Caroline Turner (via LinkedIn)
Our most recent Lawyerly Lairs have been rather lavish — a $12 million apartment, a $4.4 million mansion, an $11 million beach house — but we are happy to profile prosaic properties as well. Recall, for example, Lawyerly Lairs: The 99 Percent Edition.
That post was based on Joyce Cohen’s popular New York Times feature, The Hunt, which is the source of today’s topic too:
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After her graduation from Columbia Law School last spring, Caroline Turner returned home to the Washington, D.C., area to study for the bar exam. In late summer, with the exam behind her and a job in New York in the financial district ahead, she began the hunt for a place to rent.
Which bar exam did Turner take? The article doesn’t say. If she took New York, those results came out last Friday.
Caroline Turner’s new employer is also unclear. Her LinkedIn profile shows that she summered at the IP firm of Cooper & Dunham, but that firm is located at 30 Rock, not the financial district.
Back to Turner’s housing hunt:
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Ms. Turner, a 2013 graduate of American University, had a budget of $3,000 to $3,500 a month for a one-bedroom. She needed a place that would allow a large dog, preferably in the East Village and preferably with a dishwasher and a washer-dryer.
A dishwasher: necessity, or luxury?
Assuming that Turner is earning a typical New York starting salary of $160,000 to $180,000, her housing budget is eminently sensible. The rule of thumb is to spend no more than 30 percent of your gross income on housing (although the rule can bend a bit in high-cost areas like New York City). Spending $3,500 a month in rent amounts to $42,000 a year, which is just 26 percent of $160,000 and 23 percent of $180,000.
As for Turner’s desire for a dishwasher and washer/dryer, people in other parts of the country might scoff, but those are luxuries here in Manhattan. Her broker, Lindsay Dalberth, warned Turner that “a dishwasher and a washer-dryer were rare in the East Village, where the housing stock consists primarily of old-law tenement walk-up buildings.” Even people who buy rather than rent in the East Village — and drop $500,000 on their purchase — don’t get dishwashers.
Columbia Law grads are used to getting what they want, but the NYC housing market is notoriously brutal. Did Caroline Turner find what she was looking for?