i am moving to new york

!!!

i hope this means i will meet a bunch of you!!

(seriously, hooray hooray, this is very good news.)

And I have moved to New York, too, (well, Jersey City) so summer ilx meetup when geeta arrives!

1. do we really need an apartment broker? and if so, do you have any to recommend?
2. (western) queens is a possibility but we've been told it takes hours to get between there and brooklyn. true?
3. got any great ideas for finding jobs (me for editing, her for web development)?
4. any neighborhoods we should absolutely avoid?
5. um, i'm sure there's a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting that i need to know. any help would be appreciated!

xoxo

no. fuck brokers.

2. (western) queens is a possibility but we've been told it takes hours to get between there and brooklyn. true?

i have no idea what "western queens" is but if it means long island city and/or astoria, then no. take one g train or one b61 bus.

3. got any great ideas for finding jobs (me for editing, her for web development)?

no, i can't even get myself a better job. it's probably a bad idea to move here without a job first, imo.

4. any neighborhoods we should absolutely avoid?

no.

5. um, i'm sure there's a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting that i need to know. any help would be appreciated!

ok.

as a side note, long island city -- which is even more inconvenient to get to/from, esp after the water taxi stops running -- is going absolutely bananas real estate-wise. and i second hstencil's advice about trying to find a job as early as possible in the whole process of moving here.

This is just my opinion, but you'd better really want to live in NYC to make it worth all the negatives. I lived in an exciting mega-city for 5 years before coming to NYC, so the energy and buzz doesn't do much for me, and the other positives are basically replicable elsewhere (on maybe a smaller scale). All the aggravations are really aggravating. I'm done.

http://newyork.craigslist.org/

This is where I got my current job in publishing:

http://mediabistro.com/

The way I always found apartments was to look at the listings, find one that looked good, then call the number. Often as not, that will lead to the broker. Sometimes the same brokers have the same apartments so they won't necessarily be that much help. I used Citi Habitats the last time. They're okay. But it's not like they showed me a lot of stuff. I found the add for the apartment I wanted to see, they showed it to me, charged me over $1000 for the right to pay rent to live there and we both went our separate ways.

There are no neighborhoods you should avoid, but the further out you go and the less popular neighborhoods you go into, the less competitiion there will be for those apartments, and the less stressful it will be to find one. If you really want to be near a particular area in Brooklyn, look on the subway map and see what trains go there, then find a neighborhood a few stops out or more.

x-post

do you belong to a gym? engage in any athletic pursuits?

what sort of web development? php/mysql/etc?

I'm also looking to move to bk and have been advised as follows: no Bed-Stuy, most other places are fine.

Personally I did not feel safe walking around Red Hook alone at night, but maybe I was just paranoid.

oh, drats. i know someone looking for a freelance php/sql person. oh well.

Ha, how come this shit is never posted when I am jobless?

haha! technically i'm only half-whitey, but you wouldn't know it from my skin. i can hardly get a tan :[

anecdotal evidence was provided with the bed-stuy warning, but i've never been there myself so i'll leave it at that until i check it out.

so not even the jay-z connection was enough, hey?!?

Anyone know how to transfer a Con Edison account (I'm leaving and want to transfer my account to roomie)? I was on the phone for half an hour going in circles.

Should I just close the account and have him open another?

Have your roomie call them up and start up a new account for the apartment in his/her name; they'll automatically close your account, but it's not hard to pay the balance off online. It might take a few tries, but that's how I did it, and the people on the phone there are surprisingly nice.

great, thanks for the help, burt!

so uh, 3 days...

I am afraid of the cold

it ain't so bad tbh

yeah sometimes I think my california friends are just trying to scare me. and east coast->california people talking about weather are sorta like ex-smokers talking about smoking.

good luck!

btw everyone in nyc tried to scare me about the west coast and it's not like they said, so...

haha what did they say!

they were like 'you're not gonna be allowed to be saracastic anymore you know, right?'

basically like 'you're going to turn into some crunchy freak' which of course is an option but not a requirement at all.

it's true, we are a simple and innocent peoples

So yeah, I decided this afternoon that while Montreal is an amazing place to live, I am in dire need of new challenges and decided to move to New York in the coming months / a year maximum. So, as of, 2013, Brooklyn or Queens?

jersey city

oui, mais encore?

hey good for you, VHS

I'm just wondering if there is a preferred neighborhood/borough, if there is some places to absolutely avoid, etc

my serious advice is to make a list of five possible neighborhoods and wander through them to see how you feel about them. there are lots of great neighborhoods in ny (and in jersey), and some are even sort of affordable (at least relatively).

hey, my move to a (much) cheaper studio next June/July should be a snap cuz now i can't even afford fuckin' BAY RIDGE!

http://brokelyn.com/bay-ridge-9-3-yearly-jump-brooklyns-king-rent-increase-month/

does anybody know if there is an actual physical store besides ikea in NY that sells tubes of kalles and similar stuff?