When Miranda Haymon moved to New York City in 2017, there was only one neighborhood to consider: Bedford-Stuyvesant, the historic, ethnically diverse enclave in North Brooklyn. Mx. Haymon, 29, a theater director and writer who grew up in Boston and studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, found in Bed-Stuy a neighborhood full of college friends and family members.
“I saw the kind of community that I wanted to be a part of,” Mx. Haymon said. “I saw Black people who owned their homes. I saw millennials with families. Bed-Stuy feels like a smaller universe within the larger New York City.”
Mx. Haymon shared an apartment off Bedford Avenue with roommates until the pandemic hit. With live theater — and the majority of their work — on pause, they began to worry about finances. But what at first seemed to be a crisis turned out to be an opportunity. Mx. Haymon left the city in 2020, heading home to Boston to find new ways of generating income. The answer came in the realm of podcasts, commercials and films, where work was still available — and lucrative.
Saving to buy a home, which had felt like fantasy before the pandemic, suddenly felt possible. “I had a totally different financial equation when I moved back to New York in 2021,” they said.
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Landlords in New York had a different financial equation at the time, too, and when Mx. Haymon returned to Bed-Stuy, they were able to rent a two-bedroom with a balcony for $2,350 a month — a “Covid deal” that wouldn’t last forever. They continued to save, and by the end of 2022, with the rent set to rise to $3,000 a month, the time had come to look into buying.
They reached out to Dalia Glazer, a real estate agent with Compass, and explained that they could spend up to $650,000 — as long as the down payment was only 5 percent. That significantly narrowed the pool of available properties.
“I couldn’t go above 5 percent for a down payment,” Mx. Haymon said. “And by December, interest rates were high. But in my head, I did the math, and I knew interest rates can change. So if I could afford the interest rate for a few years, I knew I could always refinance.”
Ms. Glazer said her client was “very diligent” and didn’t look at anything unless it fit the criteria.
“There wasn’t that much around,” she said. “It’s very rare to have a 5 percent down payment. If it’s a condo, most of the time it will be 10 percent that’s required, and most people pay 20 percent, so that was the first difficulty.”
Mx. Haymon was hoping for an apartment with some outdoor space in a building near an express train, for easier access to Midtown Manhattan. And they looked only at apartments that had been on the market for several months, because the sellers would be more likely to accept a small down payment.
“I really wanted to take advantage of the market,” Mx. Haymon said.
Among the properties considered:
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