Entertainment
Only the Wallpaper Was an Easy Fit
Two brothers rented an apartment in Brooklyn. No surprise, the younger one got the 50-square-foot bedroom. He transformed it into “a hug from Mother Nature.”
As a first-time renter in New York, Caleb Feiring faced challenges familiar to anyone who has struggled to find a lease in the city: the apartments were tiny yet expensive, and few landlords were welcoming to a young person with a variable income.
Caleb, now 31, was looking for an apartment he could share with his brother, Micah Feiring, 36, but kept encountering roadblocks. “Because we don’t have steady salaries or a rental history, our applications got rejected too many times to count,” Caleb said.
The brothers are the founding principals of Princevest, a real estate development company that builds apartments in Princeton, N.J. Caleb also “sells words” in city parks, offering uncommon words and definitions at pay-what-you-wish prices. “Most people seem to offer a dollar a word, but I’ve had people offer me as much as $100.”
In October 2023, the brothers finally found a home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, through a friend of a friend. The duplex apartment, which they leased on a month-to-month basis, had a kitchen and living room, a generous primary suite, and two awkward, smaller rooms measuring 110 and 50 square feet.
As the elder brother, Micah took the primary suite and agreed to pay $3,000 of the $5,000 rent. “We’ve lived together in bunk beds and even a converted school bus,” earlier in their lives, Micah said. “As the younger sibling, he always got the bottom bunk, but he has become almost aggravatingly competent at doing more with less.”