One man’s apartment-hunting journey
There’s a lot of talk in our politics about how rents are unaffordable. We see historically low vacancy rates and record asking rents flash across our screens. But it wasn’t until I had to find a new place to live that the problem literally hit home for me.
When I moved to New York City in 2017 to pursue my PhD, I remember being pleasantly surprised by the cost of rent. I was living on 157th Street in Washington Heights — but my rent wasn’t that different from what I had been paying on the outskirts of Boston. I used to tell my friends back in Boston that New York clearly had a wider distribution of apartment prices, even if the median was higher. Nearly a decade ago, that turned out to be true: My rent was $1,750 per month for a one-bedroom in a pre-war building right off the 157th Street C stop.
I was a bit of a chronic mover at that point in my life, hopping from place to place, upgrading slightly each year as my then-partner’s salary increased. We ended up in a place on 184th Street for $2,000. Then the pandemic hit. My ex got a job in Chelsea, so we decided to move downtown.
It was early 2021, which in retrospect now seems like something of a golden age of apartment hunting in New York City. The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread health and economic disruption, but it also led to a temporary softening of rental demand. It may seem unbelievable now, but according to a report released by the Comptroller, the median asking rent for a one-bedroom in New York City had fallen to just below $2,600. Nearly half of apartments were offering incentives to get people in the door, including free months of rent. We found an apartment in a glorious, historic building called Chelsea Gardens, listed at an almost unbelievable $3,200.
That apartment became my dream home. Every window faced a beautifully kept interior garden. It sat just off the C/E and 1 trains on 23rd Street. The living room was huge, the bedroom equally so. The building was a co-op — meaning it was owned by its residents, with rentals a rarity — and the owner of our unit, based on his emails, seemed like a genuinely good person. When he raised the rent, he did so apologetically. Even then, it was $3,650. Expensive, but still a deal for what and where it was.
Two years in, my partner and I broke up. Over the next three years, I made the apartment my own. It became part of my identity. It was large enough that I was constantly hosting friends. I leaned into the gay history of the neighborhood and the building.
The co-op board president, Gil Neary, was a legendary real estate mogul and longtime resident of Chelsea and Fire Island Pines. His firm’s motto was, “A castle for every queen.” As the broker for the building, he had originally rented us the apartment and was known for hosting fabulous parties. In many ways, he kept an old-school gay way of life alive at a time when much of that part of Chelsea’s culture was slipping away.
He was on vacation in Maine when he tragically lost his life in a car accident in August 2024.
With his death came changes to the building. The new board, from what I was told, was no longer sympathetic to renters. My lease was set to expire in April 2026, and I did not expect a renewal, having already reached the five-year limit an owner is allowed to rent out their unit. Still, I thought there might be an exception. I was liked by my neighbors; one had even written a letter asking the board to let me stay. I was a responsible and respectful tenant who always paid his rent on time, and I felt like I was a member of the community. Moreover, the owner of the apartment, Paolo, who was doing humanitarian work in the Middle East helping refugees from Palestine, wrote a long and, I thought, convincing letter requesting the same. The board denied the request.
I have now re-entered the world of apartment hunting, and the market is bleak. The median asking price for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, according to a study by RentReboot that looked at 300,000 listings over the last year, has increased from its pandemic low of around $2,600 per month in 2021 to over $4,730 in 2026. Of course, Manhattan is far from the only place a New Yorker can live. I was willing to move anywhere, within reason, but asking rents were not meaningfully better elsewhere. The citywide median asking price for a one-bedroom is now approximately $3,785, with Brooklyn at $3,800, and even the Bronx exceeding $3,100. The same apartments in the Heights I lived in when I first moved to the city were now more than a thousand dollars more expensive a month.
To put this in perspective, under the standard 40x rent rule, qualifying for a median on-the-market one-bedroom in New York City now requires an income of roughly $150,000. In Manhattan, the number is closer to $180,000. Studios in many neighborhoods are now exceeding $3,500, yet are so small, they come with mini fridges. I have found it difficult to wrap my head around the number of people earning that level of income who are also willing to live in spaces that feel like college dorms.
One proposed partial answer to the affordability crisis in New York City is the housing lottery, where people can apply for a rare, random shot at income-restricted housing, produced with a city subsidy. (I actually applied for — and “won!” — the housing lottery back in 2024, and went through two grueling rounds of paperwork before learning that all of the units had already been accounted for.) But the irony is that for middle-income earners, it is often not actually affordable. Take a real example from a new building in Manhattan. An “affordable” one-bedroom set aside for those at 130% of area median income is priced at $3,689. For this apartment, the eligible income range for a single person is $130,800 to $147,420. The same 40x rule would lead to an affordable rent range of roughly $3,270 to $3,685.
In other words, even at the top of the eligible income range, the rent as a percentage of income is at or above what most landlords would allow under the standard 40× rule. And even the highest earners of the income bracket would be rent-burdened, with close to half of their take-home income going toward housing. Middle-income New Yorkers are being squeezed from both sides, with little evidence of relief.
My friends keep saying, “just come to Brooklyn, or come to LIC, or Astoria.” And I would happily. I no longer need to stay in Manhattan the way I felt I needed to do when I was at Columbia. But the rental market in these places is not much better. In response, I have started sending them screenshots of StreetEasy maps showing what is actually available. Their usual response is just, “Oh.”
You might wonder who I am to complain. I’m a successful professional who has lived in New York for less than a decade, just one year shy of the informal 10-year benchmark for being considered a “real” New Yorker. But rising rents affect all New Yorkers. As rents increase, middle-income residents are pushed further out, and that pressure does not disappear but instead shifts, accelerating displacement in surrounding neighborhoods. Over time, the city risks becoming a place where the core is accessible primarily to the very wealthy, those supported by intergenerational wealth or buyers treating housing as an investment rather than a place to live.
I am not sure what the near-term solution is. Mamdani has proposed to “freeze the rents,” but that would apply only to approximately 1 million rent-stabilized units, not the market as a whole. Freezing rents for stabilized tenants may even shift some pressure onto the market-rate side. The deeper issue is simpler, and it’s not solved quickly: There are not enough apartments.
If there is any silver lining, it is that people still want to live in New York City. There is a good reason people continue to compete for space here, even at these prices. Not just for the jobs or the density or the convenience, but the energy, the sense that something is always happening, the feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself.
Yet that same demand is what is making it increasingly difficult to stay. Many of the people who give the city its character, its culture and its history are being priced out of it. The version of New York that so many of us love becomes harder to sustain when fewer people can afford to live here for long.
Despite all of the financial pressures related to rent, I am not leaving. There is no place I would rather be. But staying is no longer a passive choice. It requires tradeoffs, compromises, and increasingly, luck. I’m hoping to get lucky again, as I did with my place in Chelsea Gardens, and find another needle-in-the-haystack apartment to call home for years to come. Let me know if you find one.