Married, With Roommates
Michelle Higa Fox and Stuart Higa Fox, center, in their home in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They are flanked by their roommate Ege Soyuer, left, with Merlin, Mrs. Fox’s corgi, and their former roommate Theodore Przybyla, who now lives in the apartment upstairs.
Living with roommates is practically a rite of passage in New York City. It often begins with far too many people sharing too little space and ends with a move into an apartment of one’s own, or with that special someone.
But with rents reaching new highs, single 20-somethings are not the only ones looking for someone with whom to share the rent. Couples are living with roommates even after they’ve tied the knot.
“If we were in Iowa, it would be weird,” said Josh Jupiter, 28, who, with his wife, Isabel Martín Piñeiro, 26, recently posted an ad on SpareRoom.com seeking a roommate to share the two-bedroom, one-bath apartment they rent in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “If we were in Michigan, it would be weird. In New York City, it’s like, ‘How many people can you cram into an apartment, married or not?’ We live in one of the most expensive cities in the world.”
Sure, it may sound like the makings of a reality TV show. And there are plenty of ways to cut housing costs other than taking on a roommate. But couples like Mr. Jupiter and Ms. Piñeiro say they would rather relinquish a spare room than contend with an extra-long commute, a smaller place or a less desirable area.
“This is the time, really,” said Mr. Jupiter, a freelance production supervisor and producer. “Right now, it’s important for us to save our money.”
How many couples have decided that three — or four — is not a crowd is impossible to say. One of the few measures is a snapshot taken by SpareRoom.com. Of the 1,076 ads offering rooms for rent in New York City on the site last month, one in five indicated that couples were welcome, said Matt Hutchinson, a spokesman. And one in 10 of the 1,632 “room wanted” ads were posted by couples.
“Affordability is the story of the moment,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “Sky-high rents mean having your own place as a couple isn’t always an option.”
Mr. Jupiter met Ms. Piñeiro, a writer and translator, in Spain last year. She moved to New York in August and they were married in October.
Their ad, posted in February, caught the eye of Joey Close, 28, a credit reporter for a financial magazine start-up based in Britain. “The fact that they were a married couple around my age was a bonus,” said Mr. Close, who moved in last month and pays $800 a month, which covers half the rent and a flat fee for utilities.
“I figured there would be less chance of them splitting up and then having troubles with their part of the rent,” Mr. Close said. Plus, he added, “My girlfriend is very happy with me sharing with a married couple rather than single guys who will want to go and meet girls.”
From the point of view of couples, the cash collected from a roommate can outweigh the trade-offs as rents in the city continue to rise. The median monthly rent in March in Manhattan was $3,395, up 6.1 percent over the same period in 2014, the second highest level reached in more than seven years, according to the appraiser Jonathan J. Miller in a report for Douglas Elliman. And renters aren’t finding much relief in Brooklyn or Queens, where rents have been increasing for some time.
Hefty rents make it difficult to save for a house, and tight credit has turned securing a mortgage into an obstacle course. Too few listings are pushing up the price of starter apartments.
“Couples with dual incomes that in any other market would be able to buy are not only finding it challenging, but they have to compromise,” said Sydney Blumstein, an associate broker at the Corcoran Group, noting that several of her friends are living with their parents to save money.
Ms. Blumstein has been working to help Harjinder Gill and Raj Veluvolu, young doctors who were married last year, find a place of their own. They currently share a three-bedroom in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, with two roommates. Their path to this living arrangement started with Dr. Veluvolu living with Travis Meyer, 31, a colleague. When Dr. Veluvolu became engaged to Dr. Gill, she moved into the apartment. They were all medical residents at the time.
They paid roughly $900 a month apiece, with the couple using the empty bedroom as a study. Given their hectic schedules, which often include night shifts, “the three of us were actually not all home at the same time that often,” Dr. Meyer said. When they were, they could retreat to their bedrooms on opposite sides of the apartment if they wanted some privacy. More often they would hang out together, sharing meals and watching TV.
Dr. Veluvolu and Dr. Gill started looking for a place of their own after their wedding. But once they had crunched the numbers and toured open houses, they realized they couldn’t afford one. “Realistically, we don’t have the down payment to even come close to buying something,” said Dr. Veluvolu, 32, a chief resident at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.
And for a one-bedroom rental in the same neighborhood, he said, “we’d have to spend an additional $1,000” a month. So, for now at least, the couple have decided to continue apartment-sharing until they can find something they can afford. Last month, another person joined the mix: Dr. Meyer’s boyfriend.
“If we were living in any other city,” said Dr. Gill, 30, an attending physician at SUNY Downstate, “the situation would not exist: a married couple living with a roommate and his boyfriend. It’s New York City.”
When Dr. Veluvolu and Dr. Gill eventually do move out, Dr. Meyer and his boyfriend plan to take over their space and rent out the spare room. “I guess I’m just keeping up the tradition,” he said.
As with any roommate situation, tact is required in these households.
A few weeks ago, for example, Dr. Veluvolu and Dr. Gill were celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary when Dr. Meyer and his partner came home. “They had a bottle of Champagne and Raj was making dinner for Harj and there were flowers on the table,” Dr. Meyer said. He and his boyfriend quickly retreated to their bedroom and ordered pizza. “We said, ‘Let them have their moment.’ ” And Dr. Gill said she reveled in the time the couple had to themselves when their roommate was on vacation. “It does take away from intimacy,” she said. “When he’s not there it makes a big difference. We can be more like a couple.”
“We can walk around naked more often,” Dr. Veluvolu chimed in.
The way Gregg Anderson and Peter Talley look at it, renting out the spare room in their two-bedroom, one-bath apartment is plain old common sense. “Realistically we could afford to live here by ourselves,” said Mr. Anderson, 46, a corporate meeting planner and freelance interior decorator. But the extra cash they receive each month has allowed them to buy a piece of property in Texas.
“It’s like a part-time job,” he said.
The couple married in 2011 and decided to take on their first roommate nearly three years ago when they moved from a one-bedroom rental in a Hell’s Kitchen luxury building to a two-bedroom on a higher floor. Since then, they have had four roommates, including two who worked at the United Nations and needed a place to stay for several months.
“We do get flak from friends and family,” Mr. Anderson said. “I say, ‘Do the math.’ ” The couple charge just under $2,000 a month for the spare room, or a little less than half the rent. “That’s a lot of money to say no to for an extra bedroom.”
It doesn’t hurt that they are often not at home. Mr. Anderson travels frequently for his job. Mr. Talley, 37, works long hours as a software engineer for a financial firm in Midtown Manhattan. “In this small space, we can go a week without seeing a roommate,” Mr. Anderson said.
Still, having an extra person around is not always ideal, he said, like “when you’re in a hurry and waiting for the bathroom” or when their roommate has a friend who wants to visit for two weeks.
While married couples say the decision to share digs with a roommate is primarily financial, a variety of factors may be influencing the greater openness to communal living, from rental buildings with amenity spaces that give residents elbow room outside of their small apartments to the rise of the sharing economy.
Lindsay Shields, 33, a high school drama teacher, lives with her husband and a roommate in a two-bedroom two-bath apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. “The idea is, you get married you have your own place,” she said. “I think our society is finding more ways to share and because the economy is what it is, people are realizing it’s just not possible to do that anymore. Space has become a commodity.”
Ms. Shields and her husband moved in together soon after they began dating in 2007. They married in 2012 and have had roommates practically the entire time. “There was one year in our relationship we didn’t have any roommates, and it was just so quiet,” she said.
Living with roommates is “much more cost effective,” she added. “We live together well with other people, so we might as well share the space.”
Having lived with roommates for so long, mostly students attending nearby Pratt Institute, Ms. Shields has developed some guidelines for peaceful coexistence. In the kitchen, each household member has a refrigerator shelf, cabinet space and two pantry shelves.
“We’ve had roommates before who are big cooks and those that are takeout-friendly. We do not take their shelves even if they don’t use them,” she said. If anyone plans to have more than four guests over at a time, he or she must give the other roommates a heads-up. “We also have found it easier to keep things to a flat fee,” she said, noting that dividing up utility bills, Internet, cable and other fees can be “exhausting and tedious.”
For some couples, communal living is a lifestyle. In 2005, with the help of her family, Michelle Higa Fox, 34, purchased a two-family house on Powers Street in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and invited five friends to split the rent. The roommates included her best friend from seventh grade and two college classmates with whom she ended up founding an animation studio. “For me, it was very natural to always have people around,” said Mrs. Fox, who grew up with her parents and a younger brother in a house shared with an aunt, a grandmother and, at one point, a few cousins. “There was always someone home to talk to.”
In 2007 she met the man who later became her husband, Stuart Higa Fox, 32, a writer. Eight months later, he moved into the PowerHouse, as the roommates refer to it. For a few years the couple shared the upstairs two-bedroom apartment with a roommate. They eventually moved downstairs to a slightly larger space, also shared with a roommate. In 2012, they tied the knot.
Mrs. Fox jokes that if common-law marriage were recognized in New York, she would have been the common-law wife of a good friend, Nate, who lived at the house from 2005 until 2013. “So, even though Stuart and I have been together for seven and half years and married for two and half,” Mrs. Fox said, “he still hasn’t beat out Nate’s record of living with me for eight years.”
Over the last decade, that sense of humor, along with an open-door policy, has fostered a familial atmosphere at the PowerHouse, with people coming and going freely among the four floors. Roommates have attended each other’s dinner parties, hosted an annual backyard pig roast together and showered attention on Merlin, Mrs. Fox’s affable corgi, who wanders into the bedroom of his choice on any given morning. If someone moved out, a friend of a friend stepped in to fill the void.
“Having that sense of community has been a huge benefit living in the city,” said Theodore Przybyla, 32, who works in the philanthropic sector and has lived with the Foxes since 2009, at first sharing the upstairs apartment with them.
As in any family, there are occasional quarrels. Mr. Przybyla said there have been times when “you could cut the tension with a knife.”
There have also been days when he would have liked Mr. Fox to wear more clothes. “At the beginning, Stuart was freelancing. He was in a robe all day, every day. I’d be getting ready for work, putting on a shirt and tie and he’d be eating a bowl of cereal in his robe.”
For their part, said Mr. Fox, “I would have liked to have more sex on the couch, but we ended up saving on our cable bill.”
“I usually go with the kitchen,” Mrs. Fox chimed in.
Joking aside, Mr. and Mrs. Fox said, they would not have traded the experience for anything. In fact, with the help of Mark Martov, a salesman at Corcoran, they just bought a two-family house in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a former roommate — Mrs. Fox’s best friend from seventh grade. The couple plan to rent out the PowerHouse.
And when they move with her friend to their new place, she said, “I do envision still doing family dinner and Sunday TV together.”
Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Karsten Moran/The New York Times.