NYC Real Estate: An Unhealthy Obsession

This is the floor plan of the apartment G and I are renting. Decent, right? Enough closet space, for sure. But no couple would rattle around in it trying to figure out how to use all the space.

So why can't we find a comparable apartment to buy?

G and I sold our downtown Brooklyn apartment in May, 2005. We put the profit in auction rate securities, a cash equivalent, our stockbroker told us. We expected to spend the money within a few months, a year at the most, for a hefty downpayment on a new, better apartment.

After four months, we fled a Carroll Gardens rental to another rental--the big gray apartment complex in Battery Park City. Now its almost May 2008 and we are still in BPC. No, we haven't given up owning our dream apartment--at the right price and the right distance from the subway.

Searching the NYC real estate listings qualifies as a bona fide hobby for us. As soon as we learned our securities were frozen as part of the Wall Street shakeout, we increased the intensity of our real estate web surfing. Self defeating? Yes, but isn't that part of the masochism of buying apartments in New York?