Gianna Llewellyn has come a long way since she moved to New York City on her 22nd birthday. It was 2019, and she was a college graduate from Long Island with hopes of becoming a film director or tattoo artist.
“I was just looking at any job that would give me some freedom and let me have blue hair,” she said.
Her first job, running errands on a horror movie set, came from a Facebook post. That was followed by production gigs on TV shows like “Law & Order.” She loved the apartment she shared in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with two roommates, but her meager pay and $850 rent left her “worth negative dollars,” she said.
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“I was eating Nutella sandwiches for a year,” said Ms. Llewellyn, 28, now a freelance camera assistant.
Her perseverance paid off: By 2023, she had saved $80,000. Curious how she could afford a home in the city, Ms. Llewellyn searched for first-time homebuyer programs online and found a government grant that could provide up to $100,000 toward a down payment for buyers below a certain income threshold.
Poking around Zillow that September, she was matched with Paul Graham, an agent at Platinum Properties. They bonded at their first viewing and spent more than a year scouring apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, starting at around $400,000.
“Now he’s like my family,” Ms. Llewellyn said. “Paul was so honest, and he really cared about what I could afford. He never pushed me for a more expensive place or something I didn’t like.”
She preferred Brooklyn, where all of her friends lived. Manhattan was “very grown up” and often more expensive, she said, though some listings there fit her budget. Affordability was the key, so she focused on sunny co-ops with low maintenance fees and, ideally, a flexible sublet policy in case she had to travel for long film productions.
“If it was going to be far from a subway, I wanted it to be big,” she said — preferably bigger than her 500-square-foot rental, with room for all of her tchotchkes, including chess sets from around the world, several guitars, art supplies and an antique TV that shows only static.
“I have a lot of knickknacks,” she said. ”I wanted enough space where I didn’t feel too cluttered.”
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