Cecilia Flaherty, 45, had been happily settled in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rental apartment for four years when, one morning in early June, an exterior wall of her building collapsed into the street.
“There was an immediate vacate order and we pretty much had to move out in our pajamas that morning,” Flaherty says. Without warning, she and her 12-year-old daughter were dropped into one of the city’s most tumultuous rental market periods, with apartment prices that shape-shift with each coronavirus mutation.
