My family of 7 moved from a 6-bedroom home in Salt Lake City to a 3-bedroom apartment in NYC. Our cost of living went up, but it's worth it.

Maren Droubay Maren Droubay moved from Salt Lake City to New York City with her husband and five kids. They sold their six-bedroom house and moved into a three-bedroom apartment. Droubay said her family's housing costs doubled, but their New York life is a dream come true. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maren Droubay, a 32-year-old who moved from Salt Lake City to New York City with her family. It's been edited for length and clarity. My husband and I are from the Salt Lake City area of Utah, and we have five young kids. We appreciated being close to family, nature, and a city with a variety of dining options and entertainment. But we always wanted our kids to have more exposure to different parts of the world and different lifestyles than what we felt they were getting in Utah . Utah is home, but we found ourselves traveling all the time. We were always on the road. We used to homeschool our kids so that we could travel. We thought moving to New York was an impossible dream. We visited a lot and loved the feeling in the city. It took us 10 years before the opportunity finally presented itself when my husband got a job in New York. We moved from Salt Lake City to New York City on October 10, 2025. Moving to New York Moving our family from Utah to New York was probably in the top 10 hardest things I've ever done. Maren Droubay We lived in an older house , so we had to do a lot of updating to get it ready for the market, sell it, and get it under contract. We moved from a six-bedroom home to a three-bedroom apartment, so we really had to downsize - everything from furniture and lawn tools to our two cars had to go. I decreased all of our clothing to a quarter of what we had. You have to uproot everything when you make a move like this, from finding new doctors to getting our kids enrolled in school . I am so relieved that it feels so worth it. Every day, I cannot believe we live in New York. The apartment To find our apartment, I connected with people through Facebook groups or Reddit who were looking to sublease or have their lease taken over. I posted, "We're moving. We need three bedrooms. This is the ideal block radius we want to live in. Does anyone know of anything?" One person reached out to me and said, "I am moving that very month to a different neighborhood. My apartment has three bedrooms. It has laundry and an elevator." It was like kismet. It's the perfect apartment for us. We had Facetimed and looked at it, but we hadn't walked through it ourselves until we moved. We were just living on a prayer, and it worked out. We have a large bedroom at the back of the apartment that...

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