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Renting An Apartment In Astoria

My new base of operations.

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ASTORIA, New York- Renting an apartment in New York City is a rite of passage. It’s something that sucks for everyone — the rich, the poor, and the in-between. This is a city that’s a central axis of the world, the kind of place that people churn in and out 0f continuously. A place where a new arrival looking to drop a sack full of cash on an apartment needs to stand in line. It’s a seller’s market, an ecosystem where landlords and brokers can pit prospective renters against each other to push prices higher and higher.

And higher.

You claw your way up the side of the barrel here for the privilege of paying someone an inflated amount of money the right to say that you live in New York City, and all the privileges and clout that comes from this. But something doesn’t seem right about this and you know it … but you keep moving forward because the spoils to be won are real: this place is is still, without a doubt, the cultural hub of planet earth.

Our travails while searching for an apartment in New York City actually were not as bad as many others. A 50-something-year-old photographer who spent his life in New York City told me about how he broke down crying twice during his latest three-month-long apartment hunt. I’ve written about our woes searching for an apartment — poor, poor us, choosing to live in one of the most expensive cities on earth and then complaining about how we can’t afford it — but we actually got off easy. The reason for this was simple: a guy named Caesar.

At some point in our search my wife turned to me and said, “We’re going to need to have a landlord meet us and like us if we’re going to have any chance of renting here.” It seemed like a crap shot at best — all of the brokers that we came upon up to that point could be summed up with a single syllable: dick.

We decided to move our search from Brooklyn to Queens. It made more sense strategically — it’s almost a straight shot across the river to the Upper East Side where my wife works — and, virtually through neglect, Queens has become the cultural heart of New York City. Queens: the people’s borough, an area full of working class people from everywhere — precisely the stuff that the New York story is made of.

So my wife began making trips up to Queens from where we were staying in a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn, and on one of these ventures she met a real estate broker named Ceasar.

Ceasar, who is actually an adult — as opposed to the 20-somethings who dominate this profession in Brooklyn, showed her fifth-floor walk up apartment with giant windows facing east, west, and south that let in torrents of daylight in a beautiful century-old building run by a Greek lady with a passion for photography (a point that I will circle back to later). The building is located in a freshly hip part of Astoria that’s lined with boutiques, local bars, cafes, diners, and multi-national restaurants. The streets are full of people walking, talking who actually live here. There is no reason for tourists to venture over here; there are no hotels or hostels or tour crap. The place is real … and ideal.

It seemed as if my wife rolled a 4-5-6 and came up with a broker who liked us. Ceasar also wasn’t nonplussed by our backstory: decades of traveling and living abroad, wife just starting a new job, husband with no credit who writes and shoots video for a living and can only document his earnings with Paypal screenshots, kids, very little financial history in the USA, no solid assets. But this all didn’t seem to matter to this guy, who basically makes the decision as to who lives in the building. He was looking for something else.

***
My wife’s foot had spoken. We were going to apply for the Astoria apartment with the big windows. I hadn’t seen the place but this mattered little to her. She was done looking for a place to live. My wife’s feet rarely speak. I usually make all of the big decisions almost unilaterally. But this time I shut up. Okay, let’s do it — let’s sign a lease for an apartment that I hadn’t been to that’s in an area that I’ve never visited.

We did.

***
As the weeks went by as we suited up a bare empty apartment — another story that I may not bother to tell — we began becoming aware of certain patterns in the demographic makeup of our neighbors. They were all kind of like us: roughly the same age, white collar working class, with many having an odd thing for cameras. It seemed as if Ceasar found a profile that worked and rolled with it, cultivating a culture rather than just stuffing a building with rent payers.

***
I’m sitting here at my new workstation looking out a big window to my left at rooftops stretching out towards the sea. What can you really say when life is good?

I have a new base of operations.

***
Last night I was walking downstairs in my apartment building as a new guy who just moved in one floor down from me was walking up. He stared at the GH5 hanging from my neck for a moment, looked up and said, “Nice camera.” Dude knew what it was. Definitely a video shooter.

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Filed under: Apartments, New York City

About the Author:

I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. has written 3694 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.

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VBJ is currently in: New York City

7 comments… add one

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  • Rob August 15, 2019, 9:44 pm

    Nice story, congradulations on finding a home!

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    • Wade Shepard August 16, 2019, 8:25 am

      Thank you!

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  • steven August 16, 2019, 11:29 am

    Wade & Family,
    So glad to hear that you’ve found a “home” and the area looks to be a good fit. ( Added bonus is the great view)
    Also a plus is you all will stay in shape with the five flights of stairs. HaHa
    Congratulations ..

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    • Wade Shepard August 16, 2019, 1:31 pm

      Thank you! Yes, five flights of stairs don’t sound like much at first but after going up and down them five times a day … well … you start to feel it a little. Haha but that’s probably a good thing! The view is pretty cool too: planes flying in and out of LaGuardia all day. But I have to say that I’m looking forward to getting on one of them planes soon!

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      • Jack August 26, 2019, 4:59 pm

        I got healthy in China living on the 5th floor. Even I got to the point where I could run up the stairs. If I can do it then think that everytime you huff and puff lol

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        • Wade Shepard August 30, 2019, 9:11 am

          Yes, it’s funny when you read studies on exercise and you discover that formal exercise — like working out — only burns off a small percentage of calories that you otherwise burn during the course of a day. Most calories are burned through normal metabolic processes and normal movement — like running up five flights of stairs all day long. However, building additional muscle allows for more calories to be burned via these normal processes, so formal exercise, in a roundabout way, does work.

          My parents recently visited us in NYC. My dad was surprised by how much people have to walk and exercise just to get around and live here. I believe this is one of the benefits of big city living: big cities make you move. In small cities and the countryside it’s too easy to — or impossible not to — just drive around in cars everywhere and places are usually on the ground floor or only up a flight or two of stairs. It’s sort of counter-intuitive and the opposite of what it used to be.

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  • Marchus Shane August 17, 2019, 2:48 am

    It’s so hard finding a comfortable apartment around the Astoria. Thanks for the information, probably good research on this kind of topics it really helps to the needy people.

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