Alanna Schubach
Contributing editor Alanna Schubach has over a decade of experience as a New York City-based freelance journalist. She has written about real estate for Brick Underground, Mansion Global, and Barron's. She has also contributed features, essays, and op-eds to The Nation, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Village Voice. She won a National Association of Real Estate Editors’ silver award in 2018 for her Ask an Expert column for Brick Underground. She is also a fiction writer and a creative writing teacher, and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Posts by Alanna Schubach:
“When people think of New York,” says Amanda Thickpenny, an actor who has performed with the Pearl Theatre Company, “they think of the arts—Broadway, Lincoln Center, the Met, MoMA.” But the people who create that art increasingly cannot afford to live here, given the exorbitant housing and living costs.
To many longtime New Yorkers—the ones who scrambled for years to pay the rent for cramped apartments with indifferent landlords—the Millennial generation seems to have things awfully easy. Newcomers nowadays arrive, the narrative goes, in a city scrubbed of the crime it was once was notorious for, and—with mom and dad’s support—move into swanky spaces in the hottest neighborhoods.
My first New York City apartment came with a number of unique features. An East Village duplex, its two floors were separated by a steep spiral staircase, treacherous after nights out in the neighborhood. My bedroom was a stucco basement, the size of a shoebox, which I shared with a colony of mice; it connected through a heavy side door to a long, creepy cellar, and then to a dingy back courtyard. And then there was the man across the hall in apartment 1N.
The places we live in figure largely not only in the minds of New Yorkers, but also on the pages of great works of literature.
