every lit window. 46 new york apartments, and what's in them.

i've never been anywhere where space feels as crazy as it does in new york. you walk down a street in manhattan and every little box you look up at is somebody's whole place. it's maybe 500 square feet. at what manhattan costs right now, a box that size goes for something like $850,000, on average.¹ and inside it is everything a person owns. their books. their favorite towels. the little plant they grabbed from the flower buckets outside the corner deli. all of it.

i think about this the most when i'm walking around at night. when it gets dark the buildings kind of disappear and you just see the windows. there are so many lights on. and every one of them is a whole story that has nothing to do with you. somebody's making dinner. somebody's lived in that apartment for fifty years and it still looks like 1970. somebody moved in last month and hasn't hung anything up yet.

some people look out at a fire escape. some people look out at a brick wall four feet away. and somebody on 26th street is looking at madison square park with the flatiron sitting at the bottom of it, like that's a normal thing to have out your window.

you only get a second of it from the sidewalk. a lamp, a painting, the top of a bookshelf, a cat. then you keep walking.

this is something i've thought about for a long time, and two books i love live in the same corner of my head. one is joshua charow's loft law, where he spent two years ringing doorbells to photograph the artists still living in the old lofts in soho, tribeca and the bowery, surrounded by everything they've built up in there. the other is by tatsuya tanaka, the japanese artist who makes tiny worlds out of everyday stuff, like broccoli standing in for trees. i found his book at a uniqlo, of all places. both of them make me look at ordinary stuff a little differently.

it isn't just here

i wanted to make sure i wasn't being dramatic about new york, so i looked into it. honestly, other cities are more extreme.

• hong kong118sq ftabout 216,000 people live in subdivided flats, which is one apartment cut up into several. that's the median one. per person it works out to about 65.² below that are bedspace apartments, the ones people call coffin homes, where what you rent is barely bigger than the bed. a law that took effect this year sets a minimum of 86 square feet for the flats. the bedspaces aren't covered by it.³
• paris97sq ftthe legal minimum to rent a place out is a main room of 9 square meters, or 20 cubic meters if the ceiling is high. the top floors of the old buildings are full of chambres de bonne, the old maids' rooms. one count found about 114,000 of them, fewer than half that big, and most with nobody living in them.⁴
• london400sq fton paper, a new flat for one person is supposed to be at least 37 square meters. in practice a rule that let developers turn offices into flats without full permission produced studios as small as 13 square meters before it was tightened in 2021.⁵
• tokyo95sq ftthere's a developer whose whole thing is apartments about this size, with a ladder up to a sleeping loft.⁶

so new york doesn't have the smallest rooms. it isn't even the most packed. manhattan is roughly 29,000 people per square kilometer. paris is about 20,000. kowloon is over 45,000.⁷

what's different here

it isn't the size of the boxes. it's who's in them.

more than a third of new yorkers were born in another country. linguists count more than 700 languages spoken in and around the city, which probably makes it the most linguistically diverse place on earth.⁸

everybody brings their whole world with them and sets it up in whatever room they can get. you can see it in what they make of the space. so you get an altar with oranges on it on the third floor, and a wall of wigs on the fourth, and neither of them knows about the other.

the other thing is that people stay. about a million apartments here are rent-stabilized, 4 out of every 10 rentals. that means you have the right to renew your lease, and the rent can only go up by what a city board votes each year. this year it voted zero.⁹ so you get people who've been in the same place for decades, paying a number that makes no sense next to what the person across the hall pays.

and nobody gives a place up, because there's nowhere to go. the last time the city counted, 1.41 percent of its rentals were empty and available. for apartments under $1,100 a month it was 0.39 percent.¹⁰ basically every box has somebody in it.

so i made a thing. below is a city at night. keep scrolling and we'll go in one window, and then another, 46 of them.

46 windows

an illustrated walk. the page goes dark and shows a skyline at night, then moves into one lit window after another. each apartment is drawn as a cutaway room, and the text for each one follows below as you scroll: who lives there, where it is, what it costs and what they keep.

skip past the 46 windows

01 / 46skip to the end

this is the city when it's dark.every little square is a window. the yellow ones have somebody home.

the dark ones aren't empty.somebody's asleep, or at work, or hasn't gotten home yet.

pick a block. pick a building.

pick a window.fourth floor, the one with the plant.

that's 46 windows.

there are about 3.7 million homes in this city.every light is somebody who picked out a lamp.

look in any window

all 46, in the order we walked past them. tap one to go back in.

46 apartments, 5 boroughs windowsmap

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everyone in these windows is invented. any resemblance to a real person is a coincidence. the neighborhoods, the kinds of leases and the price ranges are real.

sources

1. manhattan sales averaged about $1,700 a square foot in the second quarter of 2026 (Miller Samuel for The Real Deal), and $1,751 in the third (Corcoran, via a market summary). 500 square feet at those prices is $850,000 to $875,000. a million would take $2,000 a square foot.
2. Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2021 Population Census: persons living in subdivided units. 108,200 units, 215,700 people, median floor area 11.0 square meters, 6.0 per person.
3. the Basic Housing Units Ordinance, in force March 1, 2026: at least 8 square meters, with enforcement phased in over several years. it does not cover bedspace apartments (summary of the standards).
4. décret n° 2002-120 of January 30, 2002, article 4 (text of the decree); Atelier parisien d'urbanisme, Les chambres de service à Paris (2015): about 114,400 rooms, about 85 percent not occupied as homes.
5. UK government, nationally described space standard (37 square meters with a shower room, 39 with a bath), and its extension to permitted-development homes from April 2021. the 13 square meter studios: Passive House Plus.
6. The World, Apartments in Tokyo are even smaller than you may think (2023), and reporting first published by the New York Times in October 2022.
7. manhattan: 74,782 people per square mile at the 2020 census (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts). paris: 20,054 per square kilometer (INSEE, 2022). kowloon: about 47,600 (analysis of the 2021 census). these are areas of very different sizes, so it's a rough comparison.
8. NYC Department of City Planning, The Newest New Yorkers, 2026: 37.5 percent foreign-born in 2023. languages: the Endangered Language Alliance has mapped more than 700 and calls the New York metropolitan area "the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world" (Languages of New York City map).
9. 996,600 rent-stabilized apartments, 41 percent of rentals (2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey, below). the Rent Guidelines Board voted on June 25, 2026 for no increase on one- and two-year leases starting October 1, 2026 (the mayor's statement).
10. NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey: selected initial findings. net rental vacancy 1.41 percent, 0.39 percent under $1,100, 3,705,000 housing units. it's the most recent one. the 2026 survey hasn't been published yet.
11. NYC Rent Guidelines Board, 2026 Income and Expense Study (rents actually collected in stabilized buildings, by borough) and 2026 Income and Affordability Study (rents by the year people moved in).
12. Mayor's Management Report, fiscal 2026, New York City Housing Authority chapter. public housing rent is set at 30 percent of household income.
13. Zumper, New York rent research by neighborhood, November 2026. asking rents, which run higher than what long-time tenants pay.