American horror story: renting a property in New York - ForumDaily
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American horror story: about renting a property in New York

Why housing search is the most terrible period in the life of any New Yorker and why the Moscow rental market is better than the American one, musician Dmitry Mironenko told The Village about my own experience.

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People who come to New York for two weeks return to Moscow confident that this is the best city in the world to live. After all, life is a picnic in Central Park, dinners in Nolita, and eternal discounts with Marc Jacobs. Well, more coffee in the morning before work. Just for a dollar! In reality, everything looks like this: in order to live in Manhattan from the TV series “Sex and the City,” you need to sell all the buds of the world.

Yes, and Brooklyn from the TV series “Girls” is not the same: noisy Williamsburg has approached bohemian Soho in terms of rents. Last summer, having left for New York, like many others who did not benefit from their homeland, I was ready for a lot.

I have heard more than once that the search for housing is the most terrible period in the life of any New Yorker, even if he is self-styled, even hereditary. He did not expect a miracle, but still believed that it was possible.

The first and main compromise of a young New Yorker is: either you go to your house along the street where Sartorialist will photograph you sooner or later, but you share this house with three or four artist-designers-bartenders-models, or settle in modest émigré wilderness and on weekends you listen to burrito music playing at an indecent volume at the spanish neighbors. I was inclined to the second, because people love less than stupid music.

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My conditions and budget were quite within the framework of common sense - 1 200 − 1 300 dollars a month for a small apartment without neighbors. In this case, it was necessary to begin with the selection of the district. In New York, gentrification is superfast. Each season in Brooklyn appears - more often trying to appear - a new Williamsburg, every second season in Manhattan tries to come up with a new SoHo. For alien codes and names from the site Craigslist look like an unfamiliar foreign language.

Everything beautiful is expensive, everything cheap is scary. It is really scary because, unlike the dismal Moscow Butov, the residents of New York Butov own firearms.

So choose: Crown Heights, Bensonhurst, Ridgewood, Maspet ... The only thing you know right away is that you don’t need Brighton Beach and Coney Island: even on the other side of the world, Russians rent apartments with a festive carpet on the wall.

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Now you yourself - the tool of New York gentrification. We need to find the right new place, have time to get a profitable contract and wait two years later for the “Sartorialist” on its street. There is little confusion from advisers: some of the hereditary Brooklynites living in Bushwick or Williamsburg still do not know that the neighboring Bedstay from the black ghetto has turned into a new secret love of regular hipsters: tasting of fashionable California wines has replaced the rapper showdown.

True, the quarter, which begins after two blocks from tastings, still smells like murder. So you have to, armed with maps Google and your own intuition, crawling along the back streets of Brooklyn and looking for new gems. And then return to the new pearls late in the evening and recheck: is it just the American dream or the dream of the American psychopath?

As soon as the approximate rating of the regions fits into your head, circumstances will come into force. Instead of impeccable service and efficient work, a bloody struggle for a potential living space begins. The system of rental housing is arranged in the United States is much tougher than in Russia. If you do everything officially, they sign an annual contract with you (lease), which, for example, does not allow the landlord to raise the rent, and you - to move out ahead of time.

American laws are on the side of the tenant. If you do not go into details, it will be harder than it seems to drive you out of rental housing.

In response, you must prove your trustworthiness with the help of several documents: letters of the guarantor, able to cover your costs in case of emergency, credit history at a US bank and certificates from work. If you come from another country, most likely you will not have any of these documents. And this means that in the competition for a more or less decent apartment you will lose to any competitor.

A foreigner who does not have an American guarantor needs to invent his own way of persuading a realtor and apartment owner. It’s better not to rely on charisma, because you don’t see the owner personally, they’ll be shown your case - papers and stamps. For myself, I came up with the following: I offered to immediately cover the semi-annuity and showed certificates stamped from Moscow banks with all family savings. But in order to play these cards, I had to sweat.

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New York realtors, they are brokers, will be more abruptly Moscow. Do not answer calls, do not come to meetings, promise one thing, but show quite another. Sometimes they don’t have time for shows at all - and they offer to run around the apartments themselves and send a text message if they like it. At the same time, most of them require 15% of annual rent for their services! And judging by how freely they feel, a lot of naive people come to New York. For example, the realtor could not come to my first viewing, saying that I simply went into the apartment - the door was open. At the entrance I met competitors - a young couple with a child, the glance of all three hinted that with a successful outcome for these "squares" we will face a serious struggle. Go, look.

Bay window, fake fireplace, representative kitchen seems to have to fight. And then a man comes out of the door leading to the closet and says that he lives in the next room, but does not cause much trouble.

Understanding will not come immediately: if everyone in Moscow is afraid of carpets on the walls and rusty toilet bowls, then in New York you can be shown an apartment with a toilet in the middle of the kitchen, a studio in which the bathroom is twice as big as a living room, an apartment with a washbasin, an apartment , in which bugs and rats will live with you, a studio in which there is no natural light, because all the windows look at the wall of the neighboring house, the house past which trains rumble. Also, by the way, there are houses that are constantly being robbed, and houses in which there is a hail around the clock from the ever-falling Mexican children.

The most interesting thing is that for the same money you can make something in all respects charming or something surprisingly terrible. A room can cost as much as an apartment, a small studio without a kitchen, and even in a poor area - as a large studio in a good one. People who are at different stages of despair and awareness pay money for everything in New York. Because it's not about money, but about nerves.

Some realtors, having learned that you are a foreigner, are trying to fool you in such naive ways that it is difficult to believe.

For the first three weeks I was offered a throw at PayPal 5 thousand dollars as an advance for an apartment already delivered, pay 100 dollars for an application for an excellent studio, rent an apartment for sale Craigslist at a price of 1 100 dollars, for 1 350, rent an apartment on the Internet, and get the keys sometime later. I was even written by people who pretended to be Baptist missionaries asking them to transfer money somewhere to Africa and wait for the blessed contract to arrive by mail.

By the way, the naivety of the new arrivals is not always caused by banal stupidity. Stories about the wonderful performance of the American dream really work in the real estate market. Some, for example, are still looking for housing for ads in local newspapers. I didn’t believe in it myself until I visited a person who had thus obtained a great and huge apartment for himself. The next day, I bought all the surrounding waste paper and immediately saw a dream ad - an apartment with a separate bedroom for just 1 200 dollars. The owner, a cheerful and drunk Romanian with multicolored teeth, led me to a house sandwiched between two churches, to an apartment where flies flew around the mattress in the bedroom, and the bathroom looked like it seemed you would never return.

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After such an experience with the hope of a miracle, I quit. But it was exactly what happened to me. Monitor Craigslist for the hundredth time in a day, I stumbled upon a posting of a newly renovated apartment in the heart of Bushwick. I decided to check this option because I was there, and because of this I managed to intercept it from all competitors. The apartment was shown by the owner of the house. My documents and the included full mode of one hundred percent charm convinced him.

I even bargained for a discount: there was no washbasin in the perfect apartment with an excellent location in the bathroom - quite a New York compromise. The next day we signed a deal - I paid a double amount: a deposit plus the first month. Without realtor commissions and huge pledges. No bids and no fee for checking credit history. It so happened that with a city that does not wait for you, you can still agree. Not immediately and not at all. But when I read news from Biryulyov, the absence of a washbasin seems not such a tragedy.

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