It ends up being just like dating or interviewing for a job, and it�s just as demeaning and laborious as you could expect. But choices are scarce in the housing market, and pride is always the first casualty.

In reality, each room you see ends up being a potential long-term relationship, so you�ve got to play the whole thing from a specific angle from the moment you walk in. Your interview starts the when you step in the door, so you can�t afford to be sure of a space before you turn on the charm.

And with me, baby, it�s all charm.

You learn to enter expecting the Waldorf, and you exit with that same attitude, even if you find an opium den with no windows. Positive thoughts, positive vibes.

There will be roughly five to twenty people, all jockeying for the same room, so you�ve got to make these people want you over the competition. You�ve got to put on your fresh brownie smell, wrap them in a blanket of comfort and convince them that you would be the best accessory for their apartment.

In essence, whore yourself like you�re out of crack.

When I started looking more seriously for an apartment, I was but a mere novice. I knew nothing of Craig�s List, I couldn�t filter the fake ads from the real ones, and I had only a cursory knowledge of the various neighborhoods one could choose to live in.

The majority of my searching was through various print papers, and specifically, the Village Voice, and anyone who�s ever searched for an apartment in New York using the Voice knows what a futile effort it can be. The large majority of listings are covert quasi-scams from real estate agencies or roommate brokers of questionable intentions, all offering amazingly perfect living situations for a fraction of their market value. The few authentic listings are often snapped up before the paper is even printed, leaving you with a distinct disadvantage if you�re lacking Internet assistance.

However, in my mind, I had a clear advantage over the potential competition out there due to my distinct lack of available options. I was sleeping on a couch in the ghetto. My wardrobe was a small suitcase and my personal items were limited to what could fit into a backpack. In short, anything I could find would be an improvement.

Or at least I assumed it would be...

I started the ball rolling slowly.

For the two or three months I lived in Flatbush, I was checking the apartment listings regularly, but I didn�t peruse many ads. I was generally short on time and motivation due to the infectious spells of depression that seemed inherent to the apartment I was staying in. But with the communal home life becoming more destructive and uncomfortable, it was apparent that I had to lower my standards and find something with a little more stability.

I devised a tiered system of importance to classify apartments and focus my energy.

The most attractive apartments would be called first and most often. The less attractive yet more realistic options occupied the second tier of my apartment search pyramid, and effort was expended accordingly. At the bottom of the barrel were all the places that I hoped I wouldn�t have to live, yet couldn�t discard outright.

This was the �safety� level, the net below my high wire. The inevitable conclusion.

When the listings came out, I would start at the top level, calling and leaving messages for all the dream apartments.

Hey there. My name is (Eager Apartment Hunter) and I saw your ad in the (Online or Paper Apartment Listing). I�m very interested in your apartment and I think it�d be perfect for me. I�m (current sex), (current age), originally from (place of origin). I work as a (menial worker bee position) at (employer I�d rather be rid of). I�d love to see the space, so please call me if you intend to show it soon. My number is (current phone number). Good luck.

Once those were all contacted in one way or another, I would move to the second round, calling all the more realistic apartments. Once I finished calling all those numbers, I would procrastinate for as long as possible before calling the �safety� group of listings.

Despite my deliberate attempts to order and rank my hopes and thus increase my potential for landing a good apartment, I found that I only received responses from the apartments I deemed least desirable. Every rathole in outer Brooklyn was eager to show me their space, while all the posh and trendy spots were inconsiderately mute.

It seemed that I was riding in on the tail end of the redistricting of coolness.

Williamsburg was the new official hotspot, and rents were approaching and sometimes exceeding Manhattan rates. Every penis-faced wanna-be artist was flooding in, driving up the market to vastly inflated proportions. What was once a dirty, run-down community was now a dirty, run-down community with a few new coffee shops.

Irony being that the years of industrial pollutants had left Williamsburg with pockets of increased cancer rates, and now troves of worthless artists were moving in, and destroying the real estate market.

A cancer of commerce.

In the mad rush to settle into what was rapidly becoming the coolest area outside of the Village, many people found themselves priced out of the exodus. If you were late to jump ship, you would find that the majority of apartments were either taken or outrageously expensive.

The offshoot being that all the surrounding areas were suffering infectious development. Artists and hangers-on were settling down in the outskirts, in areas previously deemed too distant from subway service and in the plentiful industrial parks in waves of illegal conversions.

I quickly found this to be my target market.

All these jokers moved into these huge converted warehouses to set up shop, but most of them quickly found they still couldn�t quite cover the bills alone. Having twice the space to paint didn�t increase their abysmal lack of talent, and thus, the art boom never happened.

Paintings never sold.

Where listings in Manhattan were still desperately out of reach and those in Williamsburg were completely overvalued and over sought, the industrial parks of Brooklyn held countless numbers of people who were eager to supplement their rental income.

So I enter the picture.

Most of the apartments I was shown were dreadful. They were suffering from piss-poor and generally dangerous conversions. Anything with a loft was generally constructed with a mind towards thrift rather then load-bearing capacity. Corners were cut, construction was suspect and materials were at the low end of substandard.

If there were walls, they were un-insolated, and if the apartment had heat, there was generally no way for it to reach your room.

Privacy was non-existent, as most of the doors were made out of sheets, and the slightest whisper seemed to carry throughout the space.

It�s difficult to walk into third-world conditions and keep your happy-face on, but I did it. I would enter the apartments of these self-proclaimed artists with all the warmth I could muster, half-jokingly expecting a cardboard refrigerator box with a sleeping bag.

When they�d show me the lofts they�d spent the last few weeks building, I�d say how cozy it was rather then point out how you couldn�t maneuver in a mattress. I�d say how it didn�t bother me not to have a handrail as I walked up rickety steps placed at non-standard angles. I would look at how they�d used 2x4 pine beams to construct their floors, silently calculating how much weight I could expect to put in the center before structural failure. I�d marvel at the complete absence of joist hangers, noting the thrift-motivated tendency to offset floor joists, thus defeating their purpose.

I�d smile when they showed me their �kitchen�, usually consisting of a hot plate and a mini-fridge. I can work with this, I�d say to them while vetoing the whole deal in my mind.

My interview often seemed like a book report. Excruciatingly dull, slow, uninteresting. I was trying to sell myself to people who were more boring then an actuarial table. v Every attempt at a common theme was met by resistance. I�d ask a person about their DVD collection and they barely raised an eyebrow. I�d read the spines on their bookshelf, yet couldn�t coerce an opinion about any of them. They�d own musical instruments, yet they were non-committal about being musicians.

The only thing that remotely interested them was art, and not specific art or art forms, just the concept of art as a thing.

You do any art? What�s your art? I�m an artist. I�m just going to school, trying to work on my art.

It took me a couple of showings before I finally realized what was going on.

They were all just spoiled rich-kids, living off their parent�s finances. They were living an impoverished artist�s life through subsidies from relatives and trust funds. They�d adopted a shitty apartment in an attempt to deny their privilege, and they�d become self-proclaimed artists as an affront to their own dramatic lack of talent.

They were pure wastes of socioeconomics.

They disgusted me, yet I needed an apartment, so I continued to look for the right combination of structural integrity and bearable personalities within my price range.

I saw two apartments in the same trendy building on Montrose. Each one filled with pictorial monuments to the absence of artistic talent, and each time it was extolled to me how cool it was to live in that particular building.

As I was examining one person�s shoddy workmanship, he claimed to be a carpenter. As I banged my head on a large protrusion of metal, he said, �Yeah, that pipe is a heating pipe, so it gets pretty hot in the winter�.

In his mind, the pipe represented a strong advantage. Heat in the room. I noticed how the pipe hung well into the crouching space afforded by the low ceilings, and all I could think about was repeatedly burning myself while trying to crawl out to work each morning.

Each apartment I was shown seemed to suffer from dramatically diminishing quality. The conversions were dreadful and the kitchens were non-existent.

Even if I could find people I could manage to live with, the very nature of the rooms being offered were unacceptable. And just as I was thinking about renting my own virgin loft space so that I could do my own conversion, I came across this ad...

Interesting living situation to share. Huge open 1000+ sq ft loft with 40� of windows. Build to suit. $650+sec.