Millennial New Yorkers are ditching basements and roommates for luxury apartments at $1,000-plus discounts

Millennial New Yorkers are ditching basements and roommates for luxury apartments at $1,000-plus discounts

$3,200. $3,000. $2,900.

Over the past several months, Brett Vergara had been watching rent fall like dominoes for apartments at The Brooklyner, a residential skyscraper that briefly had the title of Brooklyn's tallest building around a decade ago.

Replete with a rooftop deck, floor-to-ceiling views of The Empire State Building, and an in-building fitness center, The Brooklyner was a far cry from the Park Slope basement he lived in when he first moved to New York, where bars blocked the view out of his lone window. 

"I was playing chicken with the fallen rent prices," Vergara told Insider. 

Vergara, a 28-year-old who works as a UX program manager, said he shared his last Brooklyn apartment with three roommates, with his share of rent coming to $825 a month. He had been flirting with the idea of solo living for the past two years. 

"Part of me was torn between riding out really low rent for as long as I could and trying to figure out when was the right time to make the jump," Vergara said.

The pandemic just so happened to be that time.

When a corner one-bedroom, which he said was priced around $4,000 when last listed in October 2019, hit $2,650 in February, Vergara