A fifth-floor bedroom with en-suite steam shower is being used as a gym. A large luggage closet on that floor is currently dedicated to golf equipment (the owner ranks among the top golfers on Wall Street). There is also a finished basement that houses mechanical equipment, a laundry room and a walk-in cedar storage closet.

I can’t stop looking at the photos of this $30 million apartment.

In my grand quest for the perfectly affordable apartment, I’ve spent a lot of time on Craigslist. I thought it’d be easy to impress potential roommates by email with a mix of self-deprecating coolness and un-uptight responsibility. But the response rate of people begging me to check out their newly renovated loft apartments was low. I decided to read through my old emails with fresh eyes to discover if I was doing something wrong. I was.

• “It’s a steady job that pays pretty well, but the “freelance” title means they don’t have to provide benefits.”
(Translation: “I will not pay rent on time.”)

• “I like to stay informed, talk my Adorno, Marx, Hegel, etc. I’ve spent time working with NGOs in Latin America promoting sex education and women’s rights. I’m probably a social democrat.”
(In my defense, I was pandering to live in a $450/month “leftist-activist space” in Bedstuy. But yes, this is absolutely obnoxious.)

• “I have good credit and would be happy to sign a lease. Sadly, I don’t floss very regularly. Please don’t hold it against me.”
(Sub-standard hygiene habits! Also: Dental jokes! I don’t understand why they didn’t respond!)

• “I’ve held multiple leases (without getting kicked out or pissing anyone off)”
(The introduction of the pejorative seems unnecessary.)

• “To prove that I’m not a creep/robot…”
(Not inspiring confidence either.)

• “In my free time, I also like to watch television on my computer, sometimes write about said television on my computer, and cook a nice meal before spending time in front of my computer watching television.”
(While a perhaps accurate depiction of what I do half the week, I would not want to get a beer with this person.)

• “I’ve been living in Prospect Park South (with a horrible dearth of good coffee shops) with a couple friends from college who spend all of every weekend in the apartment with friends over, loudly playing music and Settlers of Catan.”
(And did I mention that I have a cape and am a Dungeon Master with no friends?)

• “As proof of my character, I can submit a dreamcatcher I made in Girl Scouts.”
(Nope.)

Jenny An is a writer and fact checker in Brooklyn.

We have all lived in some places. Where have you lived, Laura Yan?

Bushwick Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y., $850/mo.
My first apartment in New York was a sublet room in a townhouse on the intimidating-sounding Bushwick Avenue. It was the summer of 2008, the summer after my delirious freshman year at NYU.

On the afternoon I went to look at the room, my contact didn’t pick up his phone, and none of the roommates were home. It began to rain and I didn’t have my umbrella. I ate tiny burgers at the White Castle across the street and when I tried again later, a boy appeared out of a side door that lead to the backyard. He was a slightly older boy with matted dark hair, a little cute and a lot hip. He didn’t have access to the main house, but offered me shelter in his apartment in the shack in the yard. I sat on the wooden floor in my damp dress and watched him and his friend, a beautiful black Frenchman, paint on a huge canvas, vivid splatters of color and slightly grotesque figures in abstract expressionism. Real artists! I was thrilled.

Eventually I got to see the room in the main house. It was very much a boy’s room, with action movie posters on the wall, a queen sized mattress on the floor, and sparse furnishings. It was overwhelmingly sunny, and like the rest of the house, welcoming. I liked the roommate who took me on the brief tour, Bree, who had a camera-dazzling smile and was bubbly and enthusiastic as her acting career likely demanded her to be. The apartment suggested romances and adventures and everything I had dreamt of. I took the room.

That summer at 15 Bushwick felt like a montage of idyllic, cliché scenes of glittering sunshine, giddy brunches, late night conversations, crushes on foreign roommates, rooftop reveries before a sparkling Manhattan skyline. My roommates all had subtitles: the slender, Texan artist who became my close friend; the outgoing, silly Russian filmmaker; the playboy actor from California with a reputation; the Swiss architect with his cohorts of attractive Francophone friends. It was blissful—my first taste of the quick and easy closeness formed between relative strangers.

Graham Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y., $750/mo.
I found my next apartment off the same stop on the L, a cute house with apple green kitchen walls, modern furniture, and a bedroom with a real bed. In my new room I hung up dresses in sorbet colors and lined up my mary-janes and oxford heels and Ferragamo flats beneath. I laid out my jewelry and Labbit (a very round, football-like stuffed rabbit with a mustache) and arranged my bow headbands and top hat and masks. I haphazardly taped prints of my photography on the wall. My room! I took pictures of every niche and felt impressed with myself.

I thought it was a proper home, though the alpha roommate, Marines, never let me completely feel that it was my own. Marines did not own the apartment, but acted as if she were the landlord. She was a small, quick-lipped Spanish woman, who was a waitress and bartender at a trendy upscale Mexican restaurant nearby. She was in her late-twenties, and lived (and fought often) with her boyfriend. She yelled and her voice traveled, even from their nest downstairs. And sometimes she yelled at me.

This was the fall of sophomore year, and I’d learned more rules of living in the city, but still hadn’t completely lost my thirst for adventure, which led me to try things such as starting a conversation with two “traveler” punk kids at Union Square, and then offering them a place to stay. I was happy to save them from having to sleep on the street, but Marines saw their dirty, rugged backpacks and unwashed hair and was not pleased. Next time you want to have guests over, ask me first, she said. I had my next strike when I had a boy over, and late at night he dashed to the bathroom, naked, which Marines witnessed and thought horrifying. She forbade me to have guests over, ever again. I spent the rest of my days there in nervous calculation of her wrath, playing hide and seek when I did dare to invite anyone home.

I still left a grateful note on the fridge and hugged Marines goodbye when I moved out. We pretended that we had been friends. A few years later, I went to the restaurant where she worked for the first time. I was gleeful and in love with my date, and Marines had a swelled belly and seemed eager to report that she was married—and pregnant, perhaps victories on her version of the ex-roommate success continuum scale.

Between Grand and Montrose, Brooklyn, N.Y., $760/ mo. plus $380 lost security deposit
For one month, I lived with a purportedly 86-year-old man who looked to be in his sixties and bragged to me about the 250 women he’d had sex with. The apartment was a loft in the midst of an industrial-zoned block lined with warehouses and huge, frightening trucks at night. My roommate spoke very slowly and had trouble hearing. He wandered around the apartment in stained white t-shirts and boxer shorts. Every time I heard him laboring to climb the ladder to his lofted bed, I worried that he would fall, and what I would do. He was a photographer, and loved to tell me stories of his past, often of his sexual prowess. Once, he showed me his post on Craigslist, offering to pleasure 18-45 year old women orally, and informed me that he needed extra-large sized condoms for his related activities.

My room had a lofted bed, too, and a long horizontal mirror and a vanity table, with a crimson velvet couch that gave it the feeling of a debauched boudoir. I had convinced myself that all of this was okay because I was desperate for a place to stay and I thought it would make for fabulous writing material. But a few weeks after I moved in, I realized I dreaded that solitary, nervous walk through the desolate street, and the subsequent conversation I’d have to have with my roommate. I started to cry. Soon after, I gave up my deposit and moved.

My Current Place, Brooklyn, N.Y., $675/mo.
My apartment is a simple, bare, renovated basement apartment in Williamsburg, with white walls and doors and cabinets and speckled cold tile floors. In the living room there is a black wood table, and three white chairs, a tall cabinet and a recently rearranged circle of a small couch and a reading chair. A huge La Beauté Est Dans La Rue poster hangs in stark black and white on one wall (my roommate had printed it and put it up our earliest days here.) There’s a small cornflower blue throw pillow with an owl on it (a gift from a friend from home) on the white reading chair. Other than that, there are hardly signs of its inhabitants.

The apartment was heaven to me when I found it: clean, new, and sans awful roommates. My one roommate is a tall, handsome political science grad student, a vegan who spent some time growing his own kombucha in a clear glass jar I had bought as a vase. My other roommate is a reclusive Japanese girl who has built up a large repertoire of grievances against me, manifested through her audible sighs, slamming of doors, and moments when she actually pauses in her vegetable chopping to gather herself before she continues, slicing her food as she imagines my head in its place.

Things come undone often: the hinge off the front door, the shower rod and curtains that came clanging down. Ants crawl on our kitchen counter. I returned home from San Diego once to dead cockroaches scattered in my room. The crack in my ceiling drips water onto the edge of my mattress during fierce rain storms. At some point many, many tiny snails gathered on my windowsill. When my landlord came to clean the mold, he left the room in utter upheaval.

Lately, I try not to spend much time here. I leave for the city, some unexplored borough. I linger in coffee shops and parks and go for very, very long walks. My room, the nest of my bed lit by the suffocated yellow light from my Ikea paper lamps, the alcove of pillows molded to the shape of my back, feels like a trap at times.

I love visiting other people’s homes, seeing the glimpses and signs of their imagined lives. Yet, when I think of the apartment where I’ve lived the longest, where I live now, I wonder about the impression it gives—if any at all.

Laura Yan is a writer, seeking adventures, and maybe a new apartment. She tweets.

Not Adam's house

The following conversation took place on gchat, and has been edited by both parties for punctuation, capitalization, general readability, and intent. Some failed jokes have been taken out (some have been left in).

Logan Sachon: Adam Frucci. You are a 29-year-old person with a mortgage in Brooklyn. What’s that like?

Adam Frucci: It’s great, for the most part! I like being able to do whatever I want to my place. And feel like I’ve made a Grown-Up Investment. It’s only lousy when I need to fix something and pay for it myself, but that doesn’t happen super often.

Logan: What have you had to fix?

Adam: Well, we had some pretty bad leak damage from the hurricane, and some before that as well, but that was all covered by the builders warranty so it ended up being a lot like renting: I waited way too long for some lazy dudes to do a half-assed job fixing it, but I didn’t have to pay anything. But things like scuffed up/scratched flooring I know will be on me to fix down the line when it comes time to sell. And scratched doors and cabinets, that sort of thing. I haven’t really had to pay to fix much myself, but I am just more aware of the general wear and tear of the apartment.

Logan: You don’t make homeownership sound very sexy. “I’m more aware of scuffs.”

Adam: Haha sorry! It’s not that sexy, I don’t think? It’s about as sexy as preparing your taxes well and early.

Logan: Can we talk about how ownership came about for you? What made you think you could own a little piece of New York City?

Adam: Well, I was looking to rent and was looking at places in Prospect Heights, where I had been living and wanted to keep living. And there was a new building that I kept walking past, and I went to an open house kind of on a whim. It was the first time I really did the math and realized that the mortgage payment from buying would actually be a bit less than the places I was looking at, and the apartment would be nicer. This was also when the First-Time Homebuyer’s Tax Credit* was available, which made the whole thing seem more attractive. And as a huge fan/booster of Prospect Heights, I was (and am) a firm believer that it would be a smart place to buy as it was getting nicer by the week. And it has! So it all just kind of fell into place. I was lucky enough to have saved up some money from some overpaying pre-recession freelance blogging gigs and was able to pay the down payment and that was that.

* First-Time Homebuyer’s Tax Credit: This was that thing in 2008 that was passed by Congress to encourage people to borrow money and buy houses and stimulate the economy. Buyers could get up to $8,000 written off against their taxes or, if they didn’t owe, refunded to them, as cash.

Logan: Did you know you were saving for a down payment?

Adam: I mean, my parents were always drilling it into my head that I should save for a down payment at some point, but I assumed I was a few years off. But I do owe them — they basically harassed me until I set up an IRA, which let me put money in every year tax-free and then take it all out with no penalty to buy my first home. So yes, I was saving for a down payment, but I didn’t think it would happen until I was in my 30s.

Logan: So you were always going to be a homeowner. This was always going to happen for you.

Adam: Haha it was my DESTINY. I grew up moving every 5 years; my parents have some weird version of real estate wanderlust where they just love moving, so it’s kind of in my blood, maybe?

Logan: You said it seemed like a better deal to buy than to rent, which I feel is something that people say, but is it actually true?

Adam: I mean, my mortgage payment is less than I would pay in rent for this apartment, to be sure. And then there’s the whole investment thing, even though a good 75% of my mortgage payments go towards interest at this point. But I do know I’ll get a chunk of cash whenever I decide to sell, so in the end I think it’s a way better deal. Provided your home value doesn’t go down, of course, which is certainly not guaranteed. But I felt pretty safe about this neighborhood. NYC feels like a whole different world, real-estate wise, than like, suburban Tempe.

Logan: Oh I thought that was guaranteed in New York, basically?

Adam: Haha, that’s the idea!

Logan: What about maintenance and taxes and utilities and all that? Can we talk numbers here?

Adam: Sure! Since my building was new and has no doorman or anything, my condo fee is pretty low, around $285. And also because it’s new, it’s got a tax abatement so my property taxes are almost nothing. Utilities are about what I paid when I rented, since it’s the same electricity/gas/internet coming in. Older buildings and buildings with lots of amenities have way higher condo fees, which I imagine are tough to justify. I wouldn’t be able to swing a $1,200 maintenance fee on top of mortgage payments.

Logan: Do your friends own things, too?

Adam: I have a few friends that also own, yes. Almost all of them also own in ugly new construction buildings like mine, because those are the cheapest to buy while still being pretty nice. I assume we’d all rather own parlor floors of brownstones, though.

Logan: Do you think less of your friends that are renters?

Adam: No! Of course not! That is crazy.

Logan: Oh.Well you should! We’re lazy and don’t have our shit together! Unlike youuuuu.

Adam: I would go back to renting after I sold this place if it seemed like it made the most sense. I don’t know if I’m an owner for life. But it makes sense for me now, so.

Logan: Have you painted and done DIY stuff? Knocked down any walls?

Adam: All the walls are painted, but otherwise not really. I may put in a tile backsplash over the stove if I can get my dad to help me. Very exciting!

Logan: I could help you with that. I watch a lot of HGTV.

Adam: OK, you bring the sledgehammer, I’ll buy a six-pack.

Logan: Thanks for answering all of my boring questions, Adam Frucci.

Adam: Talking about mortgages like an old fuck.

Logan: Asking about mortgages like an old fuck.

Adam: I guess we’re both boring.

Adam Frucci is the proprietor of Splitsider.

An American male in Brooklyn walks down the street. He receives a phone call from his landlord; he does not pick up. Moments later, as he is listening to the voice message, he grimaces. His companion raises her eyebrows. He continues listening and grimacing, and then he hangs up. The rent checks were all rejected, he says, so I have to go deal with that. They all bounced, that’s crazy, she says. No, he says, rejected because my handwriting is illegible. Oh, she says. There is a beat. They keep walking.

I don’t get it, she says. He explains: I am in charge of writing the checks in my house, because my flatmates and I are idiots and constantly late with our rent. And it’s not because we didn’t have the money, though that sometimes happened, yes, but because we’d just forget, and be weeks late. And then my landlord would come over and wake us up really early to write him checks.

She cuts in: Wait, that’s it? He didn’t threaten to kick you out? No, he likes us, he says. Sometimes he comes over and hangs out. But after he started to come over really early and wake us up, I just decided to take their checkbooks and write all the checks out together. So now I’m in control of two grown men’s checkbooks. But sometimes the bank can’t read my handwriting, so the checks get rejected, and then I have to rewrite them.

And that is how The American Male In Brooklyn pays rent.

Photo Credit: flickr/rufusowliebat

We have all lived in some places. These are the places I have lived. Where have you lived?

Argyle Ave, Los Angeles, Calif., $350/mo.
Graduated college and hopped a plane to L.A., where I shared this two-bedroom sublet with three boys. We all slept on air mattresses on the floor and pretended to write screenplays (well, I pretended — I think they actually did?). I don’t recall ever using the kitchen, and instead subsisted off of $8 protein smoothies that we’d get after midnight runs to the gym (when in Rome, etc.). Lived here three months. Felt like three years. One of the best times of my life.

Stratford Ct, Del Mar, Calif., $900/mo.
Shared a two-bedroom duplex with another Southern-transplant I found on Craigslist in this incredible neighborhood in this really rich little town. Two blocks from the beach, with ocean views. The only reason we could afford to live there (well, and I actually technically couldn’t afford to live there, but I wouldn’t find that out until later!) was because the owner wanted to tear down the place and build something bigger and better, but in this particular community, you couldn’t change anyone’s ocean view AT ALL, so poles and strings had to be put up reflecting the dimensions of the proposed structure, and then everyone had x amount of time to complain, and then things had to be amended, blah blah. So the idea was that we’d live in this duplex and deal with the poles and ropes everywhere and also would only have 30 days notice if/when the plans ever got approved. That was a good year, domestically.

Sydney Place, San Diego, Calif, $850/mo.
Totally cool cabin that I moved into with this couple and the coolest dog ever, who gnawed on potatoes instead of bones. It overlooked a canyon and was totally amazing, except that it had no insulation (at all) and also single paned windows and also, you might not know this, but: it can actually get cold in San Diego. Also, the crawl spaces were home to some kind of small mammal. Moved out on New Years Eve by myself after the couple and the dog followed their hearts to Vermont, and I couldn’t afford rent/convince anyone to move into the Coldest Apartment In The World with me.

Somewhere in South Park, San Diego, Calif., $465/mo.
I crashed in a friend of a friend’s spare bedroom for a few months after moving out of the cabin. I don’t remember much except that I barely unpacked my car and spent most of my time at the bar around the corner, which is pictured, as I cannot remember the address or location of this place, at all.

Laurel Ave, Los Angeles, Calif., $0/mo.
Squatted on a mattress under the dining room table for … several months. Worked temp jobs and didn’t pay rent, because it was all very temporary and I wasn’t really living there. Eventually did pay each boy, like, $100 each, which was insulting in its smallness. Pros: Lived rent-free for many months. Cons: Now indebted to three boys until forever.

SE 35th Ave, Portland, Ore., $275/mo.
Lived here for three months when I first moved to Portland. Sublet a room from a dude who was taking the summer to fight forest fires. It was a gross house, and so I spent most of my time in the park across the way or the bar across the other way. The roommates were a preschool teacher/doula, a hipster handyman, and another person who I never saw or met in three months. This place had the gnarliest kitchen I had ever seen, and have ever seen since.

SE 45th Ave, Portland, Ore., $425/mo.
Lived with three girls I met on Craigslist, at least one of whom I was convinced was stealing my clothes.  Once a week someone made a big pot of miso with kelp, which would set me gagging when I approached the porch, and just as often there were crafting parties during which people would knit ovaries and uteruses and be totally fem twee. But: My room was dope and had a huge closet with a window in it, and for that reason, I stayed for a year. When I left, the Craigslist ad they posted to replace me basically said: “We’ll take anyone who wasn’t our old roommate, as we hated her.”

NE 10th Ave, Portland, Ore., $525/mo.
AKA the dream house. Our apartment was the top two floors of a three-story craftsman duplex with two of my very best friends. It had huge windows, hardwood floors, a working fireplace, a tiny and perfect backyard that felt like a fairy garden, and a balcony in the treetops where we sat all summer. We had dinner parties every week and a guest room that was always full and someone was always cooking dinner and had enough to share and there were fresh flowers always, and it was basically the most perfect year of my life. I moved out to live on my own. Terrible idea.

Alberta Ave, Portland, Ore, $800/mo.
Baby’s first studio. On top of a food co-op, which was convenient but also loud, especially since there was a permanent free pile under my balcony that doubled as a hangout for people who liked to get in arguments at 4 a.m. It was here that I figured out that if you yell at people that you’re trying to sleep, they flip you off, but if you say your baby is trying to sleep, they shut-up. Had exactly one party before I moved, a brunch in which we went downstairs to get extra champagne and orange juice approximately four thousand times and spent approximately five zillion dollars, but it was worth it.

Missouri Ave, Portland, Ore., $500/mo.
Split two-bedroom apartment with bad light but hardwood floors and an immaculate garden kept lovely by the octogenarian landlady. Closest business was feminist sex toy store (awesome); second closest business was gourmet organic local sustainable immaculate ice cream place, with fresh-made cones (more awesome). I got fat.

Somewhere in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, N.Y., $700/mo.
I rent a little room in a little three-bedroom apartment with two roommates that I see sometimes, but mostly not. Totally the worst of all the apartments that I looked at, and yet I decided to live here! Cried the first night because it was so disgusting, but: With help from friends, ripped up carpet, repainted, and now it’s tolerable. Except for the bathroom, which is The Worst, but it’s Newww Yorkkkk. Also: It always smells like curry, as these place tend to do. I’m not putting a picture of my home, because of Personal Safety (and also embarrassment), but instead here is a bar that I like called The Drink.

Did you know that if your apartment burns down/gets ransacked/blows up, your landlord’s insurance only covers his building, and not any of your stuff?! So that’s why you need renters insurance. That and, in case someone dies at your house. Renters insurance covers that, too!

It happened to me:  A few years ago, someone shattered my car window and stole my laptop out from under the pile of jackets that was hiding it so well. When I called my car insurance company to make a claim, I learned the very important fact that car insurance only covers your car, not anything in your car (duh?). However: homeowners or renters insurance would have covered anything in my car, even if the car wasn’t in front of my house, which it wasn’t. I didn’t have homeowners or renters insurance at the time, because no one had told me I needed it (doh). But I got it, and I have it, and of course no one has bothered to steal anything of mine since, thanks.

How to buy: I have a car, so I just added it onto my car insurance policy for something silly like $8 a month, but if you don’t have a car you can totally just call up a company and say: “Yo. This is my address. How much is renters insurance?” It’ll be between $10 and $30 a month, depending on your apartment and your city and how much nice stuff you have and other factors. They’ll ask you some questions. You may or may not know the answers to them. In my experience, you can figure this stuff out on the fly, and it’s all relatively painless, and in a short amount of time, you have insurance.

These are some companies that offer renters insurance: I found them via Google — maybe you can find a few more, if you’re inclined. And don’t leave your laptop in your car. Amateur move.

Allstate
Geico
esurance
Progressive
Travelers