When her landlord raised her rent by $200 last February, Theresa Handwerk saw the writing on the wall.
Ms. Handwerk, 51, had been paying $1,450 a month — “pandemic rent,” she called it — for a studio on the East Side of Manhattan. She was happy to squeeze into its 300 square feet in exchange for the prime location, within a 15-minute walk of her Midtown office, where she works as an insurance broker. But as the rental market began to roar back to life in the spring, she figured this wouldn’t be the last time her rate went up.
The best way to protect herself from ever-rising housing costs, she thought, was to leave the rental market and put her savings to work. “I knew there was no way I would be able to stay in New York if I didn’t buy,” she said. “I felt like a sitting duck.”
And she wasn’t willing to leave the city. Ms. Handwerk has a master’s degree in art history from the University of Delaware; when she moved to New York in October of 2011, it was to have access to the world-class culture and art. “Being interested in art and going to museums is my life,” she said. “It’s what brings meaning to my life.”
She decided that she could spend about $200,000 on a new place, probably in another borough. But she was hesitant — her first apartment in the city was in Fresh Meadows, Queens, and it took over an hour to get to her job near Grand Central Terminal. If she was going to buy, she wanted a more reasonable commute that didn’t involve relying on the Long Island Rail Road or Metro-North.
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She knew she would likely be limited to a studio, but she wanted one that felt renovated, clean and bright, with a foyer that separated the entrance from the rest of the space. She also wanted an elevator and laundry in the building.
She called Marc Williams, the broker with Corcoran who had represented the apartment she was renting, and they zeroed in on Forest Hills, Queens.
“As a lifelong single woman, the financial and social inequalities compared to married couples are glaring,” Ms. Handwerk said. “And my financial history has not been one that gave me the confidence that I could just buy a place.”
Here are the three co-op studios she considered:
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