Yes, People Really Live Like This

And some of them might even be your friends:

Living in a top-floor walk-up in New York City is a mixed blessing.

Sure there are those stairs; all those stairs. There is the moment of dread when you look up the stairs and contemplate the trek up, up and up, carrying groceries, children, luggage, furniture, whatever.

But that’s not all there is. In the current real estate market, top-floor walk-ups may well be the best deals. They can also be quiet spaces that are flooded with light and that have open views of the city, especially if they peek out above their surrounding neighbors. In some cases, they also have a deck or terrace that can become an outdoor living room with the twinkling night sky as a backdrop.

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Since 1968, the city has generally required builders to install elevators in all new residential buildings that have five or more stories. But under certain zoning provisions, a five-story building can be built without an elevator.

Brokers say there are some developers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who have gotten approval to build five-story walk-ups by setting the top floor back from the front of the building and by keeping ceiling height under eight feet.

At five stories, “having an elevator would mean pretty significant common charges,” said Roberto Gonzalez, an agent at Bond New York. “Developers will do walk-ups because they want to be competitive, and they want to use as much of the footprint as they can for living space as opposed to an elevator shaft.”

David Kazemi, a vice president at Bond New York, said that walk-ups don’t seem to bother many of the young professionals looking to buy in Williamsburg. “A lot of people prefer it actually because they don’t want the luxury high-rise lifestyle,” he said. “That’s not the point of living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”

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People who live in top-floor walk-ups say they have a variety of coping mechanisms that help them deal with the daily hike up the stairs.

Ms. Stern said she learned very quickly not to focus on the number of steps. She counted and knew the exact number at one point. “But that was discouraging because then I found myself counting every time I went up,” she said. “It was much better when I stayed focused on the mission and the goal of just getting home.”

Big shopping trips to the grocery store are replaced by more frequent and smaller purchases, and heavy items like kitty litter might be put on the Fresh Direct order, along with a generous tip to the delivery man.

Mr. Gonzalez, the Bond agent, recently bought a fifth-floor walk-up for himself in Williamsburg, and he said that he had learned to become more organized to avoid having to run up and down the stairs several times a day to retrieve forgotten items. “Before I leave the house now I have a little saying: ‘Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone,'” he said. “Because if I forget one of them, that’s when I regret the top floor.”

Mr. Nguyen, the owner in Inwood, said the one thing that he takes special care with is the trash and recycling. “I make sure it’s well secured for the trip down because I don’t want it breaking,” he said.

Also, after spending a week personally gutting and renovating the apartment’s kitchen with a friend, he said, “If I’d known what all we had to go through, I’d have probably hired somebody else to do it.”

He and his friend hauled up 15 kitchen cabinets, two 7-foot-tall storage units, countless bags of grout, boxes of tile and piles of new floorboards. “We sort of had to do a lot of maneuvering and we had to shimmy a lot of things around corners on the stairs to make it fit,” he said. “But it’s amazing what you can do with sheer will and determination.”