“Suddenly we could afford to have a place that had a dishwasher, which was nice, and my bed didn’t touch three of my bedroom walls,” Ms. Lewis, 25, who works in political communications, said of the $3,300 a month space.
A year later, the landlord raised the rent to $4,700, a 42 percent increase, with an 11-month lease. Rather than move, the pair found a third roommate. Last week their landlord raised the rent again, to $6,300 a month, a 34 percent increase from the previous year, and a 91 percent hike from 2020. A search of the apartment’s rental history shows its highest rent, $4,700 a month, was in 2017.
“It shocked me,” Ms. Lewis said.
The roommates huddled in the living room, calculators out, trying to find a way to keep their household intact. They contacted the landlord, asking to negotiate. “The chances of that happening are slim to none,” Ms. Lewis said. “I may as well win the lottery.”
On Monday, the landlord came back with an offer of $5,800, still out of reach, but close enough to make the decision that much harder. “There’s no real winning in this situation,” Ms. Lewis said, noting that the offer also included an additional $1,700 security deposit. “I either pay $500 a month more and go into debt or I go home and let my best friend down.”
Either outcome means accepting a measure of defeat. “We were getting to a point in our lives where we have an apartment that we like, we have stable jobs, we can actually start to enjoy the city without feeling stressed about money all the time,” Ms. Lewis said. “It’s putting a pause on all of that.”
Tenants whose leases have not yet expired are worried, too. Jenika McCrayer, 31, a freelance writer, recently called her landlord to negotiate a two-year renewal on her Bedford-Stuyvesant one-bedroom, suggesting a modest annual increase. Instead, the landlord told her to expect her rent to rise by a third, to $2,800 a month, when the lease expires next spring.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
