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“I have no much more a single-bedrooms correct now. None,” a true-estate agent named Rena explained to me on the mobile phone one cold February morning. She experienced just sent me to her past selection: a one-bed room in Prospect Heights dealing with an inside courtyard that had the dim, cramped truly feel of a back again workplace. Hire was $2,400 a thirty day period furthermore a broker payment. “I work from residence,” I advised her. “And it was a minimal …” “Depressing,” she loaded in. “Sad. I get it.”

The week ahead of, I experienced frequented two other a person-bedroom or 1-bed room-adjacent apartments: a studio in which my queen-dimension bed would healthy snugly up versus the dishwasher, if I at any time wanted to open up it ($2,500), and a just one-bedroom sublet in a Brooklyn Heights co-op with a mini-fridge, for which I was informed to compose a letter about “my partnership to the borough” ($2,600). There ended up a dozen a lot more one-beds that had been taken off the current market ahead of I was even in a position to make it to my scheduled tour. One of them, a broker advised me, had been rented ahead of the shopper even noticed it. The listing consisted of a single image of the current renter’s fire mantel with a print of *Monet’s water lilies and four pictures of the Fulton Avenue G coach entrance. “How is that possible?” I asked. He replied, “That’s just the marketplace ideal now.”

Minutes immediately after leaving the mournful interior condominium, I was now back again to scrolling through Zillow when Rena made a relaxed remark around the cellular phone: “Everybody broke up in the pandemic, and all they want is a single-bedrooms.”

Unbeknownst to her, Rena experienced, in an fast, shipped a grand unified concept for what I assumed was only my individual suffering. Of training course I had acknowledged that my New York apartment search was heading to be awful: The town was in the throes of an unprecedently absurd housing market place, with rents rising by double-digit percentages 12 months more than calendar year and men and women outbidding every single other for unspeakably degenerate sites. But my hunt for a a single-bed room experienced felt arduous in a way that could not be discussed purely by macroeconomics. Rena’s idea created great sense: There were 2 times the sum of sad-sack persons hunting for the same range of one-bedroom units due to the fact so several relationships had bitten the dust through the stop-time. I was in just one of them. I was going for the reason that I had damaged up with my spouse in South Slope and was starting more than over Prospect Park — or making an attempt to. “I’m sorry that occurred,” Rena explained when I advised her she was a genius and, in fact, conversing about me. “At the very least it usually means there are a ton of other solitary people today out there now?”

As a substitute of looking at them as passionate potential clients, nevertheless, I noticed them as my rivals. I experienced elbowed earlier them at showings, loudly talked over them about how a great deal I adored crown molding. In order to outdo them, I experienced adopted a humiliating, abject tone even though corresponding with many brokers and brokers, a tone that felt disturbingly near to the just one I had applied towards the conclusion of my partnership when I was striving to preserve it: “If there is everything I can do,” I wrote about a renovated 1-bedroom on Franklin Avenue that went for $400 a lot more than the listing price tag. “I just want to realize what happened,” I questioned the broker for the elevator making to which 40 other people used in, I was advised, 16 minutes.

Rena’s concept gave my grief some direction. I was a member of an specifically afflicted team within the larger sized housing scarcity, and as I heard other tales of rental woe from good friends with associates and small children hunting for even larger apartments, I took to indicating things like, “Okay, but it’s in fact worse for singles. A Realtor informed me.” I grew much more self-assured with each individual particularly anecdotal piece of evidence I arrived across. A handful of months later on, I obtained a text from an ex I had dated more than ten decades earlier who instructed me he was also going. “Two-bedroom?” I wrote back again, politely referring to his girlfriend. “No, a single-bed room. Just me.” “Welcome,” I claimed. He instructed me that, even as a corporate lawyer, he could scarcely obtain just about anything in his selling price variety that wasn’t awful. What is extra, his broker, a Corcoran agent, experienced recently gone by way of a break up, also, and he also could not obtain a 1-bed room.

I achieved the agent on the phone. He wouldn’t let me use his title, but he confirmed that, sure, he had witnessed a unexpected uptick of breakup clientele, together with himself. (“COVID was gonna make or split your relationship” went his summary.) He was nevertheless residing with his ex, and they had been competing in the 1-bedroom-scarcity crisis. So far, they experienced observed each other at showings twice but experienced nevertheless to bid from each individual other. “You’ll locate a whole lot extra studios accessible than a person-bedrooms,” he stated, “because just after a breakup, people want their personal place. They want separation, and they want partitions.”

A further agent who declined to be named agreed. “No one wants to stare at their bed all day,” she mentioned. She has experienced numerous purchasers shift since of a separation, which include a man who was so desperately in enjoy — with the waterfront luxury apartment he lived in with his ex-girlfriend — he stayed in the very same setting up when they broke up. She waived her charge for the reason that she felt so negative for him. “Frankly,” she stated, “I experience like I have become more of a therapist. And I essentially went to school to be a therapist, so I’m glad I have the education.”

Even now, I required really hard details to aid the idea of a a single-bed room scarcity fueled by a flood of the just lately uncoupled. So I went to Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, a real-estate appraiser who retains present data on rentals in a spreadsheet with 10,000 entries. To start with, he gave a common rundown of the causes renting and getting a house in New York are so tough appropriate now: Right after the metropolis shut down, people today are coming back again, and there just is not adequate inventory for all of us, moreover rental bargains from the final two yrs are expiring. Then he shared some harrowing figures: The median 1-bed room in Brooklyn is $2,800, up 8 percent from last calendar year in Manhattan, it is $3,788, up 24.2 %. In the meantime, rents for two-bedrooms have remained in essence unchanged or grew only a little bit. The quantity of 1-bedroom listings fell 86 p.c yr above year from March 2021 to now. Looking at the details, Miller reasoned, “I would say you are moving into a market place that is substantially extra punishing for 1-bedrooms than two-bedrooms.”

It wasn’t ample. “So when you say, ‘You are moving into a marketplace,’ you indicate me, a single man or woman,” I prodded. “You’re indicating there is properly a singles tax on housing.” But he would not be as definitive as I preferred him to be: The details just reveals “correlation, not causation,” Miller explained, while anecdotally speaking, indeed, he had been hearing about more divorces in the past two a long time.

Afterwards, I instructed my good friend Sarah about my investigation, and she carefully rolled her eyes. “I will publish a sequel” to this column, she mentioned, “about how there are no reasonably priced two-bedrooms for partners.” I relented: Wanting for an apartment in New York is heartbreak for virtually anyone suitable now. Miller had advised me that, even with his thousands of rows of details, the market is so manic that numerous of its extremes nevertheless sense really hard to demonstrate. I had desired a reason for my suffering to be special. But at least I did not experience lonely any longer.

By some miracle, at a demonstrating in Fort Greene in March, an agent instructed me about an condominium downstairs in the exact same developing. It was lately obtainable, and the listing hadn’t gone on the net but. It was prewar, and it experienced a charming archway, kitchen cabinets installed backward, and no bed room closet. I was the initially applicant. When I observed out I was authorised, I informed the agent, a 25-calendar year-outdated previous aggressive e-sports activities participant, that I was so joyful I could kiss him. He explained to me he experienced a girlfriend.

*This story has been updated to mirror that the print was a reproduction of a person of Claude Monet’s water lily series paintings, not Vincent van Gogh’s, although van Gogh has a drawing termed “Marsh with Drinking water Lilies.”