The weird world of house-hunting in the badlands of New York

After a surprise eviction from her Brooklyn pad, Holly Baxter is thrown into the precarious and confusing world of renting in the Big Apple

Finding an apartment to rent is the easy part, after that it’s all so confusing (Getty)

Last week, I was finishing off a particularly delicious grilled cheese sandwich for lunch at my desk in the newsroom when my phone began to ring. It was my flatmate, who was at that moment in time on holiday in South Africa with his girlfriend. I knew he wouldn’t call from across continents without a good reason, so I excused myself and went outside to pick up. As soon as I did, and sans preamble, he said: “There’s no easy way to tell you this. The landlord is kicking us out.”

Much as I would love to claim that we are being turfed out of our Brooklyn pad because of my unstoppable rock-and-roll lifestyle, it’s a little less exciting than that. Our landlord, a former stockbroker who invested in a brownstone in Brooklyn decades ago before retiring to California, has hit some long-term health issues. The brutality of the American healthcare system is inescapable, even for rich people, and he is now having to sell the entire building to finance his treatment. That means that, despite our lease running for another seven months, we are being told to leave the apartment within the next few weeks, along with the inhabitants of four other flats below us. It’s a costly as well as a sad enterprise, since over the weeks since we moved in we’ve spent time lovingly decorating our little garret in Park Slope and making friends with all the nearby baristas and restaurateurs. It is an absurdly cheap, pretty but ancient place with 1940s electrics (light switches that do mysterious things, plugs that only work on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings, a leaking chimney, floorboards which expand outwards when it rains and so on) and we probably won’t find somewhere in the same area again. For a New York minute, we were able to share a neighbourhood with people much better off than us; now, unfortunately, the dream is over.

Our living situation is complicated by the fact that you can’t officially rent an apartment in the States without a credit rating, and your UK credit rating means nothing in the land of the free. Over the year that we’ve been here, we’ve diligently attempted to build something resembling a presence in the eyes of the US financial system – we’ve opened multiple bank accounts, paid for meals and wedding costs with credit cards before immediately paying them off – but my fiance and I, UK-dwelling Brits as we were for 29 years, are still coming out as a dead zero. Our flatmate functions as our guarantor at the moment, but our next living space will most likely be a studio since he’s ready to move in with his partner. And that projects us into the weird world of New York subletting.

There is a local bylaw in New York which says people can’t be banned from subletting apartments they’ve entered into a tenancy contract with. It’s designed primarily to protect the city’s large number of undocumented inhabitants, who don’t necessarily have the requisite social security numbers to rent fully legally. It also means that, if you were very determined, you could have your own property empire without owning a single flat. Once or twice, I have considered whether it might be a good use of my time to save up some cash, rent two or three apartments in up-and-coming areas of Brooklyn on long leases, and put some other tenants in for a profit (my fiance has had to remind me that I am not a multimillionaire investor on Dragons’ Den, but in fact a 31-year-old in a precarious industry with an overdraft in two countries.)

 It’s a divorce and the house is a child in need of a custody arrangement

Finding the sublets is fairly easy – Craigslist, spareroom.com, and even a New York-specific subsection of Airbnb are all good go-to places – but they are, of course, less secure than fully legal contracts worked out with an estate agent and the landlord present. Like many things in America, they inhabit that strange grey area between fully legal and illegal, meaning that you’re absolutely fine up until you aren’t. Getting a flat through an estate agent is similarly weird, since there are no estate agent companies here – just individuals with a “real estate license” who make their money by either working for the landlord or the tenant. During a house sale, it’s not uncommon for those two estate agents to sit down together and mediate between themselves like it’s a divorce and the house is a child in need of a custody arrangement.

Think that all sounds confusing? Well, you’re not the one who’s about to embark on another house-hunt in the badlands of the east-coast housing market. Wish me luck as we start our search in February. At least dry January is coming to an end.