Small Spaces and Rentals
Sarah Lin
New York, NY
Sarah Lin has spent most of her adult life navigating New York's rental market, and somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like a problem to be solved and started feeling like a subject worth writing about.
She grew up in San Francisco in a house that her parents owned outright - a fact she didn't appreciate until she moved to Manhattan at twenty-three and found herself in a studio with a Murphy bed, a radiator that clanked at 3am, and a kitchen the size of a wardrobe. It took her about two years to figure out how to love it properly.
Her writing on small spaces focuses less on clever storage solutions and more on the psychology of constraint - what it means to make real decisions when you can't have everything, and how those decisions end up saying something true about who you are. She is particularly interested in renters: the temporary permanence of it, the ethics of borrowing someone else's walls, the question of how much to invest in a home that isn't yours.
Sarah has written for New York Magazine, Apartment Therapy, and Curbed. She currently lives in a one-bedroom in Bushwick with too many books and a very good light situation.
