Siri Nippita and Gernot Wagner were college sweethearts at Harvard University, then bounced between Cambridge and New York (with a stop in California) after graduating.

They first came to New York for Dr. Nippita’s medical residency and fellowship. Then, with one child, they headed back to Boston for work. More recently, both landed jobs at New York University - Mr. Wagner as an environmental studies professor.

Now with two kids in tow, they prepared to return to New York, and they were tired of living in university housing.

“We wanted to have roots and paint the walls and move things around,” said Dr. Nippita, 40, who is originally from Yonkers. In the past, they had asked landlords about redoing the bathroom and leaving it for the next tenant. “The answer was always a hard no,” she said.

The couple needed to find a location that was close to their workplaces and their kids’ school in the West Village. Dr. Nippita, a gynecologist who is also on the faculty at N.Y.U.’s School of Medicine, works at Bellevue Hospital. Mr. Wagner, 39, a climate economist originally from Austria, teaches at the Washington Square campus. So they focused on a few blocks in Greenwich Village and NoHo.

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“For us as fairly as possible to distribute the task of running a household and caring for kids, we wanted to minimize commute time and make our commutes as controllable as possible, which meant avoiding the subway,” Dr. Nippita said.

Having endured plenty of dark rentals, they wanted good sunlight, high ceilings and an open feel. And they craved efficiency, with no need for excess space. In Cambridge, the family lived in a three-bedroom with an office, but “used a tiny fraction of the space,” Mr. Wagner said. The children shared one bedroom, and one was for a nanny.

“Whenever the four of us were home, we were in the kitchen together,” he said. “We barely used the living room.”

Their subsidized rent there was $3,252 a month, “which anchored our original search,” Mr. Wagner said. “We basically said, ‘New York is so expensive, let’s double that.’” For a co-op, that meant they would be able to afford something in the low $1 million range.

Among their choices: