Our subletting situation was supposed to be simple: we pay rent to Reggie and Reggie pays the mgmt company for our building.
Turns out, Reggie didn’t pay the rent. He’d stretched himself so thin setting up the mansion—and now the mansion was a complete loss with everyone who’d paid him rent money demanding refunds—so Reggie opted not to pay our rent, instead doling it out to other people he owed. It was a bad situation. Bad. We knew NYC apartment laws were on the renter’s side for the most part, with a lot of notification necessary to evict a resident. But we were nervous. Of course, Reggie continually told us everything was fine, fine, fine, but by then, for all the excuses we’d accepted from the guy, we were done. We needed to find something new. A stable solution. Between our individual jobs, it was tough to schedule appointments to see apartments. We needed so much paperwork. Years of tax records. Pay stubs. Bank statements. Like I said, renting in NYC is about as stressful as buying a property anywhere else, and to make matters worse, renting an ideal spot at our price level was dauntingly competitive. Apartments move fast and typically had multiple renters at the ready. I remember viewing another basement spot in Manhattan. It was a good price (for Manhattan) for a studio apartment and the location was unbelievable, right down from Astor Place and on the border of NOHO and East Village. But it was a basement. And you had to walk through a weird boiler room and janitor closets to access the spot. It was like something out of the Oscar winning movie, Parasite. The poor family’s place, not the rich. Remember how crazy that apartment was, looking out to street level by the ceiling window? This spot was like that. I’m not joking. I remember how weird it felt to go through the underbelly of an apartment building, literally underground, and access the apartment between the water heater and boiler tank and thinking, “Is this even legal?” It was. Despite the oddities, there were several interested parties. My real estate guy actually brought two of us to tour and at the end (all 30 seconds of it because you didn’t need longer to see the whole place), the agent kind of dangled as a completion—“Whoever gets their paperwork in first gets the apartment.” I declined. I regret it in a way—because the location was seriously unbelievable—but I just couldn’t imagine living there and being happy for long. We lasted in Reggie’s sublet for about three months, with each passing week discovering an eviction notice on the door. We even tried to sidestep Reggie for one month, sending the rent check directly to the mgmt. Eviction notices continued to appear. Eventually, we signed a lease on an apartment on Roosevelt Island. It was one of the few spots that had onsite management and was more of a traditional apartment set up—without agents and such—which made us feel more at ease. We only lasted the year afterward, about a year and a half in NYC total. With all the setbacks and difficulties we experienced at the front, much of the mystique surrounding NYC dissipated for us like steam off a hot spring.
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