A New World Order for Renters? Well, It Worked for This Guy.

A few years ago, Khaled Khaled was envisioning a new world order for renters: “I started telling everyone, ‘No one is going to sign apartment leases anymore.’” He made this bold claim at the outset of a 12-month journey that took him around the world, from one apartment to the next — before he arrived at an unexpected conclusion.

It was 2019 and Khaled was living in San Francisco. A Palestinian who grew up in Abu Dhabi and Qatar, he had landed a work visa and a job with Kasa, a national short-term rental company focused on the tech industry. He was happy with the status quo of his life. “I always loved San Francisco and imagined that’s where I would end up living,” he recalled.

That is, until his brother — who was also his roommate — decided to marry, leaving Khaled with an apartment he couldn’t afford on his own. He looked around for options, but nothing felt right.

The pandemic was then at full force, introducing a host of anxieties but also an unexpected sense of possibility. Khaled, who considers himself a minimalist, put his few belongings in storage and set out to explore the world. His work for Kasa as a data analyst, which mainly involves writing code, could be accomplished from anywhere. “I figured I may just travel for a few months,” he said. “My theory was that anywhere outside of San Francisco was going to be cheaper.”

He anticipated experiencing a few cities and then maybe returning to San Francisco. “But once I got to traveling,” he said, “I realized I didn’t want to go back to living under a long-term lease again. I know this comes from a place of privilege, but I realized you don’t need to be in a place, for example, with bad weather. If you don’t yet have an immediate family, it feels like the only thing that keeps people in one place is reporting to an office, and that’s not necessary with remote work.”

His first stop was Los Angeles, where he had friends and extended family. Then he went to Chicago for a few weeks to meet a friend. He had stops in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., targeting cities he had never seen or had seen only briefly. He wanted to get a better feel for each. “There was always an openness to each place,” Khaled said. “I asked myself, could this be the city where I change my mind and stay for a long time?”

He lived in Belize, Taiwan, Lebanon, South Africa — always finding housing opportunities that didn’t require a long-term commitment. None of the experiences were negative. And even if they had been, he was confident he’d “find something to do,” he said.

“I lived in Qatar in the ’90s,” he noted, laughing. “It was a desert. You can make the best out of any situation.”

In some cases, he stayed with people he knew; in others, he used short-term housing platforms or asked for housing leads on social media. “I would always book a place at the last second so I had as much time as possible to figure out where I wanted to go next,” Khaled said. “It was really more or less about availability.” He made a point not to stay anywhere more than a month, traveling on one tourist visa after another.

He tried to avoid hotels because he didn’t want to give himself the impression that he was on vacation: “I had to keep in mind that I was actually working.” He also avoided staying in any places that felt too generic. “I like a charming apartment,” he said. “It’s important to me that it feels like an actual home.”

On the nomad community: Khaled said that it wasn’t hard to find other nomads while he was moving from one city to the next, especially with the increased embrace of remote work. “It felt like everywhere I traveled, there were other people doing the same thing,” he said, “so it didn’t feel like anything special. You could become a part of a community or two if you really wanted to.”

On people-watching: One of the things that drew Khaled to Prospect Heights was people-watching from Caffè De Martini on Vanderbilt Avenue. He’s grateful to still live so close to his favorite spot. “I love to romanticize everything in my head,” he acknowledged, “and I thought maybe it means something that I’m right next to the street that made me fall in love with Brooklyn.”

By April 2023, Khaled had moved a dozen times, and he decided to make a second stop in New York. “It had been a year since I first visited,” he said, “and I was even more immersed in this fantasy of never signing a lease ever again.”

His first visit had stuck with him in a way he couldn’t shake, and his friends in New York had been cajoling him to return. But still, he told himself it would be another short stay. “I really didn’t think I would move here,” he recalled.

When his temporary housing in Greenpoint came to an end, however, he didn’t leave. He moved to the Lower East Side for a month. After that, he moved to the West Village and on to the East Village and Astoria. At some point, he realized he was test-driving neighborhoods.

Something had shifted. “My gut told me I was going to stay here,” he said. “I thought, OK, something feels right. It felt like it was time to stay somewhere stable.”

He had hoped to land an apartment in a brownstone. “I never wanted a modern building, to be honest,” he said. “I feel like it lacks charm sometimes, and I don’t like to be on a very high floor because it becomes one layer of resistance to going out. You become lazy.”

But he kept striking out with older buildings, so reluctantly he started looking at possibilities in new developments. It was the in-building gym at 595 Dean that caught his attention. He was trying to develop a gym regimen for the first time but finding it difficult to venture out to a gym on a regular basis. “Seeing the gym downstairs, that was the first moment where I thought, OK, maybe I’ll do a modern building,” Khaled said.

He moved into the TF Cornerstone development last November, and since then the conveniences of modernity have grown on him — not just the gym, but the co-working space and the sun deck with barbecue grills. There are, after all, older buildings across the street. “So I almost feel like I’m in a brownstone,” he said.

Khaled’s employer, Kasa, relocated to the city, so he even turns up at the office occasionally. “I came to realize that if you work for a month and never see your co-workers, you almost feel like it’s not a real company,” he said. “There’s something about seeing people that makes you feel stable mentally. I think going to the office every now and then is a good feeling. And getting off my butt is important, too, if I’m honest.”

The opportunity to make connections is, by and large, what convinced Khaled to stay in New York and abandon his aversion to a long-term lease. “Diversity was on my mind,” he said. “Not just cultural but professional. I don’t want to just be around people who do the kind of work that I do. I think, growing up in the Middle East, I grew up in diverse cultures. There are a lot of expats from different parts of the world in the Middle East, and you’re always mixing with other folks. This opportunity really mattered to me.”

But the communities he’s building in his neighborhood and beyond are still bound, in one way or another, by shared experiences. “It’s important to have people I can relate to,” Khaled said, “and it doesn’t have to be from the same culture. I relate to immigrants more than long-term New Yorkers, even if it’s Arabs who grew up here. I’m more likely to relate to an immigrant. I enjoy meeting people who have stories of their own journeys.”

Gibson is a journalist

The New York Times