She finds an apartment in La Fortuna, a historic building—based on the real-life El Cabrillo condominium in Hollywood—where a bohemian, multigenerational coterie of residents gathers in a shared courtyard to smoke, play music, and reminisce about old flames. Then one day news arrives that La Fortuna is being demolished to make room for a high-rise condominium designed by a trendy architect named Nick Dylan McDermott , and Gwen starts writing anonymous letters to a newspaper in protest.
Nick reads them, at first incensed but eventually charmed. I wish I could say that it was because it had the more repentant developer, extolled communal living, or presented the written word as a political tool. And there was something so beguiling about that buzzing, open courtyard. I had to stop after I moved back to New York City. When I started looking for a place in Brooklyn on my own a couple of years ago, my friends warned me to manage my expectations—as in, have none.
After weeks of searching, I noticed an apartment within my budget on StreetEasy, but when I went to see it I realized that the living room looked out over a massive Con Ed substation, beyond which lay a cemetery. I decided that I could do either power lines or a cemetery, but not both. I, too, relied on thin connections. By the time that happened, a year later, rents across the city had grown more than seven times faster than wages, according to a report released in May, , that compared StreetEasy and Zillow listings with data from the U.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. I started fantasizing about moving to Finland, finding a quiet job teaching English, and joining a socialist housing complex on the outskirts of Helsinki. The only thing stopping me was that it sounded like the beginning of a true-crime series. A mortgage would lock me into a monthly rate, protecting me from the fluctuations of the rental market.
There were just about seven hundred and seventy thousand problems with that plan, the main one being that that number is the average sale price of a one-bedroom co-op in the city. The guest told me she understood; she was an artist. These were below-market-rate apartments for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.
