Having been a Slave of New York multiple times in my life, aka, the roommate with the small overpriced room renting from the leaseholder who is richer and more established and has a huge room and pays almost the same rent but keeps his/her stuff all over the place so that I was essentially a gimp in a box,* I will never, ever, violate a person’s human rights like that. So, now that I am renting a room in my apartment, I am actually charging them less than me and taking the smaller room with no windows for myself. I hope to set a precedent in decency. Here is my honest, non-exploitative promotional email to first potential roommate:

So, I have a railroad apartment, and there are two bedrooms, next to each other, with an exterior hallway. I don’t need both, so I am looking to rent the larger one out Nov 1. It’s 10 x 15’ and has 14 foot ceilings and hardwood floors and two large windows out onto the street. I would charge $700 which includes utilities. It has a nice queen sized bed which the roommate could use. It’s in front of the L train stop, so transportation is really convenient. A couple of blocks away are some cool restaurants and cafes and a small grocery store. There are cool bars scattered around the neighborhood, and there’s the cheapest laundry place on the planet a block away.

The apartment has a big backyard. It also has roaches in the kitchen which I have been trying to get rid of. The room you would rent is right on the street so it can be loud. I am very neat and clean, friendly, and generally prefer to be friends with my roommates rather than act like we are two islands living in the same space by budget constraints.

The neighborhood is really hip and full of musicians and artists. It’s industrial. It’s also really dirty and ugly. Like, if your parents visit you in my neighborhood, they probably freak. I don’t mind though, because the coolness factor makes it really exciting. There is a circus, a free cinema night in a warehouse, an underground punk club, like 6 awesome bars, and the coolest joint in NYC and maybe the world, Roberta’s.

*Once I even rented a room in a place where the leaseholder didn’t pay any rent herself, instead making it up with the roommates’ overpriced rents, one of whom paid $500 a month to sleep on top of a closet. For better or for worse, I ran out of the apartment in my sports bra and shorts after coming back from a jog and facing what I felt to be a threat to my physical well-being from the angry leaseholder because I asked her to buy toilet paper, after a pipe in the ceiling had flooded the bathroom for the second time in two weeks, drenching the 40th toilet paper roll I had bought since moving in with yellow liquid. I only went back with a friend for one hour to get my stuff and leave and in the meantime wore a borrowed skirt and a tee-shirt bought from a curio shop in Times Square that said “Welcome to New York, duck motherf*****” and featured a pointed gun barrel. It seemed to summarize my experience with the city so far.