How much would Carrie Bradshaw's apartment rent for in NYC?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Although some agents handle rentals around here, these tend to be seasonal ones with absentee landlords. In that case it’s usually for convenience; the owners are typically in it for the investment and care only for the bottom line. Most other rentals are by local owners who handle their own transactions and an agent wouldn’t be much use, nor would the owners want to pay the fee.

Anyone who knows – in NYC, are the agreements between renters and agents, or owners and agents? Are these exclusive arrangements (that is, can an independent party look at and/or rent an apartment that normally uses agents)?

42

The scary thing is, she could’ve easily gotten a mortgage sometime in the last five or so years. If you could fog a mirror, you could get a mortgage. Plenty of places were lending to people at ungodly amounts like 10X their salary. It’d be run as a “stated income” loan (often called liar loans) where you don’t have to prove your salary and it would’ve been an adjustable rate with a very low introductory “teaser” rate of 1% and interest only payments. Now, she very likely wouldn’t still have the apt., having been crushed under the financial burden of the new mortgage payments the first time the rate reset and would’ve joined the ranks of the foreclosed. Which is pretty much why we’re in the midst of a lending meltdown.

43

I lived in astoria under a train trestle, in queens, and it was a very nice area, mainly greek. A three-bedroom was $2100/mo.

In terms of Carrie’s apartment, the idea that she lives alone in a brownstone, on the UWS, and hemmorhages money on shoes, clothes and taxis, is completely unreal.

That being said, I live in a true studio, much smaller than carrie’s (no alcoves here!) on the UES and I pay $1500/mo. I also don’t live in a brownstone, and I live on the avenue, not the street, which makes it cheaper. The UWS is more expensive than where I am on the UES, and apartments are also harder to find, so I imagine hers, today, would be worth $2k/month at LEAST. Dunno what prices would be 10 years ago.

Also, most rent-controlled places are large apartment buildings in specific areas of the city. It’s odd to find one brownstone on the street that just happens to be rent controlled. A majority of people in rent controlled buildings, from what I understand, have had them for years and years- lots of old people/families who hand them down to their children. Once you get a rent controlled place, you never give it up.

That also being said, most rent controlled places are not NEARLY in as nice condition as carrie’s is. When the landlord can’t make money off of making renovations, there’s no impetus to improve the place. A lot of them have outdated fixtures, no modern appliances, etc.

So for her to be able to a) find a rent controlled building on the UWS that’s b) a beautiful brownstone and c) with modern fixtures and very nice, and that d) she can afford freelancing and wasting most of her income is VERY LOW ODDS indeed. But did we ever argue that it wasn’t?

44

It could also be Astoria (my home), along the N and W lines. Or Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights or Corona, along the 7 train. Corona might qualify (for some people, not me), as “sketchy”, but the other neighborhoods certainly don’t. I grew up in Jackson Heights.

45

Ditto in San Francisco. It’s no New York, but our population density is nothing to sniff at.

46

The real mystery was how she managed to live in up until that time. Weekly column for an alternative weekly newspaper? That doesn’t pay you enough to live anywhere in the country without another job, even if it’s as a writer and editor at that same newspaper. Carrie spent far less time working than a real person in her situation would.

47

Na, they mention in several episodes how she is INCREDIBLY in debt.

48

I don’t know the show, but from this, it sounds like she’s a semi-pro whore. That’s one way of dealing with New York real estate prices, I guess.

49

Toronto. I’ve never used a realtor to find an apartment.

50

Another Sex and the City fan checking in, and I distinctly remember Carrie mentioning she pays 750$/ month for her apartment (while she’s trawling for places with a Realtor, who suggests Weehawken), which, even when rent-controlled, seemed impossible to me.

Glad to know I was right, which totally justifies me not ever imagining myself in Manhattan.

51

74th and Park, second brownstone on the right, IIRC.

I live a few blocks south and east – 63rd and York. I paid $1400 a month for a subsidized 850 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment. (Owned by a university)

I had friends who lived in the upper 80s who were paying $2500 for a 650 sq. ft. one bedroom.

A single girl living on her own on Carrie’s salary would be hard-pressed to find a room to rent in Queens… unless she had really killer royalties. I had friends living the stereo-typical Sex in the City lifestyle while earning six figures… they all lived in Brookyln.

52

Where in Jersey? I had an apartment in Jersey City that was a breeze to find, when I got my job with ConEd, and fairly cheap. (Of course my commute to where I was working, Astoria, (I was a freaking idiot - but that’s another issue!) was about two hours.) I was about 10 minutes leisurely walk from the Journal Square PATH Station, since I am male, and at the time was in pretty good shape, but still a bit heavyset, I never had any problem with people on my way to and from the train station. I even had my own back yard. Which lead to one of the more surreal experiences I had while living in Jersey City.

Of course, for this apartment I accepted certain trade-offs. Right angles didn’t exist, heat was problematic, and there was a small problem with six-legged roommates. I just prayed that if Manhattan ever got hit by an earthquake it would happen while I was at work, or in transit.

Given my commute - that’s wouldn’t have been a bad wager, either. :slight_smile:
Seriously, to get back to the point of the OP, the further one gets from Manhattan, the closer to reasonable the rents become. FTM, AIUI rents in Staten Island (an actual burough of NYC, for all its distance from the rest of the city) were even more reasonable than what I was paying in Jersey City. Of course, if you’re planning to live in the NYC of the movies, Staten Island really ain’t that. :wink:

53

On what she made as a weekly columnist … couldn’t be more than $500 a week, probably much less … she wouldn’t just be INCREDIBLY in debt. Collectors would be chasing her down constantly. Her phone and power would constantly be cut off, and she probably would be living on a friend’s living room couch after a couple of months.

That’s not to say that there aren’t weekly columnists living in Manhattan with the same load of credit card debt that Carrie had … but they would have had a second (or third) job.

54

All of them except Miranda were essentially semi-pro whores to various degrees.

55

That’s just because she did mostly pro bono work.

56

Carrie’s column is popular enough to be optioned for a Hollywood movie in the… 3rd season? Although that still doesn’t make her lifestyle anywhere near believable. I live in Brooklyn and pay $800 a month, and that’s just doable on my salary and living my lifestyle, which is positively Spartan compared to Carrie’s.

Aside from getting to the airport, I think I’ve taken cabs fewer than five times in the year and a half I’ve lived in the city, and then only when I can split the fare with friends, whereas it was a total oddity for Carrie to take the subway. Even if she mostly stuck to her own part of town (and she didn’t - she went to trendy clubs, bars, and restaurants in Soho frequently), that can easily be a couple hundred dollars in cab fare a month.

While I openly admit to a fast food addiction, I generally cook for myself and pack a lunch for myself during the week. Carrie never used her kitchen and ate at trendy and expensive restaurants on a regular basis. She could easily have dropped one or two hundred dollars on a single meal given the places she frequented.

When I go out, I frequent dive bars, and even that gets extremely expensive when “cheap” drinks are around $7 each. At the types of bars and clubs Carrie visited, she’d easily have spent at least a hundred dollars out every night between drinks (probably at least $15 a piece for the fancy drinks she ordered at uber-trendy clubs), cover charges, and cab fare. And that’s not even getting into how many hundreds (or thousands) of dollars she’d have spent on the outfit she wore out that night.

The lives of the other three girls at least make sense. Samantha is successful enough in PR that she represents the Wright hotel and (briefly) handles Lucy Liu’s east coast PR. Miranda makes partner at her law firm in the second season, and she’s generally described to be working all the time. Charlotte runs a gallery, comes from a wealthy family, and is later given what has to be a multi-million dollar apartment by her first husband; she later marries a lawyer.

How these people have the time to get together as often as they do and pursue their careers and sexual exploits is anybody’s guess.

57

Englewood, in the middle of Bergen County. Studios are around $900, one berooms $1200. I’m renting two rooms on the top floor of a two family for $640.

58

IIRC, the movie was never made, but she did sell a collection of her columns as a book (which was the basis for the movie idea). I’d guess she’s get a nice chunk of change from the book deal.

As for her taking cabs, there was a time where she decided to start riding the bus to save money (maybe it was when she was trying to buy her aprtment), and was mortified when one showed up with her picture on it, advertising her weekly column. She also had to ask a woman standing at the bus stop how much the bus cost.

59

I agree that using a broker is the norm in NYC. Perhaps this can be partially explained by the fact that, as of 2005, vacancies in the City proper were barely over 3%.
www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/pr/vacancy.shtml

Even looking at the major metropolitan area, New York’s Vacancy is 5% compared to Chicago’s 13% and San Francisco’s 8%. Very few major metros have vacancy lower than NYC.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/annual05/ann05t5.html

It is possible to find decent, no-broker apartments, but there is a lot of competition. A friend of mine recently came to NYC to look for housing. Upon finding some listings of interest in Craigslist, she was shocked to find herself competing with up to 40 other interested people within one day of the ad going up. She ended up going with a roommate situation, which she had adamantly opposed before arriving.

Also, because vacancy is so low, it is rare to find a landlord that will rent to you on more than 30 days notice – they just don’t know what will come available until it does, then they want to rent it immediately. So you have a lot of people who come to the city needing a place urgently because they are about to start work/school/whatever. I think this also encourages the use of brokers. People are willing to pay to get it done, stat. If they had plenty of time they could probably find something equivalent.

Personally, I looked at both broker and no-broker apartments in my neighborhood. The no-broker apartments were more expensive, less well maintained, and not rent-stabilized. They were less likely to include utilities, and much less likely to have a professional landlord or a live-in super.

60

I don’t really know how fair that is. Samantha slept with everyone, sure, but she had an incredibly successful, self started PR firm.