Licensed Professional Explains How Removing Furniture And Installing Mirrors Can Double The Perceived Square Footage Of Any Studio
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report, with property market context from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, that Manhattan real estate agent Christine Wolfe has published a 12-step guide to “maximizing the spatial potential of compact Manhattan living,” which prospective buyers and renters in the sub-900-square-foot market have described as “useful,” “depressing,” and “a document that accurately reflects the current state of affairs,” and which includes advice such as: installing floor-to-ceiling mirrors on at least two walls to “create the illusion of space that is not present but is perceptually equivalent to space that is”; removing all furniture except items that perform double duty (“a bed that is also a sofa that is also a dining table is not a compromise, it is a lifestyle choice”); and “reframing the concept of ‘room’ as a series of ‘zones’ that can be experienced sequentially rather than simultaneously.”
The guide has been shared 34,000 times on real estate social media, which Wolfe describes as evidence of “the deep hunger among New York apartment hunters for practical guidance” and which commenters have described as evidence of “collective recognition of our shared urban predicament.” The predicament: median Manhattan apartment rent is approximately $4,200 per month, which at the standard 30 percent of gross income housing ratio requires a gross income of approximately $168,000 per year to be technically affordable by the ratio, which is above the median Manhattan household income of approximately $93,000, which means that the median Manhattan household is paying above the technical affordability threshold for the median Manhattan apartment and is consulting 12-step guides to make the apartment feel less bad about it.
The Manhattan Apartment Market: Its Logic Explained
Manhattan has limited land, strong demand, restrictive zoning in much of the borough, and a landlord class that has learned to price apartments at what the market will bear rather than what a normal cost-of-production analysis would suggest, because what the market will bear is considerably above what cost-of-production analysis would suggest, because supply has not kept pace with demand for long enough that the gap between cost and market price has become self-sustaining and is now functioning as a permanent feature of the housing market rather than a temporary condition of undersupply. The 850-square-foot apartment listed at $4,800 is priced at $4,800 because someone will pay $4,800 for it. Someone will pay $4,800 for it because there are few alternatives.
Wolfe’s guide is a rational response to an irrational market: given that the apartments exist at the prices they exist, the guide helps people live in them. This is genuinely useful. It is also a document that describes, in twelve steps, the full distance between “housing” and “adequate housing” in contemporary Manhattan.
The Studio In Question
It has a Murphy bed, two mirrors, and a listing description that says “cozy but efficient.” It rents for $3,200 per month. It has three applicants. For NYC real estate satire at The Onion.
New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition
New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.
Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/