There's no place like a rent-controlled home

AS if New Year's Eve isn't wonderful enough, it's also the night I'm getting kicked out of my apartment. I've had a magical year, a year of living in a gorgeous two-bedroom apartment overlooking Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, for the same price as my previous place in East Harlem, which I shared with a lovely roommate and his disrespectful cat, Bobbi.

A red-haired child named Dahlia put the deal together. I was baby-sitting her and complaining about Bobbi constantly trying to break my laptop, and she advised me, as she so often did, to move out.

Then, leaning back in her chair with some hot chocolate on her top lip, she explained that her father's friend was moving upstate for work, but wanted to keep her rent-stabilised place in Park Slope because she'd been there "forever". It turns out that, to a nine-year-old and every other New Yorker, forever means 26 years.