Finding a desirable apartment in New York requires significant compromises in conscience, income, and pride. Competition is intense, causing profound changes in personal lives, including career shifts and alterations in relationships. Young couples resort to various strategies, including combing obituary pages for leads on vacancies. Despite the challenges, many middle-income tenants end up with inadequate space at unaffordable prices. In the high-stakes environment, conventional norms have dissolved, with some going as far as burglarizing offices to secure housing.
Finding and renting a desirable apartment in New York today requires such concessions of conscience, income, and pride that surgeons have postponed operations, housewives have gone back to work, hippies have cut their hair, and families have destroyed their pets.
In Manhattan, where competition for the smallest, darkest, highest walk-up is most intense, prospective tenants find the search for an apartment the center of their lives.
Thousands of middle-income tenants, unnerved by months of fruitless searching, settle for fewer rooms than they need and more rent than they can afford.
Modesty, gentility, and protocol have no place in the apartment grope, as some desperate prospective tenants have even been driven to burglarizing the office.
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