Sarah Max started covering personal finance more than a decade ago as a staff writer at Money magazine in New York. In 2002, she sold her Brooklyn co-op, moved West and went to work writing about real estate for CNNMoney. She didn’t realize it then, but her home office in the boom town of Bend, Ore., would prove an ideal spot for tracking the ups and downs of the housing market. Now a freelancer, Max writes about a range of topics for such publications as BusinessWeek, Golf Digest and The Week.
One of the most memorable places I’ve lived was Fort Greene in Brooklyn in the late 1990s, before it got hip. My husband and I lived at the corner of Myrtle and Waverly — also known as Murder and Wave Your Gun at Me — on the fourth floor of a true loft building. What the place lacked in amenities (that’s right, not a Starbucks in sight!) it more than made up for in 20-foot ceilings, industrial-size windows and panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline. When our friends on the other side of the river — the ones who squatted in dank, 400-square-foot studios — smugly told us they could never live anywhere but Manhattan, we just laughed. We even tried to buy the loft. But by then word was getting out about Fort Greene. It was time to pack up and move to the next frontier."