My New York Apartment-Rental Story
By Judith Rubenstein

I came to New York in January 1996, back to my hometown, the place where I had been born into a low-equity co-op building, lived at home while I went to City College, rented two different $100 a month Upper West Side apartments during my six years out of college. After living upstate for 20 years, I was sharing the $600 Greenwich Village apartment of a man with whom I’d fallen in love.

When the love affair faltered that spring, and I contemplated moving out, my lover laughed, "You can’t find an apartment."

"I have apartment karma," I replied, thinking of my past.

I don’t. What I have now, however, is personal knowledge of the city’s apartment market.

In 1996, I was looking in lower Manhattan. Not knowing my way around, I went to a real-estate broker, told him my whole story. With hindsight, I know I lucked out. At the time, I took this for granted--he liked my middle-aged dependability. Although I was existing on odd jobs, and I told him that I’d be using my credit cards to pay the rent, he convinced the landlord to let me pay four months’ rent in advance for a $1,000 studio on 10th Street between First and Second avenues. It was a new building, not rent stabilized. The tenants were recent ex-college students who rotated regularly. I paid my rent on time, maxing out two credit cards. I was having nightmares about money.

Roommate Search

I looked to be someone’s roommate. I was now working as a housing advocate, and people I knew talked about nothing but housing. I had changed from a mild out-of-towner into an aggressive New Yorker. I remember standing on East Fourth Street, chatting with one of the tenants I worked with, when two sweet 20-somethings stopped and asked us if they knew of any available apartments. John started in, "My girlfriend is looking for a roommate." I interrupted loudly, "Girls, goodbye, I know this man. This is my apartment possibility. Not yours. Go!" They fled. So it was that I heard of everyone’s dream situation--a roommate gone to nurse a sick mother in Massachusetts all but two days a month, when she returned to see John, get her mail, and be seen by the super. Janet charged me $500; I think the total rent was less.

I moved in. I saved money, started lowering the balance on my credit cards. But the landlord was harassing Janet to leave. He sued to evict her, saying that this was not her primary residence. She had medical documentation that she was caring for her mother, but the landlord had other tactics to try. The bathroom ceiling was falling down, leaking water from the apartment above. My cat developed irritable bowel syndrome from chunks of the ceiling falling on his litter box when he was using it, and no one would visit me. So I started looking for other roommate situations. I hustled. I had ads in Loot and the Villager. I talked up my search to everyone I met, and I put ads on the bulletin boards of day-care centers offering to do childcare in return for rent. I paid $90 each to two on-line roommate services, but got nothing. I was limiting my search to a bedroom of my own for $800 or less, on the Lower East Side. They told me that was "too restrictive."

Answering ads in the Village Voice at least got me interviews. One on Fifth Street was a studio divided by beaded curtains into two 6’ square bedrooms and a living-kitchen area. One on Avenue B was shared by a few hundred cockroaches. "I’ll wash my dishes and do my share of cleaning if you push me," promised my potential roommate. At another, it was clear I was being hired as a live-in therapist for my future crazy roommate.

I was getting depressed. I’d reached the point at which when I visited friends or acquaintances in clean, roomy rent-stabilized apartments on the Lower East Side, I’d burst out crying. It was embarrassing. After six months, when the fifth chunk of the ceiling fell on the cat, I grabbed at an ad in the New York Times for an $850 rent-stabilized apartment on 115th Street in East Harlem.

It could be temporary if I didn’t like it, it was accessible by buses and trains, it was large and suffused with light, it was in a renovated building with tenants researched as to their working status and stability, and my friends promised to visit.

What I learned, which, in a Pollyanna-ish mood, can be construed as worth the experience: Mexican immigrants, who dominate the streets of East Harlem right now, are ambitious, hard-working, and helpful, and belie any stereotype of poor and dangerous. Put together with the tales my friends told me of picketing Lower East Side greengrocers to win rights for Mexican immigrant workers, it was a classic picture of poor immigrants starting out. East 116th Street was exactly like pictures of Hester Street in the early 1900s--food, clothing, watches, flowers peddled on the street, no room to walk, babies underfoot, the Sanitation Department not doing its job, with concomitant smells and rodents. Interesting street food that my neighbors loved but didn’t sit well in my stomach.

Harder to describe is my daily experience on the #6 train downtown. My train, full of blacks and Latinos from uptown, then packing in young blonde recent New Yorkers at 86th, 77th, and 68th Street (older whites from that area take buses or taxis to work), was filled with racial tension. I stayed a year. Few people visited me. At this point, I used the fact that my family finally believed I was staying in the city, and was delighted about it, to ask for financial help. They agreed to subsidize my rent on a studio in the Lower East Side.

Going Back Downtown

With no time to find no-fee apartments on my own, I hunted through agencies. I figured I was a desirable tenant. By now I was earning $33,000 and had been working steadily in the same field for three years, I had a perfect rent-paying record with two different landlords and a guarantor with an income of $100,000, I looked like a quiet sedate tenant, and I was willing to pay market rate for a studio. So when several real-estate agents enthusiastically took my application and showed me apartments, I assumed my troubles were over.

I went to see apartment after apartment. I was taken with a one-bedroom on 13th Street between avenues A and B; expensive, but nice, at $1,400 with two closets and light. I submitted all my paperwork and was rejected. Next, I found a smaller one-bedroom on Seventh Street for $1,300. I was rejected again. Three weeks later, I was interested in one on 11th Street, between avenues B and C. I was sure I’d get this one, as there were two vacant apartments of the same layout, at the same price. Again, I was rejected. Each try cost me $100 for a credit check. The realtors were telling me that I was a great candidate, and they didn’t know why the landlord chose someone else. My housing friends were telling me landlords preferred young people who would leave in a year, allowing them to raise the rent 20%. One landlord admitted to the realtor that he preferred someone who could pay the rent himself.

I was at my wit’s end, and my lease was up at 115th Street. I then remembered Mike, the real estate agent who had, against worse odds--i.e., my having no job--found me my first Lower East Side apartment. I went to see. He confirmed my worst fears, that no landlord would take me if they could find someone who didn’t need a guarantor. And I would need one until I earned 40 times the monthly rent, or approximately $56,000 a year. There was no prospect of that for years. But Mike knew my good rent-paying history, and he had good relations with a few landlords. Within four days, he found me a $1,385 studio on Avenue A and Ninth Street. I took it. I was so happy with my living situation that it was hard to worry about two years from now, when I would either need a $56,000 job or for rents to go down. But this fall, my name came up to the top on a list I had been on for four years, for a subsidized moderate-income apartment. My income just made it under the wire; $33,000 is less than 80% of area median income. I will now be paying $627 for a one-bedroom apartment in this neighborhood of my choice. It is mine forever (well, until I am too old to walk up four flights). The circle is complete and conclusive; I do have apartment karma.