What I love about Marnie’s studio apartment in Chinatown on HBO’s “Girls” is that I used to have one a lot like it, with a shower in the kitchen and a bathroom in a closet. At some point before I moved in, someone had neatly tacked sheets to the ceiling to hide, I don’t know, probably a really terrible ceiling. I shared the place, a poor excuse for a one-bedroom in Little Italy, with a roommate, so it was larger than Marnie’s 250 square feet.

The biggest difference was I lived there in 1999, when everyone was busy watching Carrie Bradshaw bound up the picturesque steps of her Upper East Side brownstone on “Sex and the City.” Remember her walk-in closet? What freelancer has a walk-in closet?

Even then, I knew it was absurd. But I could will myself to believe in it, because my friends could still afford to live in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the telltale markers of gentrification — construction cranes, farm-to-table restaurants and soaring rents — had yet to take hold.

But the real estate landscape has shifted so profoundly over the last two decades that this generation’s girl-about-town occupies a very different kind of space. And it is one that keeps shrinking, which is why Desi, Marnie’s hapless husband, frantically builds a wall down the middle of Marnie’s tiny studio to try to save their crumbling marriage. “Welcome to your new one-bedroom apartment,” he says, to her horror.