This Week’s Best NYC Rentals Are In… Jersey

146 Fenimore Street, C1, in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Keller Williams Realty Empire

Listen, it’s not as though getting an apartment in New York has ever been easy. But one could probably argue it has never been harder than it is right now. The most god-awful studios are regularly renting for thousands and thousands of dollars with lines of interested tenants out the door. Here, we’ll find the actually worth-looking-ats, the actually worth-the-costs, and the surprisingly affordable-for-those-parquet-floors from around the internet.

Because I’ve been neglecting New Jersey for months, I headed to Weehawken, North Bergen, and Hoboken this week to see what was on offer. Unfortunately, it turns out there’s quite a lot — for quite a bit less money. Ya hate to see it. If the PATH isn’t your thing, I also made stops in Brooklyn and Queens, hitting Astoria, Prospect–Lefferts Gardens, Bed-Stuy, and Prospect Heights. Along the way, I found a lot to like in the quiet enclave of Kensington, which is sort of the Weehawken of Brooklyn? I’m still workshopping that comparison. Stay tuned for a special dispatch on AI-generated StreetEasy residents toward the bottom.

$2,200, 2-bedroom: A very Harry Potter attic apartment.

$2,500, 3-bedroom: An entire free-standing red brick house for that price?? Pinch me, I must be in Jersey.

$3,500, 3-bedroom: Similar wedding-cake-style, free-standing home that’s not as cheap as the above but still pretty cheap for a whole house. Bad lighting fixtures and strong hardwoods throughout.

$4,750, studio: In case you’re interested in taking over the lease of a nail salon.

From left: 21 49th Street, #1, in Weehawken, New Jersey. Photo: Serhant New Jersey LLCPhoto: Serhant New Jersey LLC

From top: 21 49th Street, #1, in Weehawken, New Jersey. Photo: Serhant New Jersey LLCPhoto: Serhant New Jersey LLC

$2,650, 2-bedroom: First-floor apartment of this whole San Francisco–esque clapboard house. Strong bones and bay windows, charming pocket doors, and radiators that double as decorative objets.

$3,300, 3-bedroom: Just another free-standing house with washer-dryer, backyard, space to park your car — all the suburban amenities, really.

$2.100, 1-bedroom: Bright, capacious, and cheap as heck.

$2,400, 1-bedroom: Funky layout and some really bad curtains — but if you squint and look past them, you’ll be able to make out the parquet potential and the perfect shade of baby-pink ceramic bathroom tiling.

$2,750, studio: A commercial loft that’s technically not for living as there’s no kitchen. But who needs a kitchen when you’re satiated by all that square footage!

$3,300, 1-bedroom: WBFA (wood-burning fireplace alert).

$4,000, 2-bedroom: Two lessons here: One, this is a strong example of how not to stage an apartment. Two, look past the staging and you’ll see prewar potential.

$7,000, studio: A commercial space in a converted church that’s honestly left me speechless.

From left: Photo: Coldwell Banker RealtyPhoto: Coldwell Banker Realty

From top: Photo: Coldwell Banker RealtyPhoto: Coldwell Banker Realty

$3,800, 3-bedroom: Triple threat: good parquets, nice wainscoting, and a two-block walk to the park.

$3,600, 2-bedroom: Another two-block walk from the park. Good bones here — though, tragically, they skewed a little too dark on the stained floors.

35 Clarkson Avenue, #4D, in Prospect Lefferts Garden.
Photo: REAL New York

$2,800, 1-bedroom: Relatively cheap and totally fine.

$4,500, 2-bedroom: Capital-B built-ins at every turn: in the foyer as a bench, in the kitchen for your spices, in the living room for your books. Love that!

$3,000, 4-bedroom: Yes, the overhead lighting is reminiscent of your strip-mall dentist’s office, but the extra-wide wood planks do a good job of transporting you somewhere else entirely.

$3,450, 1-bedroom: The rent is seriously climbing in Bed-Stuy, but the floors here are perfect.

$3,650, 1-bedroom: They overengineered the reno here, but the light is right and there’s a sizable backyard (that’s completely paved over).

$5,700, 4-bedroom: Can’t tell if it’s just poorly staged or if there’s a more systemic design issue at play. But four bedrooms is a lot of bedrooms either way.

$3,600, 1-bedroom: A prewar that I’ve listed before and will list again until it’s rented!

I spend a lot of my weeks wandering through the facsimiles of apartments on StreetEasy. As with everything else, AI has been creeping into the imagery, sticking out like a sore (and often elongated) thumb, creating uncanny renderings of spaces that shouldn’t be that bright, couldn’t possibly be that big, and definitely don’t come furnished quite like that.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed something new: the emergence of fake (or poorly photoshopped) people. To borrow one of AI’s favorite phrases, it’s been a quiet emergence. So I started collecting these images of slightly deformed unicorns wandering through luxury condos — because who knows how much longer we’ll get to peer through this strange little window before the technology becomes alarmingly adept and becomes the view itself.