Real Estate Fate

With real estate there are no rules. It's like check-in at an Italian airport.
--30 Rock

I'm moving to Indiana in approximately 3 months and I have no idea what I'm doing. I think part of the problem is that I have never rented an apartment before, and have an overly romanticized view of Midwestern boarding houses. I secretly want to live in a Thin Man movie (yeah, I know they are not from Indiana) in the 1930s, with a crotchety old landlady and a raggle taggle yet good-hearted group of boarding housemates. I want to barter for services (I'll trade knitted coasters for fresh eggs or fixed tires). I realize that this kind of thing doesn't really exist any more, if it ever existed at all.

My magical undergrad advisor once pointed out the house where she rented a room when she first started teaching. It was owned by Arthur Dove's brother (yes, really). However, considering the general magicalness of this person, it is very likely that while she ended up sipping sherry with Arthur Dove's brother and hearing stories about Georgia O'Keefe rollerskating through downtown, I would end up with Grant Wood's weird great-niece, or an heir to a BB gun fortune, or a bassoon playing sociopath. I've had really, really good roommates up until now, and I don't want to tempt fate on this. Moreover, my google search for "Victorian house rooms for rent Bloomington" turned up nothing, and the subsequent search for "Victorian house turret rooms for rent Bloomington" was even more in the realm of wishful thinking.

One of the nice things about living in Brooklyn and living in numerous other places (some furnished, some not) in the past few years is that my possessions have become pretty streamlined. Although this does mean that I don't have any pots and pans, but I do have an avocado slicer, corkscrew, and garlic press, which are, after all, the essentials. I have good pillows but no towels. I have many mugs and wine glasses but no cutlery (and no tea pot.) And I don't really have any furniture...

Digressions aside, back to Brooklyn, since that is where I live, after all. I am lucky (lucky lucky lucky LUCKY) that my magnanimous cousin is letting me couch-surf, so I am not paying rent here. New York City real estate, as anyone will tell you, is insane. Just on a lark we looked up apartments in Chelsea a few months ago and it is enough to knock the wind out of a person. If you can afford it, great, and there are deals to be found (rent-controlled, or landlords who aren't up on how much prices have increased) but they are pretty few and far between.

My friend who just moved here has been subletting, which means that you aren't signing a lease, but sometimes filling in for people who are out of town for a few months. Sublets can be a few weeks long, or a few months, it just depends. It's a good way to go about moving to NYC, I think, since you can get a taster of a few different neighborhoods before committing. I've been on a few sublet visits with her and they have been...interesting. Her first sublet was rented from an older Brazilian woman who talked to us for quite awhile, and was super nice. One we visited later claimed to be in downtown Brooklyn, but was definitely not (it was near a lot of subways, to be fair).

Another one, the most hilarious of the visits, was in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is a mix of warehouses and hipster hang-outs. It was a loft apartment (those are the ones that are a large room, very open, with a few almost bunk-like bedrooms. Except they aren't bedrooms, they are just beds up by the ceiling. It would be a tricky place to live, even with really good friends.) This loft was in a warehouse, which looked like a bit like a college dorm + bullet holes, and the door of the apartment we were looking for was bright purple and pink. We knocked, and the girl who opened the door was a hipster poster child. She looked us up and down, and it was immediately apparent that we were not going to be cool enough for her (clearly, the black trenchcoats we were wearing--because it was raining--meant that we were too conservative, or something). So we go in, and it was spectacularly awkward, and both of us were getting the giggles but trying to hide it so we couldn't really look at each other. The hipsters were kind of vague about where their other roommate (who my friend would be replacing) had gone, and when we asked when they would like a decision, they said, "um, by...tomorrow?" so we figured that we were out of the running. We got out in the hall and made it about 3 feet before we cracked up about these women and their art studio and their turtle pond and the zero privacy. My friend ended up getting a nice room in a place about 4 blocks from Prospect Park, which is fabulous. And as there is an Italian Ice stand between her place and the park, well, that is fabulous too.

I wish I knew more about housing markets and how all of this stuff works. How do certain areas get so inflated and gentrified? Here, is it because of closeness to Manhattan, to subways, to other members of your racial group? The worst, the absolute worst, and something I will never get used to, is people who have no home at all. For a few months when I was working the later shift and taking the bus at midnight, I was seeing people asleep on the streets on a near-regular basis. It's not quite as common a scene in Brooklyn as it is in Manhattan, I think, but it certainly occurs. I know it happens in every town, too, but it's just such a high number here. I didn't even think about this until my cousin mentioned it--how do they get counted in the Census? The phrase "falling through the cracks" seems especially apt. And especially sad.