New York Apartment Hunting

For apartment hunters, hard economic times can be a wonderful thing. Say what you want about Montreal’s depressed economy; its the fact that no one has any money which makes the city such a cheap place to rent an apartment. During my young adulthood, this was something I took for granted. I never reflected that, in the North American scheme of things, there was something unusual about a city where you can live in your own downtown studio for $400. It’s only now that I have finally fled Montreal’s low-rent womb that I have come to appreciate the advantages of living in a third rate real estate market.

I am writing these words from amid the piles of unopened boxes cluttering my new apartment on New York’s East 39^th Street. It’s the sort of nondescript eighth floor 3½ which would rent for about seven hundred dollars in the McGill ghetto. In Manhattan, my roommate and I are considered lucky to pay two and a half thousand - American.

But it gets worse. Before we spent even one night under our expensive new roof, we had to cough up an additional $4,500 broker fee - all cash, all up front, as per industry standard. Until recently, the concept of a broker’s fee was quite alien to my Montreal minsdet. In the rosy world of my North-of-45 youth, the first month was free; pets were allowed; there was no credit check - and the broker fee, if there was one, was paid by the landlord for the privilege of finding you.

And even with the shoebox full of twenties which we emptied onto our broker’s desk, it was still an ordeal. Why? Because as lawyers, my roommate and I were relegated to New York’s lowest applicant caste. We carried the professional mark of Cain in a state whose laws still permit landlords to discriminate openly on the basis of job description. As tenants, attorneys are litigious impediments to landlords’ sleazy efforts to circumvent rent control. Discrimination is the state-sanctioned way for landlords to retaliate. Not only was I getting screwed just like a regular New York apartment-hunting yutz; I was getting discriminatorily screwed.

But better a lawyer than a broker. The New York apartment broker is the lowest form of common hustler. He gets no salary - only commission. If you don’t get an apartment, you can still go live in Hoboken. But, if the broker doesn’t find you an apartment, he doesn’t eat. And even if he does eventually get his commission, he doesn’t get to keep a lot. Much of the loot goes to pay the agency their cut, and to bribe the superintendents for their inside assistance.

So, to make a buck, the brokers spout ridiculous lies to hustle the lowest dives. Every building, the brokers will tell you (if you’re male), teems with lonely actresses and frisky young female NYU sophomores. "This building is very famous," a broker once told me, repeating a scam I had already heard from one of his colleagues. "It is well known that all the stewardesses from all the airlines, they come live here. Lots of casual sex."

I am trying to imagine what the broker might have told me if I were a young female. Probably something like "It is well known that this building is full of well-groomed male doctors who are at that stage of life when a man is tired of games and is ready to commit to a meaningful relationship…if only they could meet a woman who understood them. Also, most of them are [insert ethnic/religious denomination of female client here]."

Finding a New York apartment was a crappy ordeal which I never plan to repeat. Now that I am ensconced, I am staying put until I give up New York’s mean streets and retreat to Montreal’s benign rows of a louer signs. If I do mange to stick it out in New York, I will not budge from East 39^th street until my lease on life itself expires. When that sad day arrives, my name will appear in the New York Times obituaries and, before my body gets cold, some lucky reader will race over to put down a deposit on my newly available quarters. That, my friends, will be the genuinely New York way to go.