wow

[ratcreature]

Looking at the Worst Room Tumblr just now (a blog that posts photos of horrible rooms and small "apartments" for rent in NYC at outrageous prices) makes me feel so much better about my place.

Also, of course I knew that fictional depictions of supposedly crappy NYC apartments in tv series and such always make them vastly larger than they would be in reality (perhaps because you couldn't actually fit a professional camera larger than an iPhone, the person operating it, and a person being filmed into an actual crappy NYC apartment from the looks of these photos so you'd probably have to stage them and leave one wall out that you don't see or something), but these are just astoundingly awful. Like, many seem to be either windowless closets rented as bedroom for several hundred dollars or some sort of crawlspaces repurposed for sleeping in, that are too low to stand or even sit.

Comments

[domarzione]

I've been following that tumblr since it started (for obvious reasons, it made the rounds early in NYC) and yeah, it boggles me. Even -- especially -- as someone who is less than a year removed from my own apartment hunting in NYC.

The punchlines to that tumblr are many. First and foremost, most of these are incredibly expensive options for substandard accommodations in trendy neighborhoods (which is not to be confused with "good" or "beautiful" neighborhoods or neighborhoods with good shopping or subway access, just trendy, especially some of the hipster loci), which means that they are betting on someone being so desperate to be cool that they'll sacrifice money and dignity to do so. These are not "the best a poor person can do" apartments. These are sucker accommodations.

(There are probably hundreds of similarly horrifying offers in non-trendy neighborhoods, but they'll be for a fraction of the price and they'll be mostly for illegal immigrants. NYC's public housing and welfare is incredibly generous -- you can apply for it the moment you cross the city line, resident or not.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I figured. The hipster neighborhood phenomenon drives the prices in trendy neighborhoods here as well. Not quite to this ridiculous extent, but it's the same underlying mechanism. The annoying thing is when you live in a neighborhood that is encroached by the phenomenon.

Like the neighborhood where I live borders one of the spots that have become more and more popular the last decade and one that isn't very popular for various reasons, in part because a bit further there are several high rise housing projects, that make those areas really unpopular among those who want to live in an building with "character" or such, plus there cuts an autobahn through that neighborhood, there's industry including a waste burning power plant that smells sometimes and it gets airport noise. It also has some really nice aspects, but it's generally not a first pick kind of area.

So my street is sort of inbetween the area that has become more trendy (though still not among the extreme), and that other area that has very little chance of attracting hipsters. So you get ripple effects. Like next to me there used to be all small stores on the ground floors of the buildings, but half of these have been converted to ground floor apartments now. Also they converted one old air raid shelter into an apartment complex. Air raid shelters pose some problems, because they are pretty much useless unless you are carpet bombed but they are quite expensive to tear down, what with having built to withstand so much, especially without damaging nearby buildings, otoh they are hard to convert into attractive living space too, so I guess whether it's worth investing in plots occupied by them is a gauge of how much profit can be made in an area. While I've been living here they actually tore down two of the ones nearby, converted a third (that turned into one odd looking building) but the one directly across from me still hasn't changed into anything.