Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers.
Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers.
Abstract
"I'm still working in Philly, so I'm going to commute almost two hours, but I'm living a dream that I've always had." Daniel Yaburov and Alina Yaburova, siblings from Dnipro, Ukraine, fled the war in February and came to New York, where they are being hosted by the Gurevich family in their three-bedroom apartment overlooking Riverside Park on the Upper West Side. Ingrid is thrilled to be sharing her space, saying that she hopes to have a roommate until she's "98 - at least." At first, having an older roommate was a "90 percent financial" decision for Stacey, who was living in California when she landed a teaching job at the New School and saw Ingrid's post on Craigslist. "They're building these luxury apartment buildings, but who can afford to live in those?" Kazi, Amzad, Eliyas and a fourth roommate are all recent Bangladeshi immigrants who share a basement apartment in East New York, Brooklyn. Because the apartment has no living room, they use one of the bedrooms as a living room and another as an office. "Don't set me up for failure." Ayomide Enitan, Carlton Bruce and Alex Palacios live in a four-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Who goesby Ayo, moved to New York from Lagos, Nigeria, in January to get his master's degree in public health from New York University, he checked into a hotel in Hell's Kitchen and began looking for an apartment. Each of them arrived in early May. After moving in last summer, Madhulika Pesala says that she anticipated some of the downsides of being in New York more generally - "Whenever it rains, my street turns into a trash river" - but that living with so many people was an easy adjustment.
