Apartment Envy: A Real Estate Marriage Sours

SoHo co-op studio, 450 square feet, loft-bed, 11-foot ceilings, hardwood floors. $1050 a month, rented from owner.

New York Today Real Estate, December 4, 2000

On November 28th, three days before she was to move out, Michele Arboit gave a Mars/Venus spin to her seven-year rental of a SoHo co-op: "It's like a human relationship -- like when you meet someone and it seems so perfect, so meant-to-be. You think, 'This is it,' but it doesn't last." The freelance editor with reddish-brown hair and a penchant for red lipstick and nail polish, among other red things (see below) was wistful after reflecting for a few hours on her imminently former home, her nostalgia stoked by a reading of the opening paragraph of E. B. White's "Here is New York." When she arrived at the famous final sentence -- "No one should come to live in New York unless he is prepared to be lucky" -- Arboit looked up at me with a bright smile. "I'm prepared to be lucky again," she said.

Arboit's life in New York certainly began in a lucky way. Upon first moving to the city eight years ago, she stayed three months at a friend's empty co-op on West 67th Street, during which time she set eyes on the Prince Street apartment. The real estate market was, as most New Yorkers know, quite different back then: "There was actually a sign in the window saying, 'Apartment for Rent,'" she said incredulously. Arboit liked what she saw, but ended up taking a one-year sublet from some friends who lived in the Ansonia. When that year ended, she remembered the SoHo flat and miraculously still had the owner's number. Even more serendipitously, the tenants who had taken it the year before were moving out that very week.

Stepping into the apartment now, it is evident that Arboit made it into a genuine home. She freely admits the apartment is narrow; but following the advice of a designer friend, she accentuated rather than downplayed its length. Decorating as though she were moving "from the great house into the guest house," she bought large armoires and couches, staying away from dainty objects. Using the basic color scheme of red, black and white, Arboit painted her bookcase and the apartment's major doorframe fire-engine red, and applied other red accents via rugs, pillows, even a red toilet seat. She bought a mirror with a black and white diamond-checked frame and used similarly patterned contact paper to cover the ugly metal on either side of her air conditioner. Arboit found other uses for mirrors and contact paper. Because the apartment gets very little light, she placed mirrors around the apartment's only light-receiving window, as well as near the airshaft, whose large windows let only a bit of light into the ground floor apartment. She also ingeniously placed a mirror above the doorframe between the main living area and the kitchen -- it looked like another window, at first glance. On the walls around the stove and the windowsills, both of which perpetually attract dirt, Arboit placed marble-patterned contact paper, which looked good and was easy to clean because of its smooth surface.

Loving decoration wasn't the only reason her apartment was so comfortable. Arboit, who enjoys cooking, regularly entertained there and had photos of family and artworks by friends lining the walls. "Everything [in an apartment] should matter and have a story behind it," she said. One of the more striking pieces is a portrait of Arboit herself, done by a friend after she had recovered from cancer seven years ago. Displaying a painting that is so personally significant is part of Arboit's home philosophy. "I've had a major illness here, a major relationship. Your home becomes the repository of your memory of those times," she said.

The good times she enjoyed in the apartment were complemented by the good relationship she had with the apartment's owner, who was living abroad and, Arboit says, had originally only requested a reliable tenant who would live there a long time and take care of the place. Her starting rent -- $1,000 a month, market price at the time -- didn't increase until four years later. Even then, it jumped by only $50, and Arboit never had to never negotiate or haggle over the price. Last year, however, at the end of her third two-year lease, the owner said she wanted to sell the apartment -- for $125,000. Arboit knew that the price would not stay that low, but was thrilled. "'Oh my God -- I'm going to get to buy my apartment,'" she remembered saying.

In order to qualify for the co-op, Arboit gave up her freelance editing gig in favor of full-time employment. She scraped together a down payment and obtained a $200,000 mortgage (anticipating an increase in the asking price), although the two parties had not yet drawn up a written agreement. Five months later, during which time she was still paying the same rent on a monthly basis, the owner changed her mind. She wanted to move back in on December 1 and have Arboit pay double the rent until then. Arboit still doesn't know whether the about-face was due to a change in the owner's personal situation, or because she "realized the market had skyrocketed here and that she could be making a lot more money." In what she describes as a painful experience, the two negotiated back and forth until finally agreeing that Arboit would leave December 1 but continue to pay $1050 a month until then.

Arboit must have been in the doldrums of packing drudgery when I visited, but her apartment was still neat and attractive, if awash in an understandable gloominess. She doesn't know where her next home will be, though the next stop is her first crashpad in New York, the West 67th Street pied-a-terre. There, she can stay for at least a month. That's a far cry from owning her own place in SoHo, but Arboit knows how lucky she's been, and she's prepared to be lucky again.

WRITING | RESUME | THOUGHTS | CONTACT