I faced the knowledge that I needed to find a new apartment by this June with the spirit of an entrepreneur.
I was unicorn-hunting: I'm a single adult who was trying to live in an apartment that I could afford—as is soon to be revealed in Hell Gate's annual report, I have a salary of $87,000 a year, which I augment with sporadic freelance gigs, like writing 200 words about a nightclub for a couple hundred bucks. At most, I could spend $2,200 a month without becoming "rent-burdened." I need to live in New York City for work, and I wanted to keep my commute to the Hell Gate office—and my proximity to people in near southern and central Brooklyn who I've become used to being around—to under an hour. I didn't want roommates, because I didn't want to say "I have roommates" on dates. I became fixated on the idea that, in order to find an apartment to suit these needs, I would need to be "entrepreneurial."
I didn't really know what I meant by "entrepreneurial," but I knew that such an apartment would not just fall out of the sky. Though I was refreshing StreetEasy and several other apartment-finding apps several times an hour and sending in doomed applications to HousingConnect, the City's affordable housing portal, I knew those to be what they call "red ocean strategies" in business—too much competition, too many other fish. I was activating my community and leveraging my networks of privilege by swallowing my pride and posting, and asking friends to post. But I knew even those oceans weren't blue enough.
My apartment search, after all, came in the middle of an unprecedented housing crisis. Rents are comically overpriced—in July, the average rent for an apartment in Brooklyn was $4,257 per month—and with available housing stock in the borough down 8.6 percent from this time last year, even the most normal-seeming apartment summons massive lines of prospective renters. Meanwhile, brokers are able to make themselves minor internet celebrities by simply offering housing to people who want to live in New York City. At the time, I did not know that my apartment hunt would raise fundamental questions about the FARE Act—which was supposed to ban forced broker fees—or about the kind of person I am.
This wasn't just a matter of being proactive—I knew I was going to have to innovate some new apartment-finding technology. If I was going to get the apartment I needed in New York City in 2026, I would have to end my search with not just a deal, but a story. People would ask me how I found the place, and if I were to find somewhere suitable, the answer would have to shock them. Maybe I'd make a handshake deal with some regretful landlord at a bar, after finding their information through public records.
Alternatively, I was open to hiring a "tenant's broker." This was another nugget of conventional wisdom that I had received, one that's developed since the passage of the FARE Act last year, which made it illegal in New York City to force a broker fee on prospective renters—but prospective renters can still hire brokers in their own apartment searches. With my price range and arguably unrealistic standards, people told me, I would need a partner in order to find blue oceans. And that's what a tenant's broker, in our post-FARE utopia, is supposed to be: A conduit leveraging connections and networks I couldn't fathom, who would find me a deal even without a direct line to landlords. In exchange, all I would have to do is be one of the next generation of suckers to pay a broker fee. One month's rent, maybe? It would sting, but I understood the cost of doing business with a fellow entrepreneur, and imagined that it could even be fair.
But what I found was villainy.