A New York woman has revealed that she pays $350 a month for her downtown Manhattan apartment after having lived in the building since childhood.
Food industry worker Akasha was visited by YouTuber Caleb Simpson in her large rent-controlled studio apartment.
Akasha’s aunt and uncle lived in the home before her, and she lived on the same floor when she grew up.
“We moved here in the early ‘90s. We moved across the hall, and my aunt moved here, and she lived here for two decades,” she said in the video.
Akasha moved into the home when they moved out, jokingly calling it “literally the easiest move in the entire world”.
The kitchen features stainless steel racks over the sink and stove with almost all of her kitchen items being out in the open.
Plates and other things are stacked on the racks and pots and pans hang from the walls.
“A lot of this was inherited,” Akasha said. “It’s very helpful to me ... having people who had to function in here for a very long time. They figured it out.”
“We used to joke when I was a kid because I’ve lived in this building my entire life, that my bathroom was bigger than some people’s apartments,” she added about the pink-tiled room.
Her closet stretches from floor to ceiling and accounts for most of her storage. The side of the closet features a bookshelf.
A small table has smaller tables underneath that can be pulled out when needed. Between the kitchen and the bed, there’s a couch.
A long table functions as a desk and TV stand opposite the bed.
The New York University graduate said the apartment building was her “safe haven” when she was growing up.
While she said she has seen a lot of gentrification in the area, she said the culture remains.
“Punk is always going to come back. Drugs never go away,” she said. “Like all of those things are still very much present here, but it is just sometimes frillier and more expensive.”
Her mother is one of the YouTuber’s viewers, and she contacted him about reviewing Akasha’s cheap apartment, which she intends to stay in for a long time.
“They’re going to drag my corpse out of this,” she joked.
Mr Simpson said at the beginning of the video that he has toured more than 200 apartments in the city and that Akasha’s was the “cheapest one”.
The Independent has attempted to reach Akasha for comment.
