Photo Credit — Remington Write / The view across Broadway at 79th Street which is one of the places I’d really love to live

I Want Out!

And others really, really want in

I lived in several shared apartments when I first moved to New York City twenty years ago. I had given up a roomy, light-filled — $310 a month — 4th-story walk-up with views of Lake Erie in Cleveland to do this. I’ve never once regretted my move. It was the right time and I came for the right reasons.

However, for fifteen months I longed to have my own apartment. I’d sit on the M4 bus coming up Broadway, gazing into lit windows, and dream of signing my own lease.

Here I am nineteen years later in my very own rent-stabilized apartment which I now share with my partner and old cat. Ask me how much time I spend basking in the glow of having achieved that decades-old dream. You’re right: almost none. Instead, I dream of living in a neighborhood without drug dealing and using happening on my stoop. Call me ungrateful — because I am — but I want to live on a street where I’ll never turn the corner to find someone passed out on the sidewalk.

When my partner and I are out and about on the Upper Westside or down in the Village, I gaze into lit windows and wonder if it’s even remotely possible to live there.

Ah, the universal human reflex to getting the goodies