Moving to Brooklyn

It finally happened, the rent wave caught up with my cool little COVID deal. I thought New York was supposed to be dead but I got a lease renewal with a rent raise of $1,300/month. For those doing the math at home, that's an extra $15.6K per year, or nearly a quarter of the median income in the US just tacked onto the price of a depreciating, non-owned asset. I'm sure I'll write about this elsewhere, but I don't believe professional landlording should be legal, and I don't think you should be able to arbitrarily raise rents "to meet the market". I don't need to have a clear policy framework figure out to know that this sucks.

Oh well, so it goes. I loved my 2 years on the Upper West Side and really feel blessed to get to have a peek at it so young; it really was a wild privilege. It's been really great spending more time in Bushwick as I visit apartments. The coffee shops really are so much better in Brooklyn. There's something about the extreme rent pressures in Manhattan that makes third places weird. I've met 5 new people this week just out and about that I genuinely vibe with and will meet up with again. I think this last year of my twenties is going to my first year being "young in the city".

- frank, 2023-01-16