When four young professionals share a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment, a strategy for the morning routine is a necessity.
Katherine Neal, who works in sales, and Annie Jackson, who works in public relations, take the first shifts in the bathroom. Ms. Neal gets in there at 6:45 a.m. and has 15 minutes before it’s Ms. Jackson’s turn. By the time Ms. Jackson finishes up, their male roommates, Michael Morgan, who works in advertising, and Andrew Bell, also in sales, are back from the gym in the building.
“It’s like living in a dorm,” Ms. Jackson, 26, said of her financial district rental. And that goes beyond the coed bathroom. Ms. Jackson and Ms. Neal sleep in twin beds in the bedroom, and share a vanity and a bench when they get ready in the morning, to avoid hogging the bathroom.
For the male roommates, the group installed a T-shaped wall in the living room, dividing it into two bedrooms, leaving space for a kitchen table in a common area. Mr. Morgan and Mr. Bell have hardly any privacy; building regulations require the bedroom walls to stop about two feet shy of the ceiling. “You can hear everything,” Ms. Jackson said.
While they live in dormlike conditions, Ms. Jackson and her roommates are not in college anymore. They are gainfully employed 20-somethings, trying their hardest to make living in New York City affordable. Each pays under $1,000 a month, toward a total rent of $3,750. Moving to another borough would afford the foursome much more space for less money, of course, but like many newcomers, they are willing to make certain sacrifices to stay in Manhattan.
Like many luxury buildings, theirs required that they use an approved temporary wall company to create the extra bedrooms, and the partition cost them over $1,000, Ms. Jackson recalled. This didn’t include doors, which the building would have allowed, but the roommates decided the added costs, including installation, were too much. They had hoped to eventually install doors themselves, as well as fill the gap between the top of the new wall and the ceiling, but design solutions have so far eluded them.
The situation is not uncommon. When it comes to finding a safe, convenient place to live, young professionals confront one of the harshest realities of New York City real estate: It’s almost impossible to live in a nice apartment — and still have enough money to dine out occasionally — without tacking on a few more bedrooms, adding more roommates and relinquishing some privacy.
Most of these bedrooms and subdivided living rooms, however, do not meet the city’s formal definition of such spaces. The New York City Housing Maintenance Code requires that all bedrooms have a window and be at least 80 square feet in area, and a living room must have natural light.
According to a spokesman for the Department of Buildings, a permit is required whenever there is a change in the layout of an apartment. For large rental buildings, landlords are required to have a registered architect or professional engineer submit the plans to the buildings department, and should not install the wall until a permit is issued.
These regulations are difficult to enforce and are often ignored, since the buildings department does not perform random inspections.
“The most common thing I see is they build the wall a foot beneath the ceiling,” said William Aronin, a lawyer who focuses on real estate litigation. “It’s not exactly the code of the law. It’s just how things work in New York City.” These types of temporary walls often cut interior spaces off from natural light, but leaving the gap at the top, at least in theory, allows a kind of access.
Dave Delaney, 34, knew the compromises required by a jerry-built bedroom all too well. In his early 20s, he lived for five years with three buddies in a two-bedroom apartment on East 57th Street and Third Avenue. The group divided the living room into three bedrooms, two of which faced the windows while a third (his bedroom) faced the apartment’s interior. One of the real bedrooms was used as a living room; the other was taken by the fourth roommate, who paid extra for it.
“It was brutal,” Mr. Delaney said. “You could literally hear a pin drop in another room. It turned into us all having to go to bed at the same time. It was basically like we were living in the same room but we couldn’t see each other.”
Because he had no window and no ventilation, it got so hot in Mr. Delaney’s room that he had to keep his door wide open at night. When it became unbearable, he bought a portable air-conditioner and carved a hole in his wall for the exhaust hose. The common areas would heat up, but Mr. Delaney’s room was perfectly chilled.
Now, Mr. Delaney lives in Los Angeles with his wife, and is preparing to move back to New York for his business, a trucking insurance company. A fake wall is no longer an option. He believes those kinds of living situations are best suited for young professionals.
“I think you’re just at a point in your life — at least I was — where you’re working a lot, you’re staying out late, and you’re going out a ton,” he said. “Living at home wasn’t really a big deal. It was just the place you went to sleep.”
Sara Goldman, a paralegal, and her two roommates were fortunate enough to inherit already-installed partitions that stop just short of the ceiling, thus avoiding a hefty expense. “It’s been a lease that’s been passed down,” Ms. Goldman, 25, said. “Luckily no one had to take down the walls.”
Those walls transform a $4,654-a-month, one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom apartment into a meticulously ordered three-bedroom. The original layout included a large living room with an adjacent open dining area that connects to an enclosed kitchen.
The roommates’ predecessors used temporary walls to split the living area into three spaces, with the back half of the living room becoming a windowed bedroom, the dining area becoming another by sealing off the doorway to the kitchen, and the front part of the living room serving as a windowless living area.
Perhaps the most creative use of artificial walls is in the actual bedroom, where the full bathroom is tucked. To make it accessible to everyone, “they added a fake wall, so there’s a hallway to the bathroom,” Ms. Goldman said.
Mr. Aronin, the lawyer, said that many landlords know it’s not really legal to transform an apartment like this, but they don’t care because their goal is simply to keep the unit rented. “Landlords don’t really care too much because one-bedrooms are sometimes $3,600, and what kind of 20-something can afford that?”
Dan Wurtzel, the president of FirstService Residential New York, a property management firm, said his building managers are careful to follow the process and get buildings department approval for any new walls. “We haven’t seen plans get rejected,” Mr. Wurtzel said. “But, what we need to be is vigilant and diligent in making sure no one sneaks something in and builds something without proper approval.”
It’s pretty common, however. And tenants often find ways to fill in the space above the wall by installing plexiglass or creating do-it-yourself insulated panels and wedging them in.
Mr. Wurtzel, however, wants to ensure that if for some reason the Department of Buildings comes in for an inspection, the building management won’t be liable. “Compliance with regulatory laws and city ordinances is extremely important in our business,” he said. “If you don’t follow those procedures, you’re creating a liability for the company, building owner, the board. It’s a hot-button issue, and we spend a lot of time training and place a strong emphasis within my organization.”
Of course, the probability that a buildings inspector will just show up is extremely rare, according to Mr. Aronin. Building officials generally have more pressing issues to deal with, like enforcing construction codes for new high-rise buildings in Midtown, or regulating home additions in Queens, he said.
The buildings department only actively investigates subdivided apartments if a complaint arrives through a 311 call, a department spokesman said. Thus most of the burden to enforce the rules falls on building owners and managers.
When Harley Landsberg, 23, moved into her two-bedroom $4,400-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side with her two roommates, the management made it clear they could use only a single, preapproved company, and that only one type of wall could be installed. It cost them around $1,500.
Although the wall creates a third bedroom, it leaves Ms. Landsberg’s roommate, Alexandra Weber, with limited privacy, since she can hear everything going on in the living room and kitchen.
“She goes to work a little bit later than me and my other roommate, which is kind of unfortunate since she can hear everything,” said Ms. Landsberg, who works in public relations. “But there’s nothing you can do about that.”
Sam Meyer and Josh Sturm have a setup similar to Sara Goldman’s. Their two-bedroom-turned-four-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side also has a living room that curves around the kitchen; their temporary walls split the living room and create two bedrooms, one where a dining room would be, next to the kitchen, another taking up part of the living room.
Mr. Meyer, 23, has the smallest room by far. “It kind of feels like you’re living in Harry Potter’s cupboard,” said Mr. Meyer, who is in his freshman year at Columbia after serving for three years in the Israel Defense Forces.
The roommates, three of whom grew up together in Toronto, don’t mind the close quarters or the lack of privacy. “It’s definitely not for everyone,” Mr. Meyer said. “When you live with your best friends, it couldn’t be better. We hardly spend time in our rooms.”
They are better off than most in their situation. Their total rent is $4,600, which would be a steal for a real four-bedroom in Manhattan, and the building allowed their temporary walls to rise to the ceiling. Mr. Sturm, who works in finance, chose to include a transom in the wall to allow some light to flow into the living room. “We did it for the light,” Mr. Sturm, 23, said. “And most buildings won’t even let you do it.”
The building’s management told them that as long as they used a pressurized wall they could build it to the ceiling. Pressurized walls require no adhesives or screws when put in place, but are installed snug between the existing walls and can be removed without damaging the permanent structure.
Donnie Zanger, project manager of All Week Walls, which specializes in installing pressurized walls, would agree. “The fire code doesn’t clearly define the parameters of what constitutes a temporary wall versus a permanent wall, and we think these walls are clearly temporary based on the fact that they are easily installed and removed,” Mr. Zanger said in an email.
“The codes, by definition, tell you that a wall is something that is fixed,” he said. “These walls are fundamentally, totally different.”
Despite the restrictions, Mr. Zanger’s business has continued to grow. He believes there’s a disconnect between what developers build in New York City and what renters can afford. He said they are too focused on building luxury apartments geared toward the foreign buyer.
“It’s delusional,” he said. “Even when dividing an apartment, it can be $1,000 to $2,000 a month each. They need to start getting real, and understand they are creating a real estate bubble. They can’t just go after the 2 percent anymore. They have to cater to a broader demographic.”
Mr. Wurtzel says the notion isn’t new or shocking. “There has been a housing crisis for the past 70 years,” he said, and even with efforts to increase affordable housing, one group of individuals is being left out: the young professionals. They often make too much to qualify for affordable housing, but not enough to easily afford an apartment in a luxury building, he said, and developers “don’t care.”
He said he believes the main problem lies with brokers, who may mislead potential renters. “Young professionals go around with a broker and see an apartment. And the broker may make representations about adding a wall that aren’t accurate, and the decisions are made by these individuals to rent or not rent, based on what the brokers are saying,” he said.
Mr. Wurtzel’s suggestion? Move to Queens.
“Move to Astoria where you can live for a lot less money than you would in Murray Hill or Downtown Brooklyn,” he said. “Or, move to Long Island City where it’s less expensive than living in Manhattan.”
Source: nytimes.com
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