This native New Yorker boasts the city’s greatest gift: An incredible apartment deal.
Indeed, a New York City resident named Akasha has lived in the boroughs her entire life and now kicks up her feet in a jaw-droppingly cheap unit: a rent-controlled studio that costs just $350 a month.
“I’ve toured over 200 apartments in New York City and we have officially found the cheapest one,” said creator Caleb Simpson at the beginning of his viral profile of one lucky Manhattanite’s enviably affordable pad. (Previously, he’s done videos about New Yorkers living in a former laundromat, an ambulance and a penthouse.)
Exactly how cheap is $350 monthly in New York? Simpson is right — it’s very cheap. The latest rental market report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel shows Manhattan had a median rental price of $4,009 in October, down from the $4,022 median tallied in September.
Akasha’s family moved to this complex — where she’s lived her whole life — in the early 1990s, with Akasha’s family across the hall from her current unit, which belonged to her aunt and uncle. When her aunt moved out, Akasha moved in. “Literally the easiest move in the entire world,” she told Caleb of the experience.
It was Akasha’s mother, a fan of Simpson’s home tour series, who contacted the creator and told him he should do a profile on her daughter’s home.
Inside, the crib is tricked out with small-space solutions.
Under her kitchen table, Akasha stores a neat stack of chairs, her closet has two clothing racks — one on top of the other — and there’s a “book nook” next to the desk. Above and adjacent to the full-size fridge is storage covered by curtains installed by Akasha’s aunt and uncle during their two-some decades in the unit. “A lot of this was inherited. It’s very helpful to me, having people who had to function in here for a very long time, they figured it out,” the NYU grad and food industry worker said.
“I used to joke when I was a kid — ’cause I lived in this building my entire life — that my bathroom was bigger than peoples’ apartments,” she said of the pink-tiled, bathtub-equipped room.
The kitchen, Simpson noted, has a back-of-house, commercial kitchen energy thanks to the stainless steel shelves, and all of the cups and plates hanging and stacked in the open. That the small space remains functional is important to Akasha, as she’s passionate about cooking.
Although neither Akasha nor Simpson noted which neighborhood in Manhattan the unit is in, Simpson did offer that it’s “in a very popular, central location.”
Akasha’s rent is a steal, but a late actress has her beat for the cheapest rent a New Yorker paid for a Manhattan pad in recent history.
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