There’s a hilarious Tumblr making the rounds - The Worst Room. It’s very funny.
It’s pictures from Craigslist ads of truly horrible New York living quarters. There are “apartments” where you can’t ever stand up all the way, people renting out their closets, places where you’re clearly renting the hallway for a cool grand a month, etc. (I kind of liked the one where the bed was literally over the kitchen, though - it was cute.) Evidently the author has gotten several requests for links to the original ads because some people see them and actually want to live there.
So, these aren’t actually legal, are they? Even in NYC? I guess the ones that are “top bunk $500, bottom bunk $600” (and why wouldn’t you prefer the top anyway?) are just technically roommate situations you don’t tell your landlord about, but aren’t there laws in New York about people renting closets that don’t have windows? Most places a “bedroom” has to have a window, both to protect tenants’ rights and to provide an emergency exit. If these are illegal sublets, don’t they get caught? Especially since they’re advertising?
And what the hell happens in case of fire in these buildings? Doesn’t anybody care about the gerbil warren death trap?
(I am reminded of a thread once where somebody was just going crazy because she couldn’t afford living in Manhattan, and I asked why on earth she didn’t live somewhere else, and she responded with something about why on earth would she live somewhere else, what would she do for fun, go to the mall?)
No, they generally aren’t legal. Though the difference between “roommate” and “sublet” can be blurred at times, if you are actually subdividing a structure with walls and it’s not inspected for fire code you can get in a lot of trouble.
People die.
Sure. What do you expect them to do about it? The people who live there do not have an incentive to report their dwelling as unsafe, just so they can get kicked out by the fire marshal.
Here’s a similar story, albeit one where someone actually makes a tiny living space look somewhat appealing. It does have a window, though.
I don’t get the Tumblr thing, either. Even in my starving-20s phase, if my only choice was to live somewhere like that, I’d move to a different city. Ain’t nothing in life worth that. And, like you said, it’s a safety issue as well.
My wife had an Upper East Side apartment and rented out one of the rooms as a bedroom. Tiny space, enough for a twin bed, dresser and clothes rack. When I moved in, we used it as an office, it was about the size of my office when I worked in an office building.
However, it was really an apartment share, the renter got to use the living room, kitchen and bathroom, though filling those areas up with personal effects was not encouraged.
Hell, for one school year my college roomate lived in a blocked off stairwell. He had a closet, enough room to fit a twin bed on the floor, and stairs for shelves. He only went in there to sleep. Seriously if you’re only using the space to sleep, it may as well be a shoebox with a bed in it.
I’ve never understood the fanatical devotion to NYC that you sometimes see. I like where I live, and I’d hate to move anywhere else, but if the only place I could afford was one of those shitholes, you can be damn sure I’d move somewhere else.
When three of us lived in a loft in the 1970s, one month we rented out a sitting-and-sleeping-only, tent-sized slot spanning parallel sheetrock walls (the sheetrock wall was to create a hallway), at a height you needed a ladder to get to. I forgot why we built the niche. The guy was nuts, but we needed the money.
[We rented an entire floor of a cast-iron industrial building on 19th and Park in Manhattan. I used to bicycle in it. We were paying $300/month, and we had to move out because we couldn’t afford the rent. Look upon me and weep.]
There was a great photoessay on the 100 sq foot homes in a city in China - the Brits apparently built a ‘temporary’ building to house a bunch of people from a refugee camp [?] and it ended up pretty much permanent. As a mental exercise it is neat to pop up a blueprint program like the one IKEA has and make 100 sq foot floorplans, but living in one would be uncomfortable. Though I do wonder at the number of the people who have their possessions in large amounts of plastic bags, I would have haunted the dump til I found actual shelving or cabinets/wardrobes I could fix up. Rigid containers stack better than soft ones.
Those are spacious NYC apartments in the OP. Smaller apartments than that get shared by people working seperate shifts. Those ritzy rooms must go for $2000 a month mininum, but it’s worth it because the building has a doorman.
Seriously though, no way in hell would I sleep in a room with no window. If there’s a fire you’re fucked. I felt claustrophobic just looking at those pictures.
No, most of them are very not legal. You can’t have a residential apartment in a basement, in a windowless room, or that’s less than 550 sq. feet.
There are exceptions that are grandfathered, in that case, the residential use must be continuous from a time when such use was legal, which is clearly not the case in these recent conversions.
That’s a good point, but only about the current tenant. I would hope that some of these places would get reported by disgruntled tenants after they leave. If that’s not happening, then it is testimony to the possibility that they’re really not as bad as they seem.
My guess is that his limited manpower allows him to check few or none of those, and even if he does do a few raids here and there, it’s not a big enough dent to stop these other guys.
A while ago I read some article online in which presumably demented architects/city planners were offering the suggestion that New York wasn’t maximizing the density potential of the land mass, and that the overpopulation problem could be solved by packing New Yorkers closer together on the lines of Kowloon Walled City of especial memory in that same territory.
Back when we lived in NYC, we looked at an apartment that was a converted hallway. There was the “living room” in which you could sit on the sofa and rest your feet on the opposite wall, then a kitchen which was basically a tiny closet with a hot plate and tiny sink, then the bedroom, which was entirely filled by a twin mattress on the floor, then the bathroom, which was similar to the lavatories on a plane, plus a tiny shower. And yes, you had to walk across the bed to get to the bathroom. Since this had been the main entrance to the building, the other tenants had to enter their apartments via a fire escape. The main selling point was the location: on a really beautiful street in the West Village.
They wanted $1K rent, and that was 24 years ago. Easily over 2-3K now.
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…an apartment that was a converted hallway… Since this had been the main entrance to the building, the other tenants had to enter their apartments via a fire escape.
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Often they are situations where a group of people will rent an apartment together within the bounds of occupancy, and rather than sharing the rooms, some people will take the rooms at a higher rate, and others will take the “creative living spaces” for lower rent.
For example, I have a friend who rents a large closet in DC. It’s a two bedroom apartment with four people on the lease going for $3,000. Two people take each room for $1000 each, one takes a large portioned-off dining room space for $600, and one takes the walk-in living room closet for $400. The common spaces are pretty nice. The understanding among all the roommates is that the people with the creative living spaces will probably spend a lot of time in the common spaces, and the people with the rooms should plan to do most of their entertaining, etc. in their private rooms.
Likewise, I’ve shared a one bedroom basement apartment (we had a minibar sink and a hot plate) where one of us took the room and one took the far end of the living room (it was long and narrow, so it as easy to partition off with furniture.) We switched off halfway through the year. My next room was a converted living room that was self-contained and not different from a bedroom, except that it didn’t have a door. In all of these cases, the landlords knew and we were not violating occupancy levels. It was just a creative furniture arrangement. Really, it’s not much different than a situation where the husband sleeps on the coach (I think it’s different if you are setting up walls or making permanent alterations.)
Why live there? Some people don’t spend much time at home. I was working full time, attending full time grad school, and managing a busy social life. Home was literally a place to store my stuff (and I didn’t have a lot due to frequent moves) and sleep. Saving on rent freed up a lot of money for travel and fun.
Also, often people will have SOs with nicer places that they stay over at frequently, but they aren’t quite ready to move in for reals. They may use the space as a crashpad near the office during the week, and spend the weekends with their SO.
Nor I. Both online and IRL, I’ve encountered people who were obsessed with one day living in NYC, New Orleans, or southern California. I can’t see the appeal. NYC is a crowded, stinking shithole, NO has some cultural attraction but isn’t exactly the safest place in the country (not to mention might find itself underwater every now and then,) and SoCal is where people go to convince themselves that “waiting tables” actually means “actor.” And the fact that the NYC and SoCal types like to refer to everything between them as “flyover country” makes me wait for the day that both regions are wiped out of existence. Detroit may be mired in shit, but at least this region actually makes things of value, instead of moving money around or whoring for attention.