With Rents Going Down, They Looked to Trade Up. Which of These Homes Would You Choose?

In her undergraduate days at New York University, Stacy Sazo spent two years in the dorms, then moved around Lower Manhattan, always with roommates.

“Brooklyn was not on that list at any point,” she said. “But after college, when everyone started spreading out, a lot of friends were migrating to Williamsburg.”

Even her boyfriend, Nicholas Giroux-Doehring, whom she had met in a macroeconomics class freshman year, landed in a closet-free two-bedroom in South Williamsburg, paying $2,200 a month. Living there, he learned how much was wrong with it: neighbor noise, excessive heat, stolen packages, occasional roaches and a finicky door lock.

When the pandemic began last spring, they retreated to their family homes — she to Westchester, he to Pennsylvania.

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In late summer, the couple decided to find a one-bedroom in Brooklyn. They had a budget of around $3,000 a month and hoped for a place with plenty of sunlight and enough space for both to work from home.

“We started seeing rents going down, and that was exciting,” Ms. Sazo, 25, said. “We had the luxury of time. So that was enjoyable, but it was also difficult because nothing was rushing us to make a decision. It gave us more room to be indecisive.”

Unwilling to rent anything sight unseen, they scheduled in-person showings at promising listings during visits to the city. “Pictures aren’t always honest,” Ms. Sazo said. “Or they always cut out the worst selling factor of the apartment.”

She wanted to be close to a subway, as she was planning at some point to return to her Midtown office, where she works in digital marketing. Mr. Giroux-Doehring, 26, is a product manager at a tech startup and will continue to work remotely.

Having lived in a rundown building, he was drawn to the modern high-rises in and around Downtown Brooklyn. They all had nice kitchens, and the one-bedrooms were usually about 600 square feet.

“Nick described those apartments as cookie-cutter,” Ms. Sazo said. “They looked like all the other apartments you see in modern high-rises.”

All the buildings were offering several months of free rent, which concerned the couple, who were planning to stay longer than a single lease term and thought they wouldn’t be able to afford a big rent hike when they renewed the lease. So they also looked at smaller buildings in the Williamsburg area.

Both had lived in places where they could hear noises the neighbors made — even coughing and sneezing — and they worried about that in badly insulated new construction, where they listened for creaky floors or TVs audible in the hallways. “It’s a gamble you take with every apartment,” Mr. Giroux-Doehring said.

Among their options:

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