Virginia K. Smith

Every so often, I still get chipper "professional, responsible roommate wanted!" emails from a listserv I joined when I first moved to the city. My friend and I always end up forwarding the listings back and forth to each other, speculating about who the hell these entry-level publishing employees are who can drop $1,300 for a room in an apartment with three other people, in Crown Heights? (Seriously.) But the answer here is pretty obvious: people who aren't looking that hard, and whose parents are paying a healthy chunk of their rent—or all of it.

If you've got $3,888,888, you can snap up F. Scott Fitzgerald's former Long Island party house (WSJ)

If your roommate secretly rents out your room on Airbnb, don't expect the site to help you out (XOjane)

Here's a heartening story about how one Brooklyn woman bikes, recycles, and generally lives off our city's mountains of daily food waste, all adding up to what the Guardian calls a "middle-class class life in New York City on less than $5,000 a year." Encouraging, but be sure not to read the fine print, like the part about how a friend puts her up rent-free in a Crown Heights house, or the small detail about her income property in France.

Queens co-op residents have resorted to setting "booby traps" for a disliked dog (NYP)

A time-honored method for furnishing a starter apartment: hand-me-downs (Apartment Therapy)

For most of us, finding our first apartment in the city is a rude awakening—I'm paying how much, for how little space, to live with how many people, in what neighborhood? Besides the obvious, inevitable sticker shock, there are a many other compromises and surprised, particularly if you're moving here from the lulling, if unexciting, comforts of the suburbs. Unless your parents happen to be shadowy foreign billionaires, brace yourself for the following: