Rooms for Rent in Noho, Manhattan, NY

Preguntas frecuentes

• How many rooms for rent are in NoHo, and why are so many in lofts?

  NoHo, short for North of Houston, is only a handful of blocks between Houston Street and Astor Place, and most of its buildings were put up in the late nineteenth century as cast-iron and masonry warehouses, stores and factories. Artists moved into those empty floors in the 1960s and 1970s, and the open loft is still the neighborhood's signature, which is why a room for rent here is often a partitioned bedroom in a large loft shared by three or four people rather than a bedroom in a tenement. Roomster's tally for NoHo stands at 1 rooms for rent today, with most clustered on Lafayette Street, Broadway, Bond Street and Great Jones Street.

• How much is a room for rent in NoHo, and where are cheaper rooms nearby?

  NoHo is one of the most expensive places in Manhattan to take a room. Listings run from about $2,540 to nearly $7,000 a month, most rooms ask between roughly $2,700 and $2,900, and a furnished room with its own bath in a doorman loft building often tops $3,800. The prices follow the loft apartments behind them, which are large and rarely cheap. Rooms under $2,500 a month are hard to find inside NoHo itself, so most renters on that budget look a few minutes east across the Bowery, in the East Village walk-ups toward Avenue C and in the Lower East Side shares south of Grand Street, and ride or walk back to NoHo for school and work.

• Can a non-artist legally rent a room in a NoHo artist loft?

  It depends on the building's legal use, and it is worth asking before you sign. For decades many NoHo lofts were zoned as Joint Living-Work Quarters for Artists, a category meant for artists certified by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, even though plenty of non-artists ended up living in them. The SoHo/NoHo rezoning approved on December 15, 2021 created a path for owners to convert those units to ordinary residential use, but conversion is voluntary and not every building has done it. Ask the leaseholder whether the loft has a residential certificate of occupancy or has been converted, and whether the landlord knows about the room share, since an unapproved share in a restricted loft can end abruptly.

• Can I rent a room in NoHo near NYU Tisch and the Public Theater?

  Yes, and that is a big part of who rents here. NYU's Tisch School of the Arts sits at 721 Broadway on NoHo's western edge, so film, drama, design and music students can walk to class, and the rest of NYU's Washington Square campus is a few blocks west. The Public Theater, in the former Astor Library at 425 Lafayette Street, anchors the theater and performance crowd, and Cooper Union and the Astor Place offices are just to the north. Rooms close to Broadway and Astor Place fill fastest from June through August ahead of the fall semester, so students should start looking in spring and ask whether a share can run on an academic-year lease.

• Are NoHo rooms for rent near the subway?

  Almost all of them, because NoHo is small and ringed by stations. The Broadway-Lafayette Street and Bleecker Street complex at the neighborhood's southern edge connects the B, D, F and M with the 6, the 6 also stops at Astor Place to the north, and the R and W stop at 8th Street-NYU on Broadway. That puts Midtown, Brooklyn and the Financial District within a single ride from most rooms, and Union Square, with the L and more lines, is a short walk up Broadway. Since nearly every block is close to a train, location within NoHo matters more for noise and light than for commuting, so compare rooms on those rather than on station distance.

• What should I check before renting a room in a NoHo loft share?

  Start with the bedroom itself. Many loft bedrooms are created with partitions or sleeping platforms, so make sure your room has a window and a door, since a windowless room cannot legally serve as a bedroom, and ask whether the landlord approved the walls. Old loft buildings often have freight-style or key-locked elevators, shared heat that can run uneven in winter and large windows that let in street noise from Broadway and Lafayette Street, so visit at night. Ask who holds the lease, whether the unit is covered by the Loft Law or rent stabilization, which limits what a leaseholder can charge you, and how utilities are split in a space that may be several times the size of a standard apartment.