The Psychology of Moving
By SARAH KERSHAW
IN the nine years since he came to New York with $500 in his pocket, Martin-Christopher Harper estimates that he has moved at least 40 times.
When he lists the neighborhoods he has lived in — in chronological order — he sounds like a bartender reciting a long list of microbrews: "Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel for a moment, Bronx, Carroll Gardens, Crown Heights, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Greenpoint, Chelsea, Crown Heights, Carroll Gardens, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, East Williamsburg ..."
Mr. Harper, 32, a hairstylist, moved to New York from Los Angeles, where he still has a share in an apartment. He says he moves a lot because he is always looking for a better deal, a better space, a better neighborhood. He acknowledges, though, that moving is something of a compulsion, and that after tackling the issue in therapy and connecting his feverish relocating to his moving frequently as a child, he has begun to cut down. He has lasted more than a year in his current apartment in East Williamsburg, a record for him in New York. These days he has a roommate, Eli J. Schmidt.
Whether one moves frequently or almost never, moving is an intensely emotional experience. The underlying psychological issues involved in real estate decisions are of great interest to therapists and psychologists, because housing and moving are filled with symbolism, the hope for new beginnings, crushing disappointments, loss, anxiety and fear.
"Panic can really set in around your home and your apartment," said Ronnie Greenberg, a Manhattan psychoanalyst. "It's a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don't realize it — they mainly talk about the packing and the external part of moving."
Mr. Harper and others who choose to move frequently are likely to be risk takers, psychologists say. If they moved a lot as children, they may be experiencing what Freudian analysts call "repetition compulsion," or a Goldilocks complex, always looking for the just the right place.
Some therapists, borrowing a term used in Alcoholics Anonymous, call frequent moving "pulling a geographic," seeking external changes to change internal problems.
But as Elizabeth Stirling, a psychologist in Santa Fe, N.M., who specializes in helping people make life changes, said, "No matter how much you move, you still take yourself with you."
On the other hand, those who never or rarely move can be frozen by a fear of change, psychologists say. The prospect of leaving the place that is the center of your universe or the one constant in your life can be frightening. Even finding a new dry cleaner, deli or coin laundry can stir up deep worries of impending isolation and loneliness.
At the height of the real estate market, those who experienced moving as a source of high anxiety were compensated by the seduction of profit.
"For the longest time, moving was a bitter consequence of making money when you were selling real estate," said Michael Moshan, a real estate lawyer and a partner in Gold Scollar Moshan in SoHo. "If I was selling my apartment and buying another one, I was making money. I had to swallow the pain of moving because I was banking something significant. Now people are moving and the moving aspect becomes much more bitter."
Packing and sorting through a life's worth of belongings — especially, say, if the move is the unhappy result of a divorce or other trauma — can be gut-wrenching.
And in the current climate, especially in New York City, moving is filled with more angst than usual because people feel at the mercy of market conditions.
Potential buyers are being rejected by banks on the eve of closing, which leaves both buyers and sellers in limbo. Would-be buyers or those wanting to rent a better apartment have canceled their plans because of lost jobs or because their retirement funds and other investments were worth less. Many people feel stuck.
Doug LeBow, whose co-op board has rejected three buyers for his one-bedroom on 11th Street and Broadway, said he felt "imprisoned." His apartment has been on the market off and on for three years.
Mr. LeBow, 40, said he received an offer of $1.12 million in cash on his 1,100-square-foot apartment in 2007; he had paid $545,000 for it shortly before the real estate boom. In 2005, after he lost his job as a creative director for the in-house advertising agency of World Wrestling Entertainment, he assumed that his real estate investment would allow him to start over. He planned to expand his production company and become a partner in a restaurant.
But while the sale was in contract, the co-op board turned down the buyer, he said. The next offer, $950,000, did not come until a year later; that buyer, too, was turned down. So was the latest, who offered $825,000.
In New York City, co-op boards have wide legal latitude for rejecting buyers. The president of Mr. LeBow's co-op board did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. LeBow said battling the board depressed and frustrated him. While he feels fortunate that he is still able to afford his monthly mortgage and maintenance, a combined total of $4,000, he said he was quickly running through his savings.
Living in the apartment, and doing some freelance work at home, makes him wonder if he is somehow doomed to stay there, he said.
"I was lucky enough, I haven't had to sell pencils on a street corner," Mr. LeBow said. "And it's not so much the money; it's the helplessness. I have felt very much imprisoned and hamstrung. There's nothing worse than having no control of your own situation."
He added: "I have been ready to move for three years, and I literally have not been allowed to move."
He recently put the apartment back on the market, asking $850,000.
For Stephen Klein, 43, a renter, a single father and a librarian at the City University of New York, the process of moving is "very emotional."
Mr. Klein has moved nine times in the last 14 years, often as relationships — including a marriage — began and ended. Now, he would very much like to move from his rental in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, because he needs more space. He wishes his 10-year-old daughter had her own room instead of the loft he built for her above the kitchen.
He said he would like to stay in Prospect Heights, where he has friends and a sense of community — all the more important because he is single. But the apartments with more space that he can afford are in far-off neighborhoods.
"I feel like I'm a refugee," he said. "I really feel like I wish I could have a sense of home. I feel like I'm floating out there."
Therapists say that they often hear upsetting language from their clients when they talk about real estate, words like trapped, stuck, imprisoned and — Mr. Klein's description of himself — "refugee." And they try to help them reframe the issue in a more positive light.
"If you say you are trapped," said Linda Sapadin, a Long Island psychologist and a motivational speaker, "that's like the trapping of an animal. It's a pretty shocking visualization. It's better to say, 'I can't move right now,' and ask what can you do to make your environment safer, more pleasant. Adding the two words 'right now' is a tremendous liberator psychologically."
Will Cox's apartment on Riverside Drive and 92nd Street has been a constant in his life — too constant. He has "walked down the same block 10,000 times," and longed to leave the neighborhood.
Mr. Cox, 38 and the owner of a television and film post-production company, has lived in a rent-controlled apartment that he took over from his parents, who now live in Connecticut. He has never lived anywhere else, except for the four years he was away at college in California.
The place has allowed him and his wife, Lynn Van Lith, who have two daughters, ages 1 and 3, a bit of a financial cushion. But in some ways it has also been a burden: Giving up a $1,200 two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is not an easy decision, even if you are eager to go.
The logjam broke when Mr. Cox was offered an incentive by his landlord. He is moving today to an apartment he and Ms. Van Lith bought in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And beneath the financial calculations of the move, and the uneasiness that comes with putting all of their savings into the apartment, they have complex feelings. One is excitement: They are off to start "a new history," he said.
"It's an opportunity to purge and create a whole new life that's now going to be my wife's and my life together," Mr. Cox said. "I'm finding pots and pans that haven't been used since my father fried eggs in them 25 years ago."
On the other hand, leaving the apartment, cracked bathroom-floor tiles and all, represents that classic and difficult task of adulthood, leaving home.
"I have all these memories of the neighborhood, these sorts of ghosts that follow you around," he said. "And for me, it doesn't at the moment feel entirely like my own life. I still feel like I'm under the shadow of my parents. That rite of passage of finding your own place to live in New York, that experience, I had never had it."
Mr. Harper, the serial mover, has had that experience so many times that he practically has his moving man, Mark Ehrhardt, on speed dial. He talks about Mr. Ehrhardt, the president of Movers, Not Shakers! of Brooklyn, the way some people talk about a nanny, a cleaning lady or a shrink.
"Mark's been with me now for six years," he said. "He's a part of my world, he's seen me grow."
Mr. Harper said that he had cut back on chasing novel spaces, finding the "newness" he had been seeking in his work rather than apartment hunting.
Still, he admitted to checking Craigslist for rentals a few times a week. Then he confessed to almost daily perusing, adding sheepishly, "I always think about moving."
Jake Nicholson | Vice President
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