The weird world of house-hunting in the badlands of New York

After a surprise eviction from her Brooklyn pad, Holly Baxter is thrown into the precarious and confusing world of renting in the Big Apple

Finding an apartment to rent is the easy part, after that it’s all so confusing (Getty)

Last week, I was finishing off a particularly delicious grilled cheese sandwich for lunch at my desk in the newsroom when my phone began to ring. It was my flatmate, who was at that moment in time on holiday in South Africa with his girlfriend. I knew he wouldn’t call from across continents without a good reason, so I excused myself and went outside to pick up. As soon as I did, and sans preamble, he said: “There’s no easy way to tell you this. The landlord is kicking us out.”

Much as I would love to claim that we are being turfed out of our Brooklyn pad because of my unstoppable rock-and-roll lifestyle, it’s a little less exciting than that. Our landlord, a former stockbroker who invested in a brownstone in Brooklyn decades ago before retiring to California, has hit some long-term health issues. The brutality of the American healthcare system is inescapable, even for rich people, and he is now having to sell the entire building to finance his treatment. That means that, despite our lease running for another seven months, we are being told to leave the apartment within the next few weeks, along with the inhabitants of four other flats below us. It’s a costly as well as a sad enterprise, since over the weeks since we moved in we’ve spent time lovingly decorating our little garret in Park Slope and making friends with all the nearby baristas and restaurateurs. It is an absurdly cheap, pretty but ancient place with 1940s electrics (light switches that do mysterious things, plugs that only work on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings, a leaking chimney, floorboards which expand outwards when it rains and so on) and we probably won’t find somewhere in the same area again. For a New York minute, we were able to share a neighbourhood with people much better off than us; now, unfortunately, the dream is over.