Lucy Cohen Blatter

In nearly 30 years of covering the downtown party scene for The Village Voice, Michael Musto became an icon of the city—part chronicler, part gossip columnist. Now, the prolific author writes a regular weekly column for Out.com.

This $1,795-a-month one-bedroom in Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone has interesting touches that make if far from rote: brick walls, a fireplace, and pretty French doors that separate the living room and bedroom.

While the apartment is undoubtedly convenient—it's located around the corner from the A and C trains, near an LIRR stop, and lots of stores and restaurants—it's in a more industrial slice of Bed-Stuy, so don't expect a pretty tree-lined street.

One of the strongest signs of an improving economy is a healthy real estate market, which is why news that homeownership ticked up slightly during the last quarter of 2015  (per the Wall Street Journal) was welcome. By the end of last year, the homeownership rate across the country was 63.8 percent, which, in case you're wondering, is still way higher than New York City's.

We're pretty envious of pretty much every square inch of Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber's Tribeca duplex apartment: the huge windows, the beautiful archways, the winding staircase—not to mention 4000 square feet of space.

If you're in the market for a Manhattan townhouse, you have a pretty small pool from which to choose. In fact, according to Jonathan Miller, author of a Douglas Elliman report out today which tracks townhouse sales over the past 10 years, the listing inventory right now is just 474 (a decade ago it was slightly higher at 493).  And over the last 10 years, only about 2.5 percent of residential sales in Manhattan were of townhouses.