At LIM your week has two addresses, and only one of them is printed on your timetable.

At LIM your week has two addresses, and only one of them is printed on your timetable.

About half a mile west of 216 East 45th Street, a private furnished studio that sits central to campus and to wherever your placement turns out to be — because when you sign a lease, you usually only know one of those two addresses.

Most pages about housing near a campus answer one question: is the journey to campus acceptable? That is the wrong question about LIM, because a LIM week does not run between two points. It runs between three.

The campus is about half a mile east, and that is the easy half of the problem

LIM College is at 216 East 45th Street. Stagg is at 12 West 44th Street, about half a mile west — a crosstown walk, one block north and a handful of avenue blocks east.

That figure is straight-line rather than walked. Manhattan's grid always adds something, and crosstown avenue blocks add more than numbered ones, so treat it as proximity rather than a commute.

The transit timings are the verified ones. The 42nd Street–Bryant Park subway entrance — B, D, F and M — is two minutes from the door, and Grand Central is a six-minute walk east. The building scores Walk 100, Transit 100 and Bike 80.

Nothing here implies any relationship with LIM College. Being a short walk from a campus is geography, not affiliation. Ask the college directly what housing it operates or refers to, and what the deadlines are — only LIM can answer that, and whatever it offers may well be the cheapest option on your table.

The second address is the one you cannot plan around

LIM teaches the business of fashion — merchandising, management, marketing — and its defining feature is that industry work is built into the degree rather than bolted onto the summer. Part of your week is spent inside a company rather than a classroom: a showroom, a buying office, a retailer, somewhere with a schedule of its own.

Which means that when you sign a lease, you commit to an address while one of your two destinations is still unknown.

You may not know where that placement will be. It may be in the Garment District, further down Seventh, a few blocks from campus, or across town. It may change between terms, and probably will as the programme moves you through different parts of the industry. You cannot look it up in advance.

That is a different housing problem from the one every other campus page solves. The usual advice is to live close to campus, and it assumes campus is the only fixed point in your week. For you it is not. Optimising hard for East 45th Street would be optimising for half your week and leaving the other half to chance.

Central beats close, and the difference shows up on a three-stop day

The answer to two centres is not to get as near as possible to one. It is to sit in the middle of the area holding both.

A Midtown address between Fifth and Sixth does that structurally. Campus is a walk, most of Midtown and the Garment District is a walk or one stop, and the subway hub at the corner covers whatever is not. A day holding a class, a placement shift and an evening commitment becomes three short journeys rather than a scheme planned the night before.

Housing an hour out serves neither centre. It is not simply further from campus — it is further from every possible placement at once, and it turns the gap between a class and a shift into dead time in a café, because going home and back is no longer worth it. That is the hour of every weekday a cheap room quietly charges you.

A placement week asks something specific of a room

If part of your week is spent in industry workplaces, you are in and out at odd hours and presentable when you go.

Every studio here is private: its own ensuite bathroom, its own entrance off the hallway, nothing inside the room shared with anyone. That matters more on a placement schedule than on a timetable of lectures. You come back between a morning class and an afternoon at a showroom, change, and leave again, without negotiating a bathroom with anybody or waking a flatmate on an early start.

The weekly rate covers everything: furniture, electricity, gas, heat, water, air conditioning, trash, sewer and Wi-Fi, with no separate utility bill and no broker fee. Studio Basic is $625 a week, the most affordable of the three, with one honest drawback — limited natural light. Studio Plus is $645 and is brighter. Studio King is $695 and is the largest. Each has a study desk, built-in bookshelves, a smart TV, a mini-fridge, microwave, coffee maker and kettle. No studio has an oven or a stove; the eat-in kitchen downstairs covers anything needing a hob. The building is a 1902 landmark with a fitness centre, laundry on site and a laundry service, non-smoking and pet-free without exceptions.

At booking you pay a deposit of four weeks' rent plus the first week — more cash up front than a room-share typically asks, refundable at the end less any damage. Check that line first if what you can pay in August is your real constraint.

This is a Midtown rate for a private room with its own bathroom, and a shared room further out will be cheaper per week. See what student housing in New York really costs once the fees and furniture are added back — the broker fee, the guarantor service and the utilities are what make a cheap room less cheap than it looks.

The term usually runs nine months, and the exceptions are a conversation

Here the term usually runs nine months, which maps closely onto an academic year — settle it once in August and the question does not come back in January.

Shorter stays are possible, but they are very limited and they are decided one at a time, on the term you are asking for and on what is actually free. So if your dates are shorter — a single semester, a placement-length stay, a programme that finishes early — ask rather than assume either way. Do not rule yourself out on the strength of a web page, and do not plan around a shorter term until someone has confirmed yours.

What to ask before you commit

What we require at signing — credit history, a guarantor, proof of income or funding, and what an international student is asked for instead — is not stated here, for the same reason: it is unconfirmed, and an invented answer is worse than none.

Ask that first. Then ask what a placement week generates and a timetable does not: how the entrance works late in the evening, whether there is anywhere to press or steam clothes, whether a parent or funding body can be invoiced, and what happens if your placement ends sooner than planned.

Tell us your dates and where you will be studying

Say roughly when you would arrive and which studio interests you, and we will come back with what is free and what it costs within one business day. If your dates are shorter than nine months, say so and ask — that is a question worth putting to us rather than deciding for yourself.

[Enquire about a room →](/contact)

See the three studios: Studio Basic · Studio Plus · Studio King

*Rates are quoted weekly and billed every two weeks. Availability changes; please confirm before you book travel.*