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It is not cheap to live in any of the great cities of the world, and New York is no exception to that maxim. Are there bargains to be found? Certainly, but 'bargain' is a relative term which means something acquired at less than the usual cost. That's an ideal place to begin: what, in fact, is the usual cost of an apartment in New York City today?

In the Real Estate Section of the Sunday New York Times (www.nytimes.com) over the past several weeks, the numbers ranged from $550 a month for a room in a shared apartment to a whopping $22,000 a month for an upper eastside palace! Use their website's housing locator to cruise recent ads by type (share/room/whole apartment) or by price. Start with a realistic assessment of your housing budget: if you can only spend $600 a month on an apartment, in New York City that will mean roommates.

State of the market

New York City consists of five boroughs which are all connected by mass transit and roadways. Despite the myriad charms of the other four, the glamor, the "Sex in the City" moments, are in Manhattan. When people in the other 48 states say New York City, by and large they are really referring to this single borough.

The rental market is a function of the geography and the politics. There are eight million people in the whole of New York City; just over 1.6 million of them live in Manhattan, which is a skinny little island of about 22 square miles in area. According to the 2000 US Census, the island of Manhattan has 798,144 housing units - the vast majority of which are occupied by renters. In fact, only about 20 percent of the housing in Manhattan is owner-occupied. That's the good news: renting is a way of life in this city.

The bad news is that scarcity of housing (less than 800,000 units in the borough everyone wants to live in) has driven up prices - that's how capitalism works. In New York City, that marketplace dynamic got a late start because of decades of rent regulations, which kept prices artificially low for renters. The remnants of those regulations means there are still some incredible bargains out there - units that have only recently been de-regulated, for example, along with the more than 740,000 apartments that are still rent stabilized - but it takes tenacity and creativity to find them.

A little research

Visit the website of the Rent Guidelines Board of the City to find out the current authorized increases for regulated apartments. Owners of rent stabilized apartment buildings must comply with these

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