Member-only story
Unless you’re rich, this may be your last chance to live in NYC
It was late summer in the year 2000. I was a technical writer and my wife was a nurse. She was 8 months pregnant. We were walking north on Broadway in Morningside Heights with a real estate broker. We had just looked at a 2-bedroom, 1-bath apartment in some need of sprucing up. (As an aside, our broker is a wonderful woman who is another one of those cliche-busting New Yorkers who move through the world with integrity and compassion in what you’d assume would be a cut-throat environment, and we still consider her a friend to this day.)
“It’s 259K. Because it’s a sponsor* apartment, you don’t need to get approval from the board. But they are not negotiating on price. If you don’t want it, they’ll sell it to someone else. You can buy it if you want to, though.”
I looked at my wife, saw the consent, and turned back to the broker.
“OK, that sounds fair.”
All I could think was that everyone I knew would laugh at us for paying such an exorbitant price for a tiny little apartment. You could buy a nice house in the suburbs for that kind of money! With a big yard! I was struggling not to have a panic attack. But whether the price was fair or not, it was just about the only…