Candy bar at the bodega near my house in Brooklyn: $1. Candy bar at the bodega near my office in Midtown Manhattan: $1.25.

1. Midtown shopkeepers pay a shipping service to import candy from Brooklyn at 25 cents an item and graciously charge their patrons at cost.

2. Every 50,000th candy bar sold in Midtown contains a check for $12,500

3. Manhattan is an insidious place that feeds off the easily-gotten money of fools and craven-hearted.

4. A Colombian quarter cartel is smuggling illegal quarters into this country by craftily selling candy bars for slightly more to Midtown workers. 

5. The bodega employees of Midtown are constantly bored and want desperately for someone, anyone, to engage them in a haggle in order to feel a human connection so they artificially raise the price of candy bars to incense consumers.

6. Money is an abstract concept, realized practically in paper and metal form, that hinges on the caprices of distant transactions and assumptions of a high-powered shadowy elite who are not beholden to logic or oversight so prices for candy, or anything else, are completely meaningless and arbitrary.

7. The wily “Quarters Boys” teenagers Robby and Bobby are up to one of their old tricks by putting fake $1.25 price tags on Midtown candy to make sure there will always be extra quarters afoot. Quarter BOYS!!

8. Everyone who works in Midtown has been appeased by a candy bar subsidy program that rebates consumers $0.25 every candy purchase and no one has told me about how to join it.

9. Slightly more expensive candy has been presented to me as a philosophical inquiry entreating me to reconsider the concepts of desire and commerce, and what has caused me to continually arrive at their nexus.

Matt Powers lives in Brooklyn.

Where have you lived, Liz Goodfellow?

Catherine St., Saratoga Springs, NY, $200/mo. (my quarter), May-August 2005
After four years in dorms, I rented my first apartment with friends the summer after college. We were so naïve we didn’t pay our first month’s rent—we assumed the landlord would stop by to get it. One roommate didn’t have a job and spent her days making us homemade gluten-free pasta that we ate on a card table.

“South Slope,” Brooklyn, NY, $625/mo. (my half), August 2005-April 2006
In my first cohabitation experience, we rented a dark basement apartment from a couple with a newborn daughter and a giant dog named “Hemi.” Hemi liked to stare in the bedroom window at us after shitting on the lawn that we were forbidden to use. Upstairs, they had terrible screaming matches and put the house up for sale. One morning I woke up oddly damp and thought one of us had peed. The ceiling had collapsed and we were blanketed with wet plaster. After two of the landlords’ carpenter friends failed to fix the problem, the ceiling fell two more times. Then they let us break our lease.
 

Fourth Ave and Union St, Brooklyn, NY, $850/mo. (my half), April 2006-April 2007
We moved to another first floor apartment in “real” Park Slope so close to the R train that I never bought a winter coat—I commuted to work in Midtown like a hamster in one of those cages with tubes. Every room and closet in the railroad-style apartment had doors—an incredible surplus of doors for an apartment so tiny. I wish when we fought that I had slammed them more, slammed them all. There was a yard, but it was scary. My parents, who visited once from Vermont and clutched their belongings tightly at all times, admitted later that the apartment made them sad. Out of desperation for love and pets, I bought two tiny turtles in Chinatown.  

Maujer St near Lorimer, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, $900/mo. (my half), April 2007-July 2008
I adopted a sweet, one-eyed cat from the shelter a few weeks before we moved. After a terrible standoff that he probably still hates me for, I chucked the cat carrier and swaddled him in a towel as we drove up the BQE to Williamsburg. The apartment was brand new and had a dishwasher and a tiny balcony. No one else in the building seemed to have a job. We drank too much and rarely washed the dishes. Orthodox men with baseball bats fought with gas station attendants below our windows, which I watched nervously as the cat chattered at pigeons. The turtles died. Inside the apartment, we fought, applied to different grad schools, and pretended we wouldn’t break up when we moved to opposite parts of the country. 

Monroe Ave, Rochester, NY, $640/mo., August 2008-August 2009

I lived alone in a giant one bedroom in a building that reminded everyone of The Shining, but I didn’t care because Rust Belt rent is cheap and generous. The building manager fed my cat when I fled town, and she left long notes about the feminist theory on my bookshelves. Once, she refused my $5 tip and said I should buy my cat better toys with the money. 
 

Crittenden Blvd., Rochester, NY, $385/mo. (my third), August 2009-May 2010

I shared a moldy house near the university’s hospital with a grad school friend and a girl we met on Craigslist. Abortion protesters stood on our lawn sometimes, and med students, ghostly in their pale scrubs, cut through our lawn before dawn. The landlord, who had fled the Holocaust for South America as a child, spoke Spanish, Yiddish, and very little English. I still have a sense that I should’ve gotten to know her, learned about her amazing life, and become a better person for it, but instead I resented her nosy phone calls about the progress of “my studies.” She made me pay to repair her lawn mower and once held my hand in the oven to show where it was dirty (the oven was off, but really). 
 

19th Ward, Rochester, NY, $425/mo. (my half), May 2010-July 2010

I moved into half a duplex with a kind boyfriend who gave me an inexplicable rage. I decorated, planted a garden, and moved out when I realized the relationship was making me cruel.
   
 

Park Ave, Rochester, NY, $675/mo., July 2010-April 2012
The Park Ave neighborhood, for the uninitiated, is where men with slick hair drive flashy cars to overpriced sushi restaurants, and Solo cups litter the lawns on Sunday mornings. The real estate agent, whose grown-out chest wax looked itchy, made me feel unsafe but offered the only apartment I could find in a hurry. My upstairs neighbor had severe mental problems and whispered “I can hear you and I hate it” through my door before snarling like an animal. The landlord made me find new tenants AND give up my security deposit. I realized it didn’t matter as I stood in his faux-Grecian office behind a Chinese restaurant. His dog never barked or took its eyes off me.
  

South Ave, Rochester, NY, $375/mo. (my half), summer of 2012
I moved in with my now-fiance in the funky/bourgie neighborhood called the Southwedge. We got a kitten from the shelter who turned out to be part Siamese. He yowled sadistically whenever we slept until the neighbors yowled at us and we moved.
 
 
 

Mt. Hope, Rochester, NY, $1200/mo. (together), April 2012-present
We like this house so much we’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to buy it from the landlord. One cat warms his old bones by the fireplace while the other watches chickadees swoop to the birdfeeder. I planted crocus bulbs last fall and am waiting for them to pop up. We have pre-approval from the bank to buy a house but the landlord needs to know if we’ll renew the lease ASAP. We’re busy planning our wedding and mortgages are complicated. One more year can’t hurt.
 

Liz Goodfellow lives in Rochester, N.Y.

Town House Student Residence, King’s University College, London, Ont. (Room and Board)
After watching a lot of Felicity, I struck out on my own in my first year of college. Almost all of my high school girl friends attended the same university, but I choose not to be roommates with any of them. I wanted to find myself by meeting new people. I wanted to place a single red apple inside of an empty mini-fridge my parents paid for and call it growth.

I met my roommate Ellen on move-in day. We were a perfect match according to our student info sheets: same extracurricular activities, part-time job, and hobbies. Except that she was a corn-fed blond girl from a small, certainly blindingly white town outside of a small town in Ontario. I was first generation Canadian, raised by West Indian immigrants in a diverse middle class suburb of Toronto. I am sure that I was the first black person she had ever known in real life.

She and her parents were polite to me and my family as we unloaded our respective family vehicles and said our goodbyes. When the dust had settled, Ellen sat facing me on the edge of her bed and said, “You know, we really have nothing in common.” It was news to me.

Things did not get better from there. I spent a lot of time with my old friends at London dive bar called the Rideout. Eventually, I switched rooms. I transferred to main campus the next year.

Ave. des Pins, Graduate Student Residence, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec., (Room)
An almost blissful experiment in communal living that ended when it should have ended and not a moment sooner. What my undergraduate residence should have been. We had house dinners. We threw debauched parties inside the sprawling Victorian-era house and on the balcony. I made out with someone in the sunroom. I set up a couple of friends and housemates. There was an endless stream of guests and visitors. One night, I came home to find one of my 13 housemates masturbating to a soap opera on the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. In the summer, another housemate brought a mattress she found in an alleyway into the house so that her visiting sister would have some place to sleep. A bed bug infestation ensued. Our commune was dispersed.

Ave. du Parc., Mile End, Montreal, QC., $400/month incl. utilities
I inherited the lease from a grad school colleague. It was the most perfect studio apartment I have ever lived in in my most favorite neighborhood in the world. Tinted light streaming in through the pale purple Japanese paper blinds I placed on bay window would wake me up in the morning. The five or six pieces of furniture I owned fit the room handsomely. I met friends frequently for coffee and brunch. I bought used books from a chain-smoking neighbor who turned the living room of his first floor apartment into a used bookstore. On the way home after a late nights, I bought fresh hot bagels straight from the oven. Within walking distance I had everything I needed to nourish my soul post-grad school, except employment. I signed the lease over to a friend.

Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul, South Korea, $0 (included in employment contract)
After much prevaricating, I left Montreal to teach English in South Korea. When I landed in Seoul, someone from the hagwon I was hired at picked me up from the airport. I was jet lagged. As we made our way to the apartment, I kept wondering why we were driving down so many little alleys and one-way streets. We weren’t. They were regular Seoul side streets. My top floor studio apartment had ondol-heating and was relatively quiet. Almost all of the foreign teachers I worked with lived in the same building or on the same block. Our neighborhood was home to an extraordinary number of stray cats. I had very little coffee and very few brunch dates. I did have a jjimjilbang (bathhouse) across the street, which I frequented.

Ocean Avenue, Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY., $550/month plus utilities
In the winter of my first year in New York, I moved into the living room of a one-bedroom apartment leased by one of my colleagues. She needed help with the rent since her girlfriend had moved back South to look after her family. The building always smelled like pot and urine. I bought a set of curtains from Target to mark off my “room”. She frequently made excuses to talk to me through the curtains and insisted on eating at the dining room table, which functioned as my desk. When I came home she would grill me about my whereabouts. Four weeks after I moved in, she told me that her girlfriend and her two cats were moving back in, not that I needed to move, or anything. I left in a fury of righteous indignation.

Dorchester Rd., Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, NY., $750/month incl. utilities
Another sprawling Victorian housed by a group of eccentric strivers. I lived on the top floor. My landlord David was an aging hippie with reality TV dreams who ran a small business. He lived in the house and rented several rooms. David had a men’s empowerment group that occasionally met around a fire pit in the backyard. He had dinner parties and family parties and work parties all the time. When I would come home to one of these parties, strangers would often look at me like, what the fuck are you doing here? David was paranoid about a lot of things and had a quick temper. He yelled at me, in front of my boyfriend once, because I let some friends stay over. He sent out nasty emails to everyone in the house about handing their rent checks in on time even though people always did because he was scary like a pirate. He threw out people’s shoes. He left skid-marked underwear on the stairs and in the laundry room. He claimed cockroaches were normal in old houses. He kept claiming that he would hire someone to clean but never did. He and his girlfriend would have loud vigorous sex on Saturday afternoons, the sounds of which would reverberate around the house. He lied about dyeing his hair. He threatened to evict one of my housemates while he was unemployed due to an obviously painful temporary disability. He got angry when I told him that I would leave instead. I left anyways.

Canarsie, Brooklyn, NY., $500/month incl. utilities (split with my boyfriend)
I currently reside in the uncoolest part of Brooklyn. It is at the end of the L-train. Past Williamsburg. Past Greenpoint. Past Bushwick. Past Brownsville. I live here with my boyfriend Noam in the top floor apartment of a building owned by his grandpa. It is my first time living with a boyfriend. It is my first time living in New York without a roommate. Noam has lived here for most of his life. Technically, there are three bedrooms. The apartment is cluttered with things owned by his grandparents that no one can agree to put in storage. On the weekends, we reorganize and reshuffle to make room for ourselves. In December, we decorated the faux mantelpiece with an old menorah and a Christmas tree-shaped rosemary plant from Whole Foods. We make brunch and coffee for each other. His aunt lives beneath us and comes upstairs to use the freezer from time to time. It takes us forever to get anywhere by public transportation. We are saving up to move to a more central part of Brooklyn. Sometime soon, I hope.

Yvonne Paul studies literature, teaches the youths and occasionally writes for publications of varying levels of prestige, including eHow. She is living her truth.

Not long ago, I accepted an invitation out for drinks with a guy I’d recently been introduced to via a mutual friend. He was unfamiliar with Brooklyn, so I suggested a spot midway between our two starting points.

One round in, having made a move for the second, he took out his wallet, apparently to show me what he was packing. It clearly wasn’t enough to cover his portion of our modest happy hour tab, and I hadn’t even seen the bill. To add to his own insult, he couldn’t use a card, because as he proceeded to tell me, “it’s been giving me trouble lately.”

I did what any self-respecting, jaded single would do: guzzled my full pint of beautiful brown Stout, smacked down a twenty and a tip and gestured toward the door, mumbling some nonsense about it being nice chatting with him. As I turned, I heard him say those three words every girl hopes to hear while sprinting toward her exit: “What, no kiss?”

In my grandma’s days, it would have been easy to spot the freewheeling, free-riding kind. She employed a two-point checklist on the matter: A Good Man need only present himself with a well-tailored suit, and a college degree. In her repression-era days, both signified dollar signs. But these are modern days. And this is Brooklyn! This is a modern place where modern people spend money on looking poorer than they actually are. Less repression, more recession means that Grandma’s two-point checklist is no longer a barometer for approximating wealth.

Brooklyn’s blurred status symbols have some definite perks—everyone looks broke! We’re all so cute in cutoffs! But as my grandma would surely want me to point out, it makes it damn near impossible to find a suitable companion for Friday night dinner. (By suitable, I mean someone who’s not trying to get into my pants and take them with him the next morning. If you don’t believe me, ask Google. It happens.)

Unlike the comfy ‘burbs or some other magical universe where unicorn meat is sustainable and cheap, the broke-ass dude is a fixture in a city like New York, where the pinch of our pockets serves as a common denominator, rallying cry, and subject of so many trendy New York Times think-pieces. You’ve heard the one about the guy who “forgets” his wallet or can’t pay his way due to a vague strain of “bad luck.” Then there’s the guy who never invites you back to his place, not because he’s polite or housing an embarrassingly large ant farm, but because he literally doesn’t have a home to bring you back to. Neither, apparently, does he have access to towels or Oreo’s because that is exactly what turns up missing from your place after he disappears.

Guys like this survive—better even, they succeed—at dating for lots of reasons. And I hate to say it, but I’m one of them. Probably not the only one either. Like some weird seven-eyed spider, these guys have proudly spun their haplessness into shamelessness; because even as an explicitly broke jerk, they’ve still managed to get a date. And by date, of course I mean sex.

Remember TLC’s “No Scrubs?” The late-90s pop song-cum-PSA which immortalized the type and provided tags for identifying one? In case you don’t, here’s a reminder: a scrub is someone who hangs out of his best friend’s ride, lives with his momma, and most importantly, “can’t get no love from me.” No love! So I ask: What happened to this zero-tolerance policy? Instead of left-eying Mr. Scrub, many women seem to have grown extra sympathetic to his plight. Because, crappy as it is, it’s a lot like our own.

I’m not here to explain broke-ass dude, or to tell him to get his act together. That’d be boring and reeking of something old and jaundiced. Plus, like I said, I’m not doing that much better. No, this one goes out to the women; the ones who go out with him. And not just once or twice. But three or four times. For an entire season of Walking Dead. For the time it takes you to read Infinite Jest in tandem. The women who cover his tabs and excuse him never being able to cover his own. The women who, in whatever way, contribute to his romantic success with other women. While it doesn’t make you responsible for his behavior, it’s not helping either. Like it or not.

For the record, I don’t like it. I’ve never been a fan of The Rules (just acknowledging “The Rules” makes me feel like an asshole named NEEDS-A-MAN-TO-MARRY-MARY). I have to admit that this broke bit works for a reason, and it’s not because women like me are too lazy to find a registered 501(c)3 to throw money at. It’s charming. Romantic, even. What youngish single woman with semi-creative sensibilities doesn’t get a tiny boner at the idea of a starving artist, even if they’d never admit it in front of a panel of peers? These guys are nothing if not intriguing. Because, let’s face it, before they met you, they’d had no idea where they’d be sleeping tonight. All I’m saying is that we need to get a little more honest with ourselves. A 30-something drifter with vague employment history and an Olympian ability to volley the tab on a date does not equal material for your future memoirs, just like it doesn’t ensure transnormative sex, or a glimpse into the psyche of Jackson Pollack the Second. It’s something else. Maybe no less interesting. But something else.

If by this point, you’re thinking your grandma has hacked this piece, it’s because I now believe in what my own grandma had (somewhat subversively) tried to tell me. Below all that smart style, there must be substance. And that doesn’t make me a Stepford shrew or a gold-digger. I’m just barely holding out for bronze.

So many of us are a bit addled by our penniless pathos right now. We’re got broken lights or no furniture to sit on, a bill or two that’s a day closer to being overdue. Most of us have better things to spend our petty cash on besides bitter cocktails with someone we’re not even sure we like. But that’s okay, as long as the burden of being cheap can be shared. Your broke act might be cute, but it’s not special, it’s not compensation for the two beers you just ordered, and it’s definitely not the way to get your damn kiss.

Karina Briski lives in Brooklyn. Photo: apol3

Grand St., Lower East Side, 2006-2008, NY, FREE

I moved to New York the August after I graduated to live with a family in this big brick building on Grand St. and Columbia (Avenue D). I took care of their kid and flailed my way through coexisting with them as I learned to be an adult. I slept on a futon, threw up in designer trash cans, smoked through the window after everyone went to bed, and always got into trouble (yes, trouble) for my messy room. Food was free, but not without commentary (“Who ate all the peanut butter?”); I got a MetroCard each month, but not without reminding someone about it. At this point in my life, I was not very good at asserting my own needs or knowing when shit was not right, as I was too busy being devastated by New York, adulthood, how hard life seemed, how unhappy everyone around me was, how naive and clueless I was, etc. It turned out that men lied (“But he said he really liked me?”), everyone was a writer, I wasn’t special, and no one was happy. I didn’t know! How did I not know?

The apartment was huge, beautiful, and, best of all, free. I had a big window and a view of the Williamsburg Bridge. Stephen Malkmus was rumored to live there. Some scenes from Eternal Sunshine were shot in our building. I was the Help. The help with a college degree, peroxide blonde hair, and a newly-cultivated addiction to Menthol Lights. I felt adrift and un-at-home, reading their Houellebecq books, and ruining my too-fragile psyche. I left the house whenever I could, and walked through the courtyard gate each time charged with possibility in my Forever 21 dress. I felt very lucky to be young, a strange and sad thing to be aware of and console yourself with, because I knew that while I was not where I wanted to be (like everyone I met, it seemed), I also knew I had time to figure it out. I could leave all of this behind one day, whenever I wanted (if I could only get up the guts to look them in the eye and tell them so).

Diamond St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2008-2009, $750/mo

The last six months or so of my nanny stint, I read The Power of Now (not a joke/wish it was), watched a lot of Oprah, kicked my Diet Coke habit, and worked as what we now call a “virtual assistant” while the kid was at school. I probably saved no more than $1,000 before I was accused of Not Caring about my nanny job anymore (true), and moved out to Greenpoint.

$750 seemed like a good deal (still does), so without much thought, I moved in with a friend-of-a-friend. The apartment was lovely and Polish, a good size and on the first floor, but my new roommate left notes like, “NOT CLEAN” on pans, told me I was turning the burners on too high, accused me of drinking her tea, told me I needed to put down the toilet seat cover after I peed, and just generally hated me overall. As I did her. To be fair, I probably didn’t know how high to turn the burners. I didn’t own anything. I didn’t know how to clean, per se. But I was very charming! And patient with her when she would drink too much, and cry to me about how alone she felt. I felt alone, too, but it was (mostly) exhilarating. My babysitting jobs were drying up, and I was broke in a way that is unfathomable now, but I was so proud to be truly supporting myself for the first time, and so jazzed about my turquoise accent wall, and these motivational prints I bought off Etsy. I spent most of my time in that very small, very cold room, writing about my feelings on my blog.

Fort Greene sublet, Brooklyn, early 2010, $900/mo

I got a job working at the platform of said blog, and took a sublet/escape route on an idyllic Fort Greene block, in a fucking brownstone that looked like it belonged on Sesame Street. Once again, I was in a home that was not my own, but this time with a good friend who was laid-back and compassionate and only silently judged me when I ate microwaved Amy’s everything. I cobbled together something resembling self-regard, and something resembling a career, and the light streamed in on the Persian rug every morning. The only way to describe the wonder of this apartment is that it’s the kind of place where when you go there for a party you leave it wondering why the fuck YOU don’t deserve a place like that. Granted, I did not even have a ROOM—just a bed in a big common area that my roommate had to walk through to get to her own (tiny) (enviable) bedroom. Luckily, I never got laid and we got along swimmingly. But four months later, the dashing furniture designer came home from his summer peddling designer furniture on the Hamptons and I was out on my ass.

Nota Bene: I still think about that apartment and still feel like it is destined to be MINE, but probably everyone who has been there feels that way. Oh, I am worse off for ever having seen it.
:(

Manhattan Ave, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2010-2011, $1300/mo.

I had just gotten a raise and was riding high on my newfound ability to take cabs and start paying old medical bills, so I thought maybe it was time to take things to the next level, real estate-wise, and live on my own. After bouts of cat-sitting and couch-crashing and general panic, the landlord-of-a-friend showed me a studio-ish place (there wasn’t a bedroom so much as a bed nook) and then told me my credit was very bad. Ah, it had all counted after all! How humiliating.

My mom signed off as my guarantor, and I swore up and down to her that I’d start paying my student loans. I remember feeling dread about not having any furniture, or silverware, or pots, or pans, or anyone to help me assemble my Ikea bed (I never assembled it, ever). But it was all mine, and I spent long afternoons deciding where to hang all of my motivational Etsy prints. There was exposed brick, a mirrored closet I worked hard to never make eye contact with, and even a fireplace (non-working), that I filled up with books (no bookshelves to speak of).

I fell in love, bought kitchen supplies, learned to cook, had people over for dinner every Sunday (this strikes me as insane now, must have been all of the new love hormones), got a student loan deferral, got a kitchen table (yellow), and also got ants. Whoops! The place was tiny and on the top floor and all the way at the very end of Manhattan Avenue, but I was very proud of it, and affectionate towards it, and sad to leave when I did. What I do not miss, though, is that fucking closet mirror. Why do people do that?

“East Williamsburg,” Brooklyn, 2011-now, $700/month

Last July, after a month of couch-hopping and cat-sitting (notice a theme? Planning ahead is not a strong suit), and an old lady refusing to leave the apartment we rented (again, a Billfold story for another day), we moved into this railroad-y yet adorable apartment. Donna at Proper Real Estate, if you’re out there checking your Google alert, thank you for saving our lives.

Our only rule when looking for apartments together was that the bedroom had to have a door (moods: we have them!). Nope. No doors. No sink in the bathroom. First floor, facing the street. Not in Greenpoint, but in this tenuous area right off the BQE that is neither Williamsburg or Bushwick. Concrete jungle (where dreams are made of). But: a tin ceiling in the kitchen! A fold-out ironing board by the only sink in the apartment! Little cut-out shelves between rooms, so that the sun just barely shines through! It’s …”cute.” We have a Cute Apartment. Which apparently is all that matters when I am trying to envision building a life with someone: Will it look good on Instagram?

(In a cruel twist of fate, our apartment is so hilariously narrow you can’t even get far enough away from any one wall to take a photo of it head on.)

We renewed our lease in July and felt a little depressed about staying put, but promised each other we’d start plotting our eventual escape. When the building changed hands, our rent was raised $50 a month, so we took the opportunity to haggle access to the neglected backyard. Now we have a vegetable garden, big sunflowers, and more pears and figs from the fruit trees than we can give away. And probably a resultant case of lead poisoning. Hooray!

We feel pretty lucky to live in this adorable little shithole. I tell myself that one day I won’t have to brush my teeth over the bathtub. And I am excited to keep cobbling together a life.

Meaghan O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of meaghano.com.

Education seems really important to you.
I feel like I should talk about public education all the time, but maybe you can’t do enough. I just think that it goes across the board—housing, education, health care. You got to have affordable housing. They got to make the public schools better. This goes across all races—this is not a black and white thing. New York City cannot just be rich. It will lose its entire flavor if it is.

Back in the day, if you were broke, you could still get by in New York. There are always going to be rich people, but you used to have more diversity. And this is something that is happening in this country: the haves and the have-nots. That is not a good situation, when the have-nots see what the haves have and the haves are not giving it up.

Wasn’t that divide always here?
It is more pronounced now than ever. Because people are making more now than they have before. You had a million ­dollars back in the day—that was some money. Not today, man. You got a million dollars, that’s just the down payment.

—Spike Lee’s conversation with Will Leitch for New York Magazine is excellent. Discussed: The Knicks, including Lee’s season tickets (“I try not to remember the price, but it is a fortune”); Brooklyn then and now, including what it was like being the first black family to move to Cobble Hill; public education; how movies about black characters do and do not get made (“I made a vow to myself, I am going to stop answering on behalf of the studios. Because every time something happens to black people, the L.A. Times is calling me up”); and his new film, Red Hook Summer (“This is not Spike going back to his roots. Red Hook Summer is another chapter in my chronicles of 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.

In most places, once you move to a new apartment, you can survey your new digs with satisfaction and begin unloading boxes, secure in the knowledge that you probably won’t have to move again for a little while. You can hang pictures, assemble bowls of potpourri, maybe even paint the walls. After all, until you decide it’s time to boomerang home to live with your parents again, or move to Seattle to join your girlfriend on her new houseboat, this is home! Settle in.

Life in New York is different. You probably know that it’s expensive to live here, but perhaps you have only a hazy sense of what kind of expensive we’re really talking about. Put it this way: If the Big Apple were an actual apple, it’d be an organic Honeycrisp ($4/lb).

In the same way that a Honeycrisp has limited surface area, the island of Manhattan only has so much space for residential buildings, and at least half of those buildings are filled with Never Say Die-type New Yorkers who have been here since 1972, fighting off the junkies, and damned if they’re going to surrender their rent-controlled two-bedrooms. About 10-15% of the rental housing stock that remains is controlled by the richest people in the world, for whom a pied a terre near Lincoln Center or a luxury downtown penthouse is a vital status symbol. 

That means you can either duke it out with every other wide-eyed wannabe to overpay wildly for what’s left—hey, look, an alcove studio in Midtown West* for $2,590!—or, more wisely, look to the other four boroughs, where deals are easier to come by. That is not to say, however, that rentals in the hot spots of Brooklyn or Queens are cheap. They are “more affordable,” which means they probably won’t make you feel as much like your wallet was sexually assaulted and forced to walk home naked.

This one-bedroom in Battery Park for $3,600 is a good example. It is advertised at 687 square feet, which is so precise I’m guessing the realtor measured the inside of the closet. How big is 687 square feet? Well, for contrast, the Elephant Center affords each adult male elephant 3,100 square feet. (An elephant 2-bedroom, so to speak, is 4,900 square feet.) Sounds palatial, doesn’t it? If you’re just squeezing an elephant somewhere temporarily, say in a stall overnight, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Standards for Elephant Management and Care from 2011 mandate a minimum of “no less than 600 square feet.” But in the long-term, that would be inhumane.

I can attest to that. My first real apartment in the city, which I shared with my then-boyfriend, now-husband Mr. Ben, was a 350-square-foot studio in Brooklyn Heights. That would hold just half an adult elephant. On the bright side, it would hold about 87 vintage English K6 telephone boxes! (If you didn’t have to worry too much about opening the doors.)

It worked okay for three years because we were young, desperate, and relatively compact, being short (me) and skinny (him). We paid about $1,550 in rent and counted our blessings. Still, no two adult human beings should have to share a space that would make Dumbo feel claustrophobic.

Our next apartment, a one-bedroom just outside of Park Slope, was $1,800 for three times as much space. We could have fit the entirety of the Brooklyn Heights studio in our new backyard, and two New York City medallion taxis in our living room / kitchen area.**

It was awesome. Like all awesome things, however, it was too good to be true for long. Our landlord sold the building out from under us to a nice Japanese family, and we found ourselves, once more, seeking maximum space for minimum money.

Overall, in the 7.5 years we’ve been in New York City, we’ve lived in two boroughs, four rentals, and one co-op, for which we coughed up enough money to buy Khartoum, the ill-fated racehorse from the Godfather. The co-op, our current home, is three rooms, plus one bathroom and a kitchen reminiscent of Harry Potter’s cabinet under the stairs^, and it would fit five dumpling trucks, although not all the impatient urban foodies waiting in line on an average Sunday. We bought the apartment so that we wouldn’t have to move again until we want to (say, because we buy an elephant). That is one of the ironies of living in New York: at some point, it can feel less expensive and less stressful to buy.

* Not a real neighborhood.
** A yellow cab is 6.5 ft wide and 17 ft long, for a total of 110 square feet.
*** A food truck is 7 ft wide and 24 ft long, for a total of 168 square feet.
^ Exact dimensions unavailable

Ester Bloom writes for money during the day, and for love all other times. She tweets in full sentences as @shorterstory.

Illustrations by Charrow. She lives in Brooklyn.

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