Talk About Renting A Hole In The Wall
Jun 25
So you think your place is small? One night recently, a group of architecture students staying up late in a loft in Brooklyn took to amusing themselves by stuffing a mattress into a hole cut into the wall above a bedroom door. Then they tried the mattress out for comfort. Not half bad! It occurred to one of them, Nick Freeman, that people might pay money to call that elevated mattress home.
So Mr. Freeman posted an ad on the Web site Craigslist: “$35 — elevated mattress-sized space between rooms.” He used a minimalist pitch. “Opening between hall and room available for long/short-term use, accessible by ladder, sheets and pillows not provided.” The ad went up around noon, and by the end of that day, Mr. Freeman had a dozen potential takers.
“I was actually surprised with the amount of places that fall into that category — kind of like ‘I’ll rent a corner,’ ” said Drew Hart, who answered the ad. “I went to look at a place recently in Queens; I wasn’t aware until I got there that it was a cloth shower curtain separating part of the living room.”
Into the six-ring circus that is the housing market in New York City — where a house can sell for $40 million, an apartment can rent for $25,000 a month and extended families sleep in shifts in single rooms — came the airborne mattress, at least briefly.
As real estate prices remain stratospheric and people keep pouring into the city, some housing experts believe the market for space within other people’s space is on the rise.
On Craigslist alone, one can find hundreds of ads for rooms within apartments, beds within bedrooms, even the occasional couch — if not living quarters, then living eighths. Some are available from Monday evenings through Friday mornings, some only on weekends. Some exclude kitchen privileges, request teetotalers, insist upon plant care, limit sleepovers.
A few will take some of the rent in trade.
“The regular value of this studio is $2,000 per month,” one recent ad seeking a roommate for a West Side apartment said. “Your share of the rent is specially reduced to only $250 per month for a female in exchange for doing small chores a few hours a week (i.e. cooking, cleaning, answering phones, massage, etc.).”
