Natasha Pearce had only visited New York City once for ten days at the age of 24 before deciding to leave Australia and make the city her home.
She came as a tourist, rented a room on the Upper East Side through Airbnb, and immediately felt the volume turned up about life around her.
“Everything I saw in movies as a kid, I finally saw in real life,” said Ms. Pearce, now 30. “We went to Broadway shows and the Top of the Rock and the Statue of Liberty.” We went to the Times Square. Everything felt exciting.”
However, the jump would take time – and multiple moves.
She returned to Brisbane but began exploring how a permanent 10,000 mile move would work.
“I texted the girl whose room we were renting and asked her, ‘How did you move to New York?’ How much did it cost?’ I got all the information I could from her because I was so keen on hopefully living there one day,” Ms Pearce said.
As Australia sealed off its borders during the pandemic, her longing grew. By the end of 2021, when international travel was sanctioned again, she had waited long enough.
“This is the time,” she recalls telling herself.
However, finding a place to land would be more difficult than she had anticipated. She arrived in May 2022 with two suitcases and some savings and was staying in hotels while she searched Facebook rental groups for a sublet that would accept a renter with no work visa and no credit history in the United States. In June, she found one — a room with no windows for $2,700 a month in an apartment on the Lower East Side, and offered to pay $3,000 just to seal the deal.
“I was so desperate. It was a crazy time,” she said.
She got the windowless sublet, but knew she would have to leave the country when her 90-day tourist visa expired if she didn’t also get a job. So she focused on her job search and pursued her studies for a degree in Marketing and Digital Strategy, which she earned online.
New York City, while still exciting, felt more complicated this time. She was concerned about gun safety in the United States, and the city seemed to be struggling more with homelessness and crime. After a stint as a tourist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the contrasts on the Lower East Side became apparent.
“It’s a little dingy,” she admitted. “But it also has a lot of character and there’s a lot going on.”
In July she had to give up her subtenancy and still hadn’t found a job. Not wanting to return home, she traveled to Spain, a country where she had studied abroad and spoke the language, and bought herself another 90 days on another tourist visa while continuing to search for jobs in New York online. She almost gave up.
“I got to a point where I couldn’t support myself financially if I couldn’t find a job, so I started looking for work in both New York and Sydney,” she said. But just as the three-month deadline was up in October, she was offered a job as a digital marketing coordinator in New York City with offices in the Financial District.
$1,540 FOR A SHARE | LITTLE ITALY, MANHATTAN
Natasha Pearce, 30
Profession: She is the Digital Marketing Coordinator for the New York Academy of Sciences.
To occupy the smallest room: “No one else really wanted it and someone had to take it,” Ms Pearce said. “It’s a small bedroom with a small window and a small closet with no door. But I was glad to have saved some money.”
The positive thing about so many steps: “It was difficult and I felt insecure. But the silver lining was that I got to experience life in so many New York neighborhoods.”
By Thanksgiving, Mrs. Pearce was back in New York with her two suitcases.
This time, however, finding a long-term landing spot would prove just as troublesome.
From Spain, Ms Pearce had found another month-long sublet, this time a sunny rented bedroom in a two-bedroom flat in NoLIta. The $2,100 price tag was affordable for her, and as she browsed the listings on Facebook, she noticed a trend.
Dozens of online posters had secured rental apartments at low prices during the pandemic and now rent increases of 40 percent and more are threatened. They looked for new homes that were more affordable and often gave up their old homes before their leases expired.
“They’ve all been desperate for something and if you find it before your lease expires, just take it and find someone else to take it over the last month before the rent goes up,” she said.
She was also exploring long-term options on StreetEasy, hoping to stay under $2,000 a month and be a short subway ride from her office. But landlords kept turning her down: Without references from previous landlords in the US, she couldn’t keep up in the overcrowded pool of applicants.
“I would have a really hard time signing a lease,” she said.
Two weeks into her stint at NoLIta, panic set in, she changed gears and began scouring Facebook again for short-term sublets.
She found another tenant vacating a studio in Chelsea ahead of an upcoming rent increase and was relieved to get a short-term landing spot in a luxury rooftop building with a gym for $2,200 a month. The landlord had warned that he would soon raise the rent to $4,000, so the tenant moved out.
Both of her suitcases were now overflowing with bedding, kitchen utensils, exercise equipment and odds and ends, and she was also lugging around cardboard boxes.
In February, she was staying in an Airbnb and was upset when she realized she had to sublet again. She called an Uber XL to help haul her stuff and moved into a $1,600-a-month one-bedroom two-bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that was so cozy under the Marcy Avenue stop at the Overpass of the Williamsburg Bridge lay that she could hear the MTA’s automatic announcements whenever a train passes.
“I told myself this would be the last short-term sublease,” she said. “I had come so far that I couldn’t go back.”
In March, she received a Facebook message from Alyssa Vitolo, 26, who works in a travel agency and whose lease is about to expire. Ms Vitolo had already connected with Mariel Jastrebsky, also a 26-year-old food and beverage scientist, via Facebook, and the two women had been looking for apartments. They had found a three-bedroom house in Little Italy for $4,900 a month and were looking for a third woman to join them.
Ms Vitolo and Ms Pearce met over FaceTime for a 10-minute chat and without meeting Ms Jastrebsky, Ms Pearce agreed to join their trio. The landlord had no doubts that Ms Pearce was capable of signing and so she signed the lease before she had even viewed the flat.
“I became more and more desperate as time went on, but I was also in a really good mood,” she said.
After splitting the $9,800 cost of the security deposit and the first month’s rent equally, the three women toured the apartment and Ms Pearce chose the smallest room. She now pays $1,540 a month and her roommates pay $1,680 each. The room fits a full bed and dresser, and when she works from home, she goes to the kitchen table or to a nearby cafe.
Most of the furniture was provided by Ms. Vitolo and Ms. Jastrebsky, and Ms. Pearce contributed a used television that she bought for $150.
Although the three women found each other under the pressure of the rental market, they have become friends. When Ms Pearce ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon in April, they went to Coney Island in the rain to cheer her on.
“It’s really nice to settle in,” Ms Pearce said. “I’ve moved my stuff to three different countries about eleven times in eleven months. I’ve been working towards this for a very long time.”