Three Searches for a First Apartment

To give a sense of what it’s like for new graduates to find a first apartment in New York, these four people were asked to keep track of the ups and downs of their search from the moment they began looking for a place to the day they signed the lease. (By coincidence, all four wound up in Manhattan, despite the fact that Brooklyn, and increasingly, parts of Queens, attract great numbers of young renters.) In all cases, the search proved more challenging than anticipated, but all four were happy with the place where they ended up.