From "The $3,500 No-Kitchen Apartment" (NY Magazine).
March 21, 2024
"The kitchenless apartment is nothing new in New York real estate. For most of its existence..."
"... it’s been acceptable, if not exactly ideal, because it generally meant cheap rent. Sure, you’ve only got a microwave and mini-fridge, but takeout is abundant and electric-kettle aesthetics are kind of peaking right now. But the social contract is fraying, and some of these apartments are currently running for upwards of $2,500. The market has created a new monster — the luxurification of the hot-plate apartment...."
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I think "kitchen less apartments" are absolutely the right kind of apartment for mentally ill and problematic tenants. The kitchen is where these people do the most damage.
"...and electric-kettle aesthetics are kind of peaking right now."
So are bondage rooms with vegan leather harnesses, but that doesn't mean those things are desirable to the other 98% of fuckos that aren't on Fetlife.com. NY brokers could sell a containerless goldfish bowl to a fantail beta and then laugh as it asphyxiates on the floor, that's how dumb the downmarket NY real estate crowd is.
Surely people in NY remember the Covid lockdowns. Good luck with the mini fridge.
After college, rented illegal "room w/shared hall bath" in downtown New Haven rundown townhouse occupied by office on lower two floors. Fire-escape ran from my room's barred windows directly into large public parking lot. Fortunately no one tried to pry windows open while I was sleeping nearby. No kitchen, only cube refrigerator. No cooking, dishes done in bathroom sink. Lasted 9 months, then went to grad school.
After grad school, toured rental apartments in Fairfield County, within walking distance of downtown Stamford. Sadly, very tight market. Realtors first showed me a number of "converted" garages. Basement garage conversions, attached grade-level garage conversions, detached backyard garage conversions - inevitably all involved nailed-down garage door, drywall interior wall backed-up against that garage door, prefabricated shower stall accompanied by mini vanity sink and toilet, and "kitchen" consisting of mini-fridge, countertop microwave, and hot plate. "Landlord" was inevitably a single middle-aged woman, divorced or widowed, trying to hang on to her house. Rejected them all, told recruiter my acceptance of job was contingent upon finding a "real" apartment. And that said, suddenly realtor found me a large conventional studio apartment, pullman kitchen, real bathroom, multiple closets, at lower monthly rent than all those garage-conversions previously shown.
People who don't have kitchens don't eat particularly well. A diet of carry-out and fast food is not a healthy recipe.
Absence of a kitchen sink is, to me, a lot worse than absence of the other things that a kitchen typically has (e.g. a stovetop, oven, dishwasher etc.) My bathroom sinks are not set up for cooking -- I'd need to set up another tub draining into the sink, and a hose attachment to the faucet in order to rinse vegetables, wash dishes, etc. But as long as you have a decent sink, everything else is fine. I roast and bake primarily with my toaster oven (a nice one from Wolf), and I have an induction hotplate that works just fine for everything else.
So this doesn't actually sound awful to me. But I'm a pretty basic cook -- just stews, pies, stir fries, and roasts. Oh, and sous vide too, I guess.
Our mortgage payment for a 1952-sq-ft house on 6.52 acres is $2,500. Property taxes plus insurance are about $15,000/yr. Plus, I have a magnificent view of the Cascade foothills.
"it generally meant cheap rent." No. Not "cheap rent;" cheaper rent.
Cheap rent was when I had a one bedroom apartment, with no kitchen, on Balboa Island for $600 a month. (15 years ago)
Reminds me of Elwood Blues making his dry white toast on a hotplate in his Chicago SRO. That was supposed to be a depiction of "down on your luck" though.
For all the problems they caused, the elimination of SRO's seems like a bad idea in retrospect.
Yesterday, I watched the superb movie Mona Lisa Smile, which I had not seen before. Early in the movie, there was a laugh-out-loud joke about hotplates.
The movie takes place in 1953. The main character Katherine Watson has been hired to teach art history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She has rented a room to a boarding house, and the landlady is showing her house and telling her the rules for living there. Among those rules, the boarders are not permitted to use a hot plate or to allow any men to stay over.
Katherine immediately responds:
"Oh, I cannot live without a ..... hot plate".
Hotplate Heaven
(no Green Hotel).
I suppose boarding houses are long gone.
"Good and hard- good and hard."
and some of these apartments are currently running for upwards of $2,500.
that doesn't sound THAT unreasonable.. you ARE talking the purchase price, aren't you?
NO?
well.. I guess $2,500 IS pretty steep for an annual rent; but it IS NYC.. it IS an annual rent, isn't it?
AKA Mens Residence
https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/07/13/uptowns-wilson-mens-hotel-is-now-the-wilson-club-and-a-few-former-tenants-are-moving-into-the-upscale-micro-apartments/
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170818/uptown/wilson-mens-hotel-tenants-fear-living-on-street-after-sro-sold-for-rehab/
Was a transit rooming house for 80yars, plywood partitions, single bed, wire mesh over the ceiling between the partitions.
Last June I lived in a sizable hotel room whole on a fellowship for a month. No kitchen. I ate well and healthy using the instant pot I brought with me. Lots of really creative good meals. Of.course breakfast was provided by the hotel and it was only about $90/night if I paid for it (it was funded by the fellowship so I didn't).
Great month spent in the great state of Kentucky, which I loved touring while I was there.
NYC has zero appeal to me So I can't imagine paying that much for such a restricted life.
Reading Mike @3:55pm, shsss, don’t tell them. Let them keep thinking NYC is a great place to live. But yeah, I have similar numbers for my home that has two kitchens not including the patio one that has a grill, fridge, and sink.
The kitchen is where these people do the most damage.
How do you know my ex-wife, Spiros?
They go to a lot of trouble not to use the I-word.
You can eat well if you have a counter, two separate AC outlets and a sink. Yo can even get a counter or one of those bar/kitchen setups from Ikea. Then you use a covered hotplate, a toaster oven and a microwave. Or you can go the Instant Pot/Airfryer route. You get in the kind of refrigerator they use on yachts which runs on regular AC power with low watts. It can all work but the trouble is the rest of your place is on another level. The fireplace, the view, the sectional furniture, the plasma TV. And what about fumes? Besides a lot of people these days can't cook, not just men. It just seems incongruous, 70's sit-com stuff, psychically impossible, not physically impossible. Why not go somewhere else? Or become the person who turns the incongruity into an interior decorating style.
"NYC has zero appeal to me So I can't imagine paying that much for such a restricted life."
For the people willing to pay $2,500.00 for an apartment in NYC that lacks a kitchen, (some even lack bathrooms, which in such cases are communal bathrooms down the hall), they see such spaces as mainly someplace to sleep and change clothes. Their actual lives are conducted outside their apartments, at jobs, of course, and after work among the myriad and wonderfully engaging amenities NYC offers, (bars and restaurants and clubs, of course, for those who like that, but also many wonderful bookstores, (though fewer than in earlier years), great museums and art galleries, On- and off-Broadway theater, symphonies, clubs where jazz and experimental music is the fare, plenty of outdoor spaces, (many parks, etc.), and so on.
I was fortunate to move to NYC at a time when it was rundown and much more dangerous than now, (1981), so it was less difficult to obtain decent or good apartments at reasonable rents. I got a rent-stabilized apt. in a pre-war building on the Upper West Side. I had no views of the streets, only of the air shaft, but I lived next to Riverside Park and mere blocks from Central Park. After 40 years, my rent was still (a shade) under $1,800.00. Why leave? My wife, NYC born-and-bred, wanted a life away from the city. We're several states away, and she is completely happy. It's nice here, very lovely, but I do miss NYC. Even as a kid in Indiana and then Florida, I enjoyed being in downtown settings, finding the concentration of people coursing over the sidewalks and in and out of the office buildings and shops, the hubbub and noise and energy of it all to be always exciting and energizing.
I haven't used the oven or dishwasher for over 25 years and I have a house.
gf walked into a drugstore and asked where the immersion heaters were. "Oh we don't carry that kind of thing," the clerk said.
"NYC has zero appeal to me So I can't imagine paying that much for such a restricted life."
Progressives love it. It allows them to bitch about capitalism while feeling superior to the rest of the country.
You can get a 450 square foot studio apartment in good Manhattan neighborhoods for under $3,000/month, with a kitchen. But maybe these aren't really available to the types of people renting these kitchen-less apartments because they have bad credit or unreliable income.
"Progressives love it. It allows them to bitch about capitalism while feeling superior to the rest of the country."
You reveal your complete ignorance of New York, (or you're just using the words "New York" as an excuse to make sub-sophmoric comments about it, or rather, about "progressives").
Robert Cook, that's a great description of why NYC really does have appeal to a lot of people. I just found I don't like crowds and don't like living among so much asphalt, concrete, and human mess. But having lived in and near cities for much of my life (on the West Coast) I'll admit I do miss the easy access to museums most of all. But I go for an hour walk into the national forest every day now, and that's the sort of culture I like.
I think being a big introvert as I am, and coming from generations of farmers and go-westers as long back as my long family tree can show, I'm pretty much bred into not being a city-liker. But for a lot of people, it makes a lot of sense. Makes a huge amount more sense the prices you paid for living there than the prices being paid now.
It really does seem to be paying a premium for thinking they are superior to others. But us others still aren't convinced and they could really spend their money better. But I don't know their stories, maybe they have really good reasons and a lot of spare money.
Robert Cook: serious question, why do you think it is fair to spend 40 years in a rent stabilized apartment? Shouldn't these places go to people in need til they get squared away and move on up and out, opening an opportunity for the next person in need?
My SIL and BIL were looking to buy a house in San Francisco years ago...they looked at many, and quite a few had NO kitchen. They both like to cook, so those were no gos for them, but they were quite surprised that there were so many.
Now that restaurants are leaving the area because of criminals taking over the streets....a lot of people are going to go hungry!!
There’s a sucker born every minute.
I find this interesting because a few years ago I was watching a documentary on ancient Rome that talked about housing in the Eternal City at the height of the empire.
Turns out the ancient Romans built quite a lot of apartments for the hoi polloi. Most of them seem to have been what we'd call a small studio apartment.
None of them had kitchens.
It was expected that the low-class workers living in them would feed themselves by patronizing local takeout stalls and bakeries.
Everything old is new again....
"Robert Cook: serious question, why do you think it is fair to spend 40 years in a rent stabilized apartment? Shouldn't these places go to people in need til they get squared away and move on up and out, opening an opportunity for the next person in need?"
Well, I would say I was one of those "people in need." Rent-stabilized apartments aren't designed for poor people, as such. There are building complexes built for low-income/poor renters: the "projects." (There are also apartments that may be purchased for low cost. Aspirants enter their names on waiting lists, waiting to be called and notified an apartment is available. I know several people who have bought their own such apartments after being wait-listed for several years each. Such apartments are not available to people above certain income-levels. I know someone who was called after waiting a couple of years, but the price, still comparatively low, had increased beyond her ability to pay, so she lost the opportunity.)
Rent-stabilization allows everyday ("middle-class") working people to be able to live in the city. The rents on rent-stabilized apartments do increase every two years, but the percentage by which rents can be increased is regulated by law. The NYC Rent Guidelines Board each year determines how much rents may be increased. Some years the increases are minimal, other years NOT so minimal. For a majority of the years I lived in my apartment I needed a roommate to pay the rent. The rent was lower than the extravagant rents that one hears of, but it was high enough (relative to my income) to be a stretch. It was only in the last fifteen years or so of occupying my apartment (out of 40 years total) that I could afford the rent without a roommate. Even then, my income was not so extravagant that my rent had become a scarcely noticeable pittance of my income. The rent was an affordable but still noticeable monthly expense, as is true for the majority of Americans anywhere, rent-payers or home owners.
I think more apartments should be covered by rent-control and -stabilization regulations. The increase of rents in NYC is such that working people are more and more unable to afford it. Yet, a city cannot exist in which the only (or majority of) residents are wealthy. Developers should be building more rental buildings geared to middle-income tenants, rather than building ostentatious sky-piercing condo or co-op buildings where apartments costs millions of dollars each to purchase. Many of these buildings may sit largely empty, as the purchasers are predominantly wealthy foreigners parking their money in NYC real estate, rarely (if at all) visiting their "residences." Many spaces in such buildings sit unsold. The whole enterprise is perverse and, I believe, will hit a wall at some point.
In SF, we have streets full of wall-less apartments.
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