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Natasha Pearce had visited New York City only once, for 10 days at the age of 24, before deciding she wanted to leave Australia and make the city her home.
She came as a tourist, renting an Upper East Side room on Airbnb, and immediately felt like the volume on life was turned up around her.
“All the things I would see in the movies growing up, I finally saw them in real life,” said Ms. Pearce, now 30. “We went to Broadway shows and the Top of the Rock and the Statue of Liberty. We went to Times Square. Everything felt exciting.”
Making the leap, however, would take time — and multiple relocations.
She returned to Brisbane, but was starting to do reconnaissance on how a permanent 10,000-mile move would work.
“I messaged the girl whose room we rented, and I remember asking her, ‘How did you move to New York? How much did it cost?’ I got all the information I could from her, because I was so interested in hopefully living there one day,” said Ms. Pearce.
When Australia sealed its borders during the pandemic, her yearning increased. By late 2021, with international travel again sanctioned, she had waited long enough.
“This is the time,” she remembers telling herself.
Finding a place to land, however, would be harder than she anticipated. She arrived in May 2022 with two suitcases and some savings, staying in hotels while she scoured Facebook apartment-rental groups for a sublet that would accept a tenant with no work visa and no credit history in the United States. In June, she found one — a $2,700-a-month room without a window in an apartment on the Lower East Side, and offered to pay $3,000 just to seal the deal.
“I was so desperate. It was a crazy time,” she said.
She got the windowless sublet, but knew that if she didn’t also get a job, she would have to leave the country when her 90-day tourist visa expired. So she focused on her job search, as well as studying for a graduate certificate in marketing and digital strategy, which she was earning online.
New York City, while still thrilling, felt more complicated this time around. Gun safety in the United States worried her, and the city seemed to be struggling more with homelessness and crime. After staying as a tourist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the contrasts on the Lower East Side were apparent.
“It’s a little bit grungy,” she acknowledged. “But it also has a lot of character and a lot going on.”
By July, she had to leave the sublet, and she still hadn’t found a job. She didn’t want to return home, so she headed to Spain, a country where she had studied abroad and spoke the language, buying herself another 90 days on yet another tourist visa as she continued to search for New York jobs online. She almost gave up.
“I was getting to the point where I couldn’t support myself financially if I didn’t find a job, and I started looking for work both in New York and in Sydney,” she said. But just as the three-month deadline was approaching in October, she was offered a position as a digital marketing coordinator in New York City, with offices in the Financial District.
$1,540 FOR A SHARE | LITTLE ITALY, MANHATTAN
Natasha Pearce, 30
Occupation: She is the digital marketing coordinator for The New York Academy of Sciences.
On taking the smallest room: “No one else really wanted it and someone had to take it,” Ms. Pearce said. “It’s a small bedroom with one small window and a little inlet closet with no door. But I was happy to save a little bit of money.”
On the bright side of so many moves: “It was difficult and I felt unsettled. But the silver lining was that I got to experience living in so many New York neighborhoods.”
Ms. Pearce was back in New York with her two suitcases by Thanksgiving.
This time around, finding a long-term place to land, however, would prove just as vexing.
From Spain, Ms. Pearce had found another one-month sublet, this time a sunny rented bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment in NoLIta. The price, at $2,100, was affordable for her, and while combing listings on Facebook, she noticed a trend.
Dozens of online posters had snapped up below-rate rental apartments during the pandemic and were now facing looming rent increases of 40 percent or more. They were scrambling to find new apartments that were more affordable, often ditching their old places before their leases expired.
“They were all desperate to find something, and if you find it earlier than your lease expires, you just take it, and find someone else to take over the last month before the rent goes up,” she said.
She also looked at long-term options on StreetEasy, hoping to stay under $2,000 a month and within a short subway ride of her office. But landlords continually turned her away: Without references from past landlords in the United States, she couldn’t compete in the crowded applicant pool.
“It was going to be really hard for me to sign a lease,” she said.
Two weeks into her time in NoLIta, panic set in, and she switched gears and went back to combing Facebook for short-term sublets.
She found another renter who was vacating a studio in Chelsea ahead of a pending rent increase, and was relieved to get a short-term landing pad in a luxury building with a rooftop and gym for $2,200 a month. The landlord had warned he would soon increase rent to $4,000, so the tenant was vacating.
Her two suitcases were now overflowing with bedding, kitchen supplies, exercise equipment and knickknacks, and she was carting cardboard boxes around as well.
By February she was staying in an Airbnb and upset to realize she would have to sublet yet again. She called an Uber XL to help her lug her belongings and moved into a $1,600-a-month bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, tucked so snugly underneath the Marcy Avenue stop on the Williamsburg Bridge overpass that she could hear the MTA’s automated announcements whenever a train rumbled through.
“I told myself this would be the last short-term sublet,” she said. “I had come so far I couldn’t go back.”
In March, she got a Facebook message from Alyssa Vitolo, 26, who works at a travel agency and whose lease was about to expire. Ms. Vitolo had already connected via Facebook with Mariel Jastrebsky, a food and beverage scientist who is also 26, and the two women had been searching for apartments. They’d found a three-bedroom for $4,900 a month in Little Italy, and they were seeking a third woman to join them.
Ms. Vitolo and Ms. Pearce connected on FaceTime for a 10-minute chat, and without meeting Ms. Jastrebsky, Ms. Pearce agreed to join their trio. The landlord didn’t quibble with Ms. Pearce’s fitness to sign, so before even seeing the apartment, she signed the lease.
“I had become more desperate as time went on, but I also had really good vibes about it,” she said.
After evenly splitting the $9,800 cost for the security deposit and first month’s rent, the three women visited the apartment, and Ms. Pearce chose the smallest room. She now pays $1,540 a month and her roommates each pay $1,680. The room snugly fits a full bed and dresser, and when she works from home, she heads to the kitchen table or a nearby cafe.
Furnishings were provided mostly by Ms. Vitolo and Ms. Jastrebsky, and Ms. Pearce contributed a secondhand television she bought for $150.
Despite finding each other under rental-market duress, the three women have become friends. When Ms. Pearce ran the Brooklyn half marathon in April, they went out in the rain to Coney Island to cheer her on.
“It’s really nice to be settled in,” Ms. Pearce said. “I moved my stuff around about 11 times in 11 months across three different countries. It’s something I was working toward for a very long time.”
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