While many of the buildings on the Upper West and Upper East Side are old and pre-war, many high-rises have been coming up in the last couple decades since as we can all see, New York is a very tall and concrete jungle. Many of the buildings are marked as “luxury” when you look up their names in Google Maps, or when you see signs outside their front entrances. However, I would argue that the term “luxury” in front of “apartments” is used a bit too loosely, and it’s pretty frustrating when you’re actually looking for a good-amenities building.

Today, I walked into a “luxury apartment” complex just two blocks over from where we live now. I asked the doorman if there would be any availability, and he gave me their website name and the name of the leasing agent. I went online to look at their available units, and the apartment layouts were horrendous: with one unit, when you enter the apartment, you’re literally entering the kitchen. Another one was a two-bed/one-bath apartment; if you’re going to be a luxury building and you have two people living in an apartment, shouldn’t they both get their own bathroom at least to pay the insane amount of rent you want out of them? One of the last units I looked at had a kitchen that was literally a corner of a room, and it looked like the people designing the place just forgot to add a kitchen to the unit and slapped it on at last minute. Did I mention the photos of the gym made it look like a dungeon?

Apartment hunting is never fun, even for people with fatter wallets.