I’ve been seeking a new apartment for the past few weeks. This weekend brought some promising prospects, but I’m not writing about anything I really like until I’m 100 percent on an application. What I’ve discovered is that if there’s one thing guaranteed by apartment hunting, it’s a heady combination of entertainment and crushing frustration.
It seems brokers don’t much care for apartment seekers looking for places in the $1,000/month range, which is a pittance for Manhattan rents, just as much so for brokers’ commissions, which likely explains at least some of their communication failure. I had a devil of a time getting them to even bother returning my calls in a timely fashion, if at all. “But Jason,” you say, grasping my shoulder gently, “You need to follow up with your broker constantly.” No, I don’t. Fuck that. When I give someone who is offering a service a directive to enact that service, I expect him to do it without me having to call him thrice daily. Brokers are those slug-like aquarium creatures that affix themselves to the glass, spending their days sucking algae and shitting. And as the great Steve Newman of Zachary Confections once told me, “You know what brokers are? Ninety percent bullshit, 10 percent commission.”
Instead, I’ve been relying heavily on Craigslist. I still have to deal with brokers or agents, of course, but it’s better for them because they don’t actually have to do anything other than lie to me and still get paid if I take a place.
The most fun game to play on any apartment listing service is, “What information is being left out of the description?” If no mention is made of an elevator, it’s a walkup. If the building is not described as “quiet,” it will be teeming with NYU students on Daddy’s dollar. If a listing looks too good to be true, it either is, or it really is that good, but someone else just took it.
I checked out a grand, 125-year-old building in my current neighborhood, off Columbus Avenue. It was previously a hotel and has marvelously high ceilings, tall doors, hardwood floors and claw-foot cast-iron tubs. The problem was that for the high $1,200 monthly rent, I would have had only a bedroom and shared access to a kitchen and bathroom. The girl who was renting the room told me on the phone she ran her massage therapy business from the apartment, which explained the tight quarters. But when I stopped by the place and asked to see “the rest” of the apartment, I saw she had a room for her massaging, a “sitting room” that was more like a full living room, a room for an office and a bedroom with her own bath. It was a great setup, but if I’d have had to live there, it would have driven me mad that all these great rooms were right there but completely unaccessable to me, particularly for that rape of a rent. On the positive side, she had a quiet and friendly wire-haired Jack Russell Terrier named Jigsaw, whose hobby was chasing in-shell macadamia nuts around the floor. A nice touch, but not enough for me to want to take the place.
Another apartment-hunting greatest-hit was a studio on Sullivan Street, which has got to be one of the quietest streets in the West Villiage, and it’s right by Washington Square Park. Amusingly, right across the street was Peanut Butter & Co., a sandwich shop that slathers its homemade peanut butter on pretty much everything. Sadly, it was not meant to be, as the place was tiny and grubby and, regardless, some NYU student had sprinted off to an ATM so he could put a deposit down on the digs right then and there.
The search continues.