Why Is It So Hard to Find an Apartment With Storage in NYC?
Animation: Curbed; Photo: Getty
It was early March when my wife and I viewed a familiar kind of apartment in Crown Heights: a cheaply done renovation asking over $3,000 a month for a windowless living area, a minuscule kitchen, and two bedrooms that barely had enough space for a bed and a path to the door, much less a second nightstand. What most struck me at the time, though, was that the landlord had allotted just one svelte closet for the entire unit. It was tucked in the corner of the larger bedroom, and half of it was taken up with a copper water heater. It was a scene we came across again and again in our search: a mediocre new development or older building freshly chopped up; tight living quarters; and a pitiful amount of storage. The kind of apartment that practically guarantees a trip to the Container Store.
The city’s closets are ever evolving. The Dakota’s attempt in the 1880s to woo wealthy New Yorkers from their townhouses by incorporating a clothing closet in each bedroom, rather than the broom closets that were standard during this time, would likely be considered small by modern demands. And at least in luxury development, the post-recession (and post–Sex and the City) closet has been ballooning in size. So while today’s investment bankers, Google engineers, and Instagram celebrities can still find a place with enough room to stash their stuff, the rest of us are often left with few, often frustrating, choices — a carved-up brownstone that never had many closets to begin with, a hastily divided prewar two-bed now shared among four roommates, or a mid-tier new build that might have one or two. For a certain class of renter right now, the trend is something like “bring your own armoire,” as real-estate appraiser Jonathan Miller put it.
Real-estate analytics and listing companies tell me they don’t have any data tracking the ebbs and flows of New Yorkers’ closet spaces. But a few things might be happening at once: The city’s Department of Housing and Preservation Development has in recent decades relaxed the closet-storage-space requirement for new construction angling for government financing. (In 2000, one-bedroom units needed to have a minimum of 19 square feet for clothing, coat, and linen closets, but by 2016, that number had been slashed to 12 square feet.) Apartments in new development rentals have also been shrinking overall: The median square footage for one-bedrooms in Brooklyn and Manhattan fell by roughly 9 percent between 2005 and 2024, according to the real-estate data firm UrbanDigs. Given the space crunch, surging construction costs, and ever-increasing rents, developers may be trying to “maximize unit count” and ultimately prioritize “marketable” square footage in apartment layouts at the expense of closets, says UrbanDigs co-founder John Walkup.
What that trade-off means for the renters looking to pay $3,600 a month for a junior one-bedroom loft in Stuyvesant Heights or $4,600 for a terraced one-bed in Greenpoint is that the seemingly bonus square footage in their living room will likely be occupied by an Ikea Pax system. “I’ve walked into some of our value rentals after they’re occupied, and we open the kitchen cabinets and see sweaters and jeans,” says architect Ariel Aufgang, whose firm handles luxury developments along with affordable and middle-income housing. “People need storage. The amount we can build in New York City in any parcel is being held back by strict zoning laws, so that’s not allowing for gracious apartments.”
Another thing that may be eating our closets: Landlords, apparently responding to pandemic-era whims of renters and likely sensing an opportunity to charge a premium, have increasingly started using them to house in-unit washers and dryers. Then there are the other buildingwide amenities that require their own square footage, both practical (gyms, conference rooms) and over the top (virtual-golf simulator, movie room). “The focus for a lot of developers was home-and-office amenities for work and living in your space, and I think maybe the closets have been compromised a bit,” says Anthony Morena, a principal at the firm Mortar Group. One prospective renter was so torn over choosing a prewar one-bedroom with “tons” of closet space or a smaller, new-development apartment with in-unit laundry and a balcony that they turned to Reddit for help. (“We’d be giving up a lot of space, but I am leaning towards the laundry in unit for sure,” they wrote.) Jason Haber, a Compass real-estate agent, is less conflicted about such a choice: “Closet schmoset, give me the washer-dryer.”
Similarly, many renters may be ready to go without a closet if everything else about the place looks decent (or if they’ve just run out of steam from marathon viewings). Sam Raskin, a communications strategist, left what he described as an aging, roach-infested building in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens in 2021 for a brand-new development 15 minutes away, “literally the shiny new object,” he tells me. The one-bedroom apartment on Clarkson Avenue has a few things going for it (central air, a huge terrace, no bugs), but his unit also has a washer-dryer combo, leaving him with just one usable closet. It fits, he says, “maybe five jackets.” To get by, he’s installed clothing racks in his bedroom, one of which collapsed. “New York City’s housing crisis is so severe people will take anything they can get and if developers think that they can get away with that, they’re probably right,” he says. “It sucks for the rest of us.”
One renter in a one-bedroom in a pricey new Carroll Street building stuffed the vestibule outside her apartment with a shelving system to contain dozens of shoes and a foam roller, while lining the stairwell leading to the roof with a tower of plastic bins and suitcases, a folding chair, and bags. (Okay, maybe some of us just need less stuff?) Another person in the same building has packed her $3,000-a-month one-bedroom’s single closet with so many shoes, bags, coats, suitcases, and linens that she couldn’t shut its doors. “As you can see, I’m busting out,” she says, having just lugged a package of new Amazon shelves up the stairs. She’s noticed the building has high turnover, which she partly blames on the landlord charging exorbitant rents for places that are so-so at best. “They don’t take time or put any thought into these properties that get thrown up quickly,” she says. “I raised my bed. I built shelves. I should just have some space.”
Other closet-deprived renters have taken a less cluttered approach to their homes. “People have their RealReal specialist on speed dial every season,” says Compass broker Phillip Salem. And for those unable (or unwilling) to pay the monthly fee for Manhattan Mini Storage or a cage in their building’s basement, there’s always Mom and Dad. Would they mind holding on to this box of sweaters until fall? “A lot of my clients have family in upstate New York or on Long Island or in New Jersey,” Salem says. There’s also an entire TikTok genre to consult for storage ideas. “If you don’t have closet space, this is what you have to do,” one guru says as she weaves what appear to be Christmas decorations into her bed frame.
As for my own search, after spending two months checking out bleak listings, we pounced on a prewar one-bedroom near Prospect Park. The 1,100-square-foot space had good light, cabinets on both sides of the galley kitchen, and a bedroom big enough for a bed, nightstands, and a desk. The final thing that had us ready to sign on the spot? Four closets.
