooms were usually about 600 square feet. Having lived in a rundown building, he was drawn to the modern high-rises in and around Downtown Brooklyn. Giroux-Doehring, 26, is a product manager at a tech startup and will continue to work remotely. She wanted to be close to a subway, as she was planning at some point to return to her Midtown office, where she works in digital marketing. “Or they always cut out the worst selling factor of the apartment.” Unwilling to rent anything sight unseen, they scheduled in-person showings at promising listings during visits to the city.

So that was enjoyable, but it was also difficult because nothing was rushing us to make a decision. “We started seeing rents going down, and that was exciting,” Ms. They had a budget of around $3,000 a month and hoped for a place with plenty of sunlight and enough space for both to work from home. Email: late summer, the couple decided to find a one-bedroom in Brooklyn. When the pandemic began last spring, they retreated to their family homes - she to Westchester, he to Pennsylvania.

Living there, he learned how much was wrong with it: neighbor noise, excessive heat, stolen packages, occasional roaches and a finicky door lock.

“But after college, when everyone started spreading out, a lot of friends were migrating to Williamsburg.”Įven her boyfriend, Nicholas Giroux-Doehring, whom she had met in a macroeconomics class freshman year, landed in a closet-free two-bedroom in South Williamsburg, paying $2,200 a month. “Brooklyn was not on that list at any point,” she said. In her undergraduate days at New York University, Stacy Sazo spent two years in the dorms, then moved around Lower Manhattan, always with roommates.
