An apartment for twelve

My latest story for The New Yorker

I’m very excited to have a new piece in this week’s centenary issue of The New Yorker, alongside some of my favorite writers. The issue is New York City-themed, and my piece is about Queens.

Read it here: “An Apartment for Twelve”

Illustrations by Medar de la Cruz

For the last several months, I have been visiting an apartment in the neighborhood of East Elmhurst, where twelve migrants share four bedrooms and a hallway partitioned with shower curtains. Inside, they practice painting nails until they get dizzy from the fumes, hoping to get jobs at a spa. They cook in shifts beginning at 3am. And this winter, they barely went out, terrified of getting deported.

As I dove into this story, even paying a portion of one migrant’s rent for a bed in order to spend as much time in the house as possible, I learned that these kinds of shared living arrangements are widespread among new arrivals to New York, especially in the outer boroughs.

They can range from crowded but legitimate sublets to dangerous and unlawful boarding houses. They are often dark, cramped, and poorly ventilated, with barely any privacy. At worst, they resemble modern-day tenements: entire families crammed into single bedrooms, with any common spaces subdivided by curtains or sheets or partition walls to allow for as many additional beds as possible.

I hope that this piece, along with my other recent work, will continue to provide a window onto the everyday lives of a group of people who find themselves at the very center of our political conversation today — and that their stories will stay with you, just as the experience of getting to know them has stayed with me.

All my best,

Jordan

P.S. The piece features some special illustrations by Medar de la Cruz. I’m very thankful for his kind and thoughtful approach to this extraordinarily sensitive story.