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…
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