Why I live in Carroll Gardens (and how you can find a place in NYC, too)

Our apartment in Carroll Gardens on moving day.

Finding a place in New York can be difficult — at least that’s what every website offering advice about finding rentals in New York said as I began my search for a new home soon after my boyfriend and I decided to move here.

However, I soon discovered that “difficult” is merely a code word for “expensive.” Finding a place is easy, it’s affording the broker’s fee and the deposit and two months rent up front that’s hard. That can add up to thousands of dollars in extra money you need before you can get a place, even if your actual month-to-month price is modest. (We were luckily able to find a place in Brooklyn for only about $20 more than what we were paying in Washington, D.C., and our Brooklyn place is, surprisingly to me, slightly larger.)

In any case, regardless of cost, figuring out in which neighborhood to live is tough when you don’t know the area very well. My reference bible throughout the search was New York Magazine’s “Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York” guide because it helps you search by the criteria that is most important to you.

For us, it was safety, cost, nightlife, proximity to midtown and space — in that order. Since we didn’t care about being in Manhattan, Brooklyn was an obvious choice, but since we did care about cost, Park Slope was out. Carroll Gardens is only about half an hour to midtown, has amazing restaurants (especially Italian; Frankies anyone?), and it’s far less expensive than Park Slope — and closer to Manhattan on the F train to boot.

We looked at several apartments and got lucky with the second broker we went to. Ironically, our broker wasn’t even planning on showing us the place we ended up settling on. She offered to take us to the apartment only after I made an off-the-cuff remark about being willing to live in “rough” conditions. She responded: “You like rough? I can show you rough.”

Our place is rough — cobwebs lace the foyer, the skylights leak when it rains, and there is a hole in the stairs that got troublingly larger after we moved our things in. But the apartment is close to the subway and even closer to many amazing bars and restaurants (and spiders are supposed to be good luck). It ended up being the almost-perfect combination.

Here’s my advice for anyone looking to move to NYC from out of the area:

Make sure you’re clear with yourself about what you’re willing to put up with and what you’re not. This will help you figure out which neighborhoods you want to look at, and once you’ve narrowed these down, will help your broker (assuming you go with a broker) refine your search considerably. Be sure to tell your broker you’re willing to live in less than ideal situations if you really are.

If you find something you like, jump on it. Don’t wait because someone else will get it. Quickly. When we found the apartment that best fit our needs we told our broker that very afternoon. You may think you have some time to mull your choices over but someone else will have seen the places you’ve seen and will make up their mind before you. When we were looking, throughout the entire afternoon we ran into another couple with the same criteria in housing who saw every apartment we saw — but half an hour earlier than we did. I have no doubt that if we waited a week to make up our minds our place would be snatched up.

Don’t (always) let the cleanliness of the place make your decision for you. Our place was filthy when we moved and we spent an entire weekend cleaning it before we moved our things in. But it eventually sparkled again — albeit for only a short while: we eventually just ended up making it messy again. If we’d rejected the place out of hand based on unmopped floors, we wouldn’t have had the chance to spill our own rum and cokes all over it.

You can figure out a good broker pretty quickly by the first place they show you and by whether they seem to know the people in the neighborhood. When we were looking in Carroll Gardens, the first broker showed us crappy, small, expensive apartments that they didn’t seem to have much of a connection with. In contrast, the second broker we saw had some pretty awesome places and knew the owners of the building by name (many of the owners met and toured the apartments with us). We love the place we got through this second broker and we love our landlord, who we met during our search.