On the hunt

Dave and I have decided to be roommates starting in May, and we spent Wednesday looking at apartments on the upper West Side. The experience, like most of my New York experiences, has been nothing short of enlightening. I've rented apartments before, but this market is like nothing I've ever seen. For one thing, space is at a premium and so people have done some pretty creative (and often unsuccessful, in my opinion) renovations in attempts to improve living space. I've seen closets about 18 inches wide carved out of random wall spaces, entryways between apartments at such an angle that if residents of both places exited their units at the same time they'd have no choice but to do so cheek-to-cheek, and shower-baths with the showerhead on one side of the tub, the drain on the opposite side, and the faucet and control knobs protruding from the wall in the middle. Many landlords don't bother to take unnecessary steps like cleaning sinks or making sure that cabinets have frivolous features like shelves in them; grime, rust, and the structural supports on which residents can rest their own purchased sheets of plywood seem to suffice. It's certainly not a renters' market. I remember going to see Ferran's new place after he'd signed the lease and it was filthy. But unless you're planning to pay top dollar – and in New York top dollar is high enough to give most of my social circle a nosebleed – these are the things you deal with. You spend the money you'd have to pay for a more high-end place on Lysol and paper towels.

The most surprising thing about this whole ordeal has been the speed at which reasonably-priced places move. Realtors will tell you that if you like the place, you need to put in an application within half an hour, and they're not kidding about that. I watched one gorgeous place vanish before my eyes. I made the mistake of looking at apartments one Wednesday, thinking that I could show places I liked to Dave on his day off on Monday. This line of thought is laughable to me now – every apartment I saw and liked was gone within a day or two of my looking at it. In Nashville, I remember considering one unit for about a week before making up my mind, and it waited patiently for me until I did.

The rental system here is coordinated by middlemen. Dave and I submitted an application for a place we liked on Wednesday, and we spent ages sitting in the real estate office while our realtors made call after call to the representative of the landlord of the building, who in turn had to call the landlord once or twice for real answers. I made two separate trips to CitiBank for account information to put on the application, and my father, who is going to be our guarantor (landlords aren't eager to rent to unemployed students and bartenders whose incomes are tip-based and therefore undocumented) had to locate, fill out, scan, and fax an unreasonable number of times. All of this makes things easy for the landlord and horrendously complicated for us. But if we don't take the place, there are other people in line behind us who will, and the landlord knows that we all have to live somewhere.

Despite the cumbersome process, I liked our realtor. He was excited to show us the place we ended up applying for, and the fact that he wasn't prepared with the keys to the unit didn't stop him; borrowing Dave's frequent movie-goer card, he jimmied the locks to both front doors while Dave and I watched openmouthed, and had us in the foyer in three minutes. He was unable, however, to jimmy the lock to the unit itself, and had to jump on his bike to pick up the key from his office. Dave and I waited for him in the lobby of the building and passed the time by talking about how it looked like, if we did get the place, we wouldn’t need seventeen deadbolts for the door after all.

Things I've learned to look for:

-Good light and lots of windows – not as easy to come by as you'd think, since most buildings are so close together that lots of windows doesn't necessarily mean good light. A bright space feels bigger.

-High(ish) ceilings – also make a place feel bigger.

-Wood flooring – I don't even want to know what caused the stains I saw on some carpets, and I certainly don't want to live with them.

-Hallways/stairwells that do not smell like kitty litter.

-Closet space

-Nearby amenities - laundromats, grocery stores, and subway stops

-Safety - I tend not to worry about this aspect (perhaps to my own fault) but Dave, who comes home from work around 5:00 A.M. on the weekends carrying several hundred dollars in cash, does.