“Since I came to New York, I’ve always lived in this neighborhood,” she said. “I feel like the air is a bit fresher here.”
But even six months in, Ms. Terzis was struggling on a social worker’s salary. The next year her landlord tried to raise the rent to $1,550, a 7 percent increase rather than the 4 percent approved by the Rent Guidelines Board. And she learned that preferential rent was, in fact, preferential for the landlord rather than the tenant. She eventually talked them down to $1,508.
Preferential rent allows a landlord to charge less than the legally allowed amount for a rent-stabilized apartment, without forfeiting the right to raise it to the full amount on a subsequent lease. Landlords tend to use preferential rent if market rents are lower than what is legally allowable. But as areas gentrify, they often raise them by large amounts, sometimes hundreds of dollars a month, until the cap is reached.
Name: Stavritsa Terzis
Age: 30 Rent: $1,650, shared with a roommate. Ms. Terzis said the management company tried to push it up to $1,700 last year, but she talked them down. Occupation: New York City Teaching Fellow, teaches English as a second language to eighth-grade students and science at Charles Dewey Middle School in Sunset Park. Also going to school at night for a master’s in teaching English to speakers of other languages at Hunter College. How she found the apartment: “On Craigslist. They said: ‘This is the space. We’re showing it to someone else in half an hour. Do you want it?’” Furnishings: Ms. Terzis furnished the apartments with antiques (her parents, retired teachers, run an antiques business on the side) and art, much that she made herself, or that was made by friends and family, including a large tombstone rubbing her grandparents took from a grave in England. Why she wanted to live alone: “I wanted to feel completely independent in order to really know myself. I wanted to enjoy spending time alone in a city full of people.”
To make ends meet, Ms. Terzis first tried renting the entire apartment on Airbnb. For a little over a year, she would leave town on weekends, or for nine- or 10-day stretches, staying with her parents in Norwalk, Conn., and commuting to the city on Metro-North. But she found the arrangement wearying, and she didn’t like paying an accountant to handle the tax complications presented by her Airbnb income. Never mind that the popular short-term rental site has been opposed by landlords and city officials alike. When she was hit with another rent increase that September, she conceded the inevitable: It was time to get a roommate.
The apartment’s layout worked in her favor. From the front door, one enters into a pentagon-shaped entry hall, from which the bedroom, living room, bathroom and kitchen pinwheel off. She found another teaching fellow to take the bedroom and she moved her bed into the living room; eventually she installed a door on the living room. She has had three other roommates cycle through and now claims the bedroom for herself. The most recent roommate moved in last December, replacing a longtime roommate, whose wife had recently arrived from Russia and did not find Flatbush to her liking. (She decided that they must live in Greenpoint.)
But Ms. Terzis has figured out what she wants in a roommate: someone she will see as little as possible.
“I choose renters that have completely opposite schedules from me, so the apartment still feels like mine,” she said.
“I liked having a living room. My bedroom now is just a little too cluttered,” she continued, pointing to a stack of school papers on the bureau at the foot of her bed. “When the room gets cluttered, I lose that freeness and imagination. It’s kind of a block.”
Credit
Liz Barclay for The New York Times
Ms. Terzis, whose apartment is now $1,650 a month, worries about further rent increases.
So in May, she plans to move into her boyfriend’s apartment, a three-bedroom on the first floor of a building his family owns in Crown Heights. “It’s kind of a magical space, but it’s going to be a huge transition for me,” Ms. Terzis said. “Something that’s preventing me from leaving is there’s such nice light here.”
Her boyfriend’s apartment is spacious, but has skylights in lieu of windows. And it will hardly be her own: The basement is often used to host freestyle rap events, her boyfriend’s parents stay there frequently and his 20-year-old brother lives there, too, and often has friends drop by to play music or video games.
Some of the previous tenants in her apartment, it seems, are also reluctant to move on.
Ms. Terzis pointed to the trunk in the middle of the entry hall. “When the hall was empty, I used to see bursts of light there,” she said. One night, she woke up to the feeling of someone touching her back, she said, and to the mysteriously strong smell of cigarette smoke.
“It was getting weird,” she said. A friend, versed in the paranormal, advised Ms. Terzis to put something in the middle of the star-shaped hall, to get rid of the floor-length mirror next to her bed and to place a small mirror atop the bedroom door jamb to reflect the room’s energy back into the hall.
Ms. Terzis complied, and things have quieted down since, though she still burns sage — just to be on the safe side.
