In 2021, we may be able to rent a flat usually beyond our means

Our lease is coming up on 1 April and that means we’re immersing ourselves back into the New York rental market again. Back at the beginning of 2020, when “coronavirus” was a rarely heard term for the common cold and The New York Times Daily podcast was only just putting together its “Could a disease from Wuhan spread round the globe?” episode, E and I signed a contract for a very, very small studio apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn. Despite the fact that it only had half of one window in the entire place, no bathroom ventilation and a fridge that backed on to our bed, we reasoned with each other that we’d be spending so many hours a day outside that it wouldn’t matter.

Just a few weeks later, Covid hit New York with a vengeance. Our move-in day in April suddenly coincided with New York City becoming the epicentre and going into lockdown. Shortages of masks and sanitiser and a temporary ban on moving meant we relied on two cash-in-hand Russian blokes that our friend had met on a freeway once to help us transfer our boxes. We all had scarves tied round our faces in a vain effort to protect ourselves from a virus we knew nothing about.

“It’ll be a bit annoying during the lockdown,” I said to E, as we unpacked, “but absolute worst-case scenario says we’ll be working remotely till September.” Well, we all know how that worked out.

In many ways, this move feels like Groundhog Day. We’re in the midst of having to decide whether to delay our wedding for the second time now (originally planned for September 2020, moved to May 2021, and now potentially shunted along to October.) We’ll probably call up the same Russian men, because they did a good job and probably need the cash. The only thing that’s vastly changed is the market pricing – and boy, has that changed.

At the beginning of 2020, we went to viewings packed elbow-to-elbow with New Yorkers desperate to spend upwards of $2,000 per month on a 300sq-ft room with a small bathroom attached. We put in applications on the spot, forking out for extortionate “application fees” and dealing with estate agents who told us they were only taking people who could move “within the next three days”. We realised pretty quickly that if we didn’t want to live somewhere where people advised us “it’s good to keep a gun, just in case”, we’d have to accept that we couldn’t stretch to a one-bed. Our “nice-to-haves” included a bedroom, a bathtub, space for a sofa, room for our cat’s stand-up scratching post, and confirmation of no recent cockroach infestations; one by one, they all had to be taken off the list. We abandoned our sofa on the side of the road with a “NO BEDBUGS” sign when it became obvious it wouldn’t fit anywhere into the new pad (someone else arrived with their own van and took it off to a new home within a couple of hours.)

These days, all the moneyed kids have moved out of Brooklyn and back into their parents’ Upper East Side apartments in Manhattan. The college students have deferred. The high earners have skipped the city entirely and gone off to their second homes in the Hamptons, Maine, Connecticut or upstate New York. Huge luxury buildings which were planned and partly executed in 2020 now stand empty, with estate agents struggling to fill them. In the past two weeks, we have attended relaxed, socially distanced appointments at large converted warehouses by the waterfront and flats with smart fridges and double-height ceilings where the estate agents have been thoroughly pleasant and followed up by email. In February 2020, I was told I wasn’t allowed to look inside the bathroom of an apartment we were applying to rent; in February 2021, I was personally escorted up to a roof garden “just so you can see how great the Empire State Building looks from here”. What a difference a year makes.

Needless to say, even among the madness of the ongoing semi-lockdown, we’re excited. At least until rents pop back up in 2022, it looks like we’ll be able to spend 2021 in a place that would usually be way beyond our means. Every cloud has a silver lining; and though it may not exactly be worth it, we’re still hoping for a heck of a consolation prize.