Looks like those cheap NYC rents have evaporated and ignited!!
The New York Dream of Cheap Rent and No Roommates? It’s Over.
The city is thriving, but many who scored a deal now face rent-renewal sticker shock. Rents rose 33 percent between January of 2021 and January this year, according to an online listing site.
The hallmarks of feeling like you’ve made it in New York City are often as follows: navigating the subway sans map, a maitre d’ who knows you by name and living alone, at last, in your own apartment. For a window of time during the pandemic, when many fled the city and landlords offered rock-bottom rents to tempt those who stayed, some could finally afford to reach that shining hill of solo living.
But as the city thrives again, many who scored a sweet deal now face rent-renewal sticker shock — rents have risen 33 percent, and a lease renewal asking double is not unheard of. Those renters have been hit with a hard reality check: The halcyon days of blasting music, letting dishes pile up in the sink and walking from the bathroom to the kitchen without a towel are over. For them, New York’s soaring real estate prices mean the only way to stay is to bunk with a roommate once again.
At the start of the pandemic, Chelcie Parry was hunkered down in a damp, two-bedroom, no-living-room apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a roommate, facing pestilence at every turn: outside was the threat of coronavirus, inside was black mold. For the pleasure, each paid $1,000.
Then in January 2021, Ms. Parry came across a studio in Manhattan’s Financial District complete with a doorman. Before the pandemic it had been listed at $2,614 a month, according to the listing website StreetEasy, now the rent was $1,750. After months of lockdowns, social distancing and working from home in her dank apartment, she jumped at the chance to live spore and roommate free.
“It felt like the closest thing that I could have to a hug at the time,” said Ms. Parry, 26. To afford it, she said, she took on another job; she works at a theater nonprofit, and at a media company. The studio felt worth the hustle: She spent her days decorating to her own taste, practicing TikTok dances free from judgmental observers and indulging her 3 a.m. Hot Pocket habit without anyone catching her in the kitchen, she said.
Then her lease renewal arrived in the mail. On April 1, the rent went up to $3,450 — just shy of double.
“It is swanky, and it is not something I pictured that I could ever be able to afford,” Ms. Parry said in March, while packing up her doorman studio. “Which apparently is right — because I could only afford it during a global crisis.”
She is not alone: Since this time last year,
New York City rents have risen 33 percent, nearly double the national average, according to the online listing site Apartment List. In affluent neighborhoods, it’s worse: at the height of the pandemic, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example, the median asking rent fell about 20 percent. Since January 2021 it has charged upward by about 40 percent in both places, according to StreetEasy.
In SoHo the
median rent jumped 58 percent in the fourth quarter — from $3,800 to $6,002 — according to the site.
Behind the extreme hikes in rent is a rental market crunch driven in part by Covid expats flooding back, attracted once again to a revitalized city or recalled by office jobs. The vacancy rate in Manhattan was 1.3 percent in February 2021, down from the record high of 11.8 percent in February 2020, according to Miller Samuel Inc., a residential appraiser.
The surging median rents are merely course correcting, and align with historical trends that were disrupted by the pandemic, according to landlords and their representatives.
Not every landlord is trying to add zeros to every renewal. To keep tenants in place, Weber Realty Management has instituted a policy that caps most renewals at 10 percent across the 250 rental units it represents in Manhattan — enough to keep in line with inflation, but many are still below the prices of comparable apartments available for rent in the neighborhood, said Marc Weber, one of the property managers. The company’s new rentals are at market rate.
“Landlords are trying to pay for their expenses, with inflation going on everything is getting more expensive,” Mr. Weber said. “But if a landlord is doubling the rent, that is greed.”
Priced out of Manhattan’s solitary-living market, Ms. Parry and her boxes headed to a new residence this month, a four-bedroom basement apartment in Harlem, with three other roommates, for which she will pay $890 a month.
“New York City has always been cutthroat about real estate,” said Stephanie Diamond, the founder and C.E.O. of Listings Project, a newsletter featuring vetted real estate classifieds. Ms. Diamond said that in recent months the housing-wanted ads have poured in. The texts of these new ads, she noted, is increasingly pitched in desperation. “It’s never been fair, I don’t think ever, and now it is off the charts.”
After a year or more of living on their own — a pinnacle of achievement in New York — some say the bump back to earth has been painfully personal. “It feels like a setback, it feels like a failure; because we all dream of coming to New York and having the beautiful one bedroom, or the beautiful studio and that’s not something that I’m going to have,” Ms. Parry said. “It is honestly devastating.”
After initially commuting nearly two hours from Washington Heights in Manhattan to the K through 12 school where she teaches in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Valerie Love found a steal close to her classroom in November 2020. For $1,450, she rented a garden-level studio apartment within a townhouse in Clinton Hill, a neighborhood “on my vision board,” she said. The family who owned the house had fled the city for a second home, she said.
As the pandemic dragged on and the family showed no signs of returning, she began not just to settle in, but to revel: Ms. Love bought a velvet couch customized to fit the Clinton Hill apartment and sets of good dishes to one day entertain. (She arrived in 2019 to New York from Atlanta without furniture of her own, filling her shared spaces with IKEA or using roommates’ pieces.)
When the homeowners returned in December 2021, and Ms. Love had to seek new accommodation, she was floored by the jacked up real estate landscape: She was priced out of living alone close by her workplace. In areas where she might afford a place by herself, there was almost no inventory.
She ended up in Midwood, Brooklyn, in an apartment she splits with a roommate, paying $900 for her share. Her custom couch is now stored in a hallway, covered to protect it from the roommate’s cat; the nice dishes remain unpacked in a rolling suitcase. She doesn’t need either, but can’t bear to part with them, Ms. Love said, mementos of a paradise lost.
“I achieved one of the pillars of living in New York: If you can secure housing in New York, this is how you know you are making it in New York,” Ms. Love said. “It made me feel confident that I was accomplished and that I was just going to go up from there.”
She added: “And now I question: Did I regress?”
If it comes down to a choice between leaving New York City or enduring roommates, many still choose cohabiting — even if it means labeling the milk in the refrigerator and duking it out over whose hair clogged the drain,
this time.
For those who choose to stay, the situation is a bit brighter: So far, roommate rents, which fell to their lowest levels in six years during the pandemic, have not risen as steeply as for solo dwellings, according to data compiled by SpareRoom, a roommate and shared housing listings site. The median rent for a person sharing an apartment was $1,199 in February, nearly $100 less than it was before the pandemic began, data shows.
Matt Hutchinson, a spokesman for SpareRoom, doesn’t see it staying that way. “New York is New York,” he said. “It’s one of those suitcase-and-a-dream cities, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”
As Galit Nickin’s friends and neighbors high-tailed it out of the city to shelter with family or in less populous areas in the early days of the pandemic, she decided to stay put. In part, it was because for the first time since she arrived from Mexico City five years ago, the downward-spiraling rents meant she could afford to live without roommates.
A year ago, she moved from a shared three-bedroom in Williamsburg, for which she paid around $1,700, to her very own one bedroom on the Upper East Side — which, after the perk of a month’s free rent as an incentive, cost roughly the same price.
Ms. Nickin, 28, leaned into having her own space, including adopting a large Labrador retriever, something unimaginable in her cohabiting days. Then came her renewal offer in the mail: On April 1 she faced a roughly 30 percent increase that Ms. Nickin, who is a project manager for an architecture firm, says she cannot afford.
She is reeling from more than sticker shock, she said, but also from the sense that landlords are turning their backs on tenants who stuck it out with them when others abandoned a troubled city.
“I decided to stay in New York, I decided to give their apartment and their building a chance, and it feels like they clearly don’t care,” said Ms. Nickin, who was granted an extra month from her landlord since she is struggling to find another place. “When they needed help, I rented it. And now they just want more money.”
Factoring in the costs of moving potentially twice within a year, Ms. Nickin now regrets her decision to jump at a cheap space. “It is coming back to bite us in the back,” she said, “when we actually were here supporting the city.”
Still, she’s trying to hang on to her one-bedroom bliss and is currently negotiating with her landlord. In fact, she has little choice, she said. Few roommate listings she has replied to will allow her dog, Lua, and that is one concession she will not make.
“I had really good roommates and I had really bad roommates,” Ms. Nickin said. “But she is a great roommate.”
