Apartment hunting in Brooklyn earlier this year was the predictable nightmare.
I saw a place on Fifth Street that looked perfectly acceptable except that it had no closets. Not one.
And a place above a dog day care business where, the rental agent swore, the clientele were let outside to race around the courtyard, barking joyously, for merely an hour each day.
And a place on Thirteenth Street where my daughter and 7-year-old granddaughter joined me at an afternoon open house. I was already thinking nope when I heard my granddaughter’s delighted cry from a rear window: “Oh! Look at all the rats!” A troupe of them were cavorting about the garbage bags piled behind the building. Definitely nope.
These rentals, and the others I visited over three months, were awfully expensive compared to my rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. Headlines pointed out that New York City was enduring its lowest vacancy rate in 50 years, and rents had been soaring commensurately.
So like any contemporary would-be Brooklynite, I was braced for a dispiriting struggle. But I had an additional issue to contend with: I was 74.
Older adults are less likely to move than younger ones, a 2022 Census Bureau report showed. About 6 percent of those over age 65 moved each year from 2015 to 2019, compared with about 15 percent of the younger population. Still, senior migration topped three million people a year.
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