Reading through many of the @humansofny stories inspired me to share my NY story or rather, my moving-to-NY story.
We didn’t last as New Yorkers for very long—almost two years—and now, eight years after we officially vacated the city, I still get anxiety thinking about what we went through. The year was 2010, just after Cam and I married. Four months later, in fact. Since my wife, Cam, was based in NYC for her flight attendant position at the time, she was exhausted with constantly commuting from DFW to NY. She wanted to try living in NYC full time. I was totally on board. I’d lived in NY once, and have a passion for food and wine, and crave new experiences (we both do) so why not? Our main problem was that NY was (and is) one of the most expensive, difficult places to live in the entire country. Not only is it pricey, but renting a place in NYC isn’t like other places. You might as well be buying an apartment with all the paperwork you’re required to have, on top of which you need to hire a real estate agent to see available rental. That becomes even more expensive because there’s usually a safety deposit, first and last month’s rent required UP FRONT, plus all the associated agent fees, which is usually equal to a month’s rent ON TOP of everything else. It’s a lot to handle if you’re already living in the city let alone trying to make the cross country move. Lucky for us, we already had an apartment set up. A fellow flight attendant with Cam (I’ll call him “Reggie”) offered to sublet his apartment in Queens to us. Our sublet was set to begin in September, 2010, so we didn’t renew our current DFW lease, packed up our apartment and set up a moving van. Everything was set up and we were excited. Until we got a call. About a week prior to turning the ignition on our moving truck, Reggie calls and reveals to us, “I’m not ready to move yet. Can’t sublet to you. Sorry.” Needless to say that we were shocked. We had to scramble and didn’t know what to do. All options were on the table: do we stay in TX? Could we rent another apartment in NY within a week? Would we still renew our current lease? Our minds were buzzing with questions. Cam flew out to NYC for work and made appointments for possible apartments between trips. She’d call me on work breaks to describe the possibilities and send links to pics of the apartments. Then, by accident, she ran into Reggie at the airport. He felt terrible about our situation and proposed another solution.
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