Nine months is the shape of a New School year, and you can settle it before you have a US bank account.

A private furnished studio in Midtown, arranged from wherever you are reading this — for the Parsons or New School graduate student who arrives in August with a visa, a suitcase and no address.

The New School enrols heavily at graduate level and heavily from outside the United States. Which means a very large share of the people searching for housing near it are doing something that is genuinely hard and rarely acknowledged as hard: committing to somewhere to live in a city they have never been to, in a country whose rental market cannot read them yet, from a time zone where nobody is awake to answer.

That is the problem this page is about. It is not the price of a room.

The campus is in the Village, and this is a commute rather than a walk

Worth being straight about, because two of the other campus pages on this site are not describing the same thing at all.

Stagg is at 12 West 44th Street, one block north of Bryant Park. The New School's University Center is at 66 West 12th Street, in Greenwich Village — about a mile and six-tenths south. That figure is straight-line rather than walked, so treat it as proximity and nothing more. Realistically you will take the subway most mornings, and some days you will walk it because it is a good walk.

What can be said precisely is the start of the journey, because it is short: the B, D, F and M stop at 42nd Street–Bryant Park, two minutes from the door, and the line runs straight down the west side of Manhattan toward the Village. Grand Central is a six-minute walk east. The building scores Walk 100, Transit 100 and Bike 80.

So the honest version is this: you are not next to campus, and if walking out of your door straight into your building is the thing you are optimising for, something closer to Fourteenth Street will beat this. What you get instead is a Midtown address with every line in it, which over nine months matters for the rest of your life in the city rather than for the trip to class — internships, galleries, the library, the airport train, the other half of your cohort who live somewhere else entirely.

Nothing on this page implies any relationship with The New School or with Parsons. Being a short ride from a campus is geography, not affiliation.

The order things happen in, and why housing has to come first

Here is the sequence almost every international arrival runs, in the order it actually occurs.

An offer arrives. A visa process starts and finishes on its own schedule. Flights get booked around a date that is partly guesswork. And somewhere in there, the question of where you will physically be on your first night in New York has to be answered — before orientation, before a bank account, before a phone number, before you have stood in a single neighbourhood and formed an opinion about it.

Everything the open market asks of a renter sits on the far side of that arrival. A credit file takes months of being here to exist. A US bank account generally wants you present. A viewing wants you in the room. A guarantor wants to be someone who knows you and lives here. None of it is obtainable before you land, and all of it is demanded before you can rent.

That is the circularity, and it is why furnished housing that can be arranged remotely exists at all. Not because it is cheaper — it very often is not — but because it is the only part of the market that can be settled in the one window when you still need to settle it.

Nine months is not a hurdle for you, it is the length of your year

For a summer intern, a nine-month minimum is a wall. For you it is roughly the thing you were going to need anyway.

A taught master's year runs from late August to May. A visa year runs on a comparable arc. Nine months sits inside both of those, which means the term is not something you have to work around — it is the term you would have asked for. Sign once, in July, from another country, and the housing question is closed for the academic year rather than reopened at Christmas.

Where it does bite is if your programme is a single semester, an exchange term or a short summer studio. Nine months does not bend to those, and the right answer then is an extended-stay let or a co-living operator rather than this building. We would rather tell you that now than after a deposit.

The one thing to establish early, because it governs your whole timeline, is what can be arranged before a visa is actually issued. That is a question about our terms rather than about the market, and it is in the list at the end of this page for the honest reason that we have not published an answer to it.

What you would be signing for, plainly

Every studio is private — its own ensuite bathroom, its own entrance off the hallway, nothing inside the room shared with anyone. That is worth stating flatly, because a large share of what an international search returns is a bedroom inside somebody else's apartment, let by somebody you cannot verify from abroad.

One rate covers everything: furniture, electricity, gas, heat, water, air conditioning, trash, sewer and Wi-Fi. No separate utility bill, no internet account to open in a name with no credit history behind it, and no broker fee. Rent is quoted weekly and billed every two weeks; at booking you pay a deposit of four weeks' rent plus the first week. That deposit is more cash up front than a room-share typically asks, and if your funding does not disburse until October it is the first line to look at.

Two limits, said once and clearly. No studio has an oven or a stove — the eat-in kitchen downstairs covers anything needing a hob, which over an academic year matters more than it would over a month, and matters more again if cooking your own food is part of how you stay sane a long way from home. And the building is non-smoking and pet-free, without exceptions.

Tours can be done over video if you are overseas. Ask for one unbroken take, filmed at an hour you pick, starting outside the front door. Then put the questions below to us in writing before anything is charged. The wider guide to student housing in New York covers what to ask any operator here, not only us.

The questions we are not going to guess at

What we require at signing, which documents an international student needs to send, whether a US guarantor is necessary, whether a scholarship letter can stand in for employment income, whether a room can be held before your visa is issued and what happens to a deposit if it is refused — none of that is settled on paper in a form we will publish.

Those are the first six questions a Parsons admit in another country asks, and inventing answers to them would be worse than leaving the space empty. Ask us directly, tell us where you are writing from, and we will put the answers in writing.

Tell us when you land

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 visa date is still moving, say so — that is the normal case here, not a complication.

[Ask what we require →](/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 flights.*