Gianna Llewellyn has come a long way since she moved to New York City on her 22nd birthday. It was 2019, and she was a college graduate from Long Island with hopes of becoming a film director or tattoo artist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just looking at any job that would give me some freedom and let me have blue hair,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Her first job, running errands on a horror movie set, came from a Facebook post. That was followed by production gigs on TV shows like \u201cLaw & Order.\u201d She loved the apartment she shared in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with two roommates, but her meager pay and $850 rent left her \u201cworth negative dollars,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
[Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here<\/a> to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n \u201cI was eating Nutella sandwiches for a year,\u201d said Ms. Llewellyn, 28, now a freelance camera assistant.<\/p>\n Her perseverance paid off: By 2023, she had saved $80,000. Curious how she could afford a home in the city, Ms. Llewellyn searched for first-time homebuyer programs online and found a government grant that could provide up to $100,000 toward a down payment for buyers below a certain income threshold.<\/p>\n Poking around Zillow that September, she was matched with Paul Graham, an agent at Platinum Properties. They bonded at their first viewing and spent more than a year scouring apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, starting at around $400,000.<\/p>\n \u201cNow he\u2019s like my family,\u201d Ms. Llewellyn said. \u201cPaul was so honest, and he really cared about what I could afford. He never pushed me for a more expensive place or something I didn\u2019t like.\u201d<\/p>\n She preferred Brooklyn, where all of her friends lived. Manhattan was \u201cvery grown up\u201d and often more expensive, she said, though some listings there fit her budget. Affordability was the key, so she focused on sunny co-ops with low maintenance fees and, ideally, a flexible sublet policy in case she had to travel for long film productions.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it was going to be far from a subway, I wanted it to be big,\u201d she said \u2014 preferably bigger than her 500-square-foot rental, with room for all of her tchotchkes, including chess sets from around the world, several guitars, art supplies and an antique TV that shows only static.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a lot of knickknacks,\u201d she said. \u201dI wanted enough space where I didn\u2019t feel too cluttered.\u201d<\/p>\n Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gianna Llewellyn has come a long way since she moved to New York City on her 22nd birthday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,8966,18696,18697,9,24,56,63,578,6222],"class_list":["post-30555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-cooperatives","tag-crown-heights-brooklyn","tag-hells-kitchen-manhattan","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","tag-williamsburg-brooklyn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}