Off-campus housing near Baruch College, thirteen minutes up Lexington

The commute is one avenue, not one journey

Baruch sits on Lexington Avenue in the East 20s. Seton Residence sits half a block off Lexington at East 40th. That is the same avenue, thirteen minutes door to door, and the 6 train runs the length of it from Grand Central.

It matters more than the number suggests. A thirteen-minute commute that involves one train and no transfer behaves differently from a thirteen-minute commute that involves a transfer — it survives a delay, it works at eleven at night, and it does not become thirty-five minutes on a weekend when the schedule thins out.

The walking option exists too. It is a straight line down Lexington, and plenty of residents do it in good weather rather than wait for a train that is four minutes away.

Why Baruch students end up looking off-campus in the first place

Baruch is a commuter school by design. It does not have the dormitory stock of a residential campus, and the students who need housing are usually competing for the same Manhattan rental market as everyone else — with a lease term that does not match an academic calendar and a credit history that does not match a landlord's form.

The two things that break the search are almost always the same. The lease is twelve months and the term is four. And the application wants a guarantor earning forty times the rent, which is a difficult sentence for a first-year graduate student.

Renting a room from a building rather than taking over an apartment lease removes both. There is no co-signer requirement and no joint liability with other residents, and the terms are weekly with a seven-night minimum, so a semester books for a semester.

What a term actually costs here

One weekly number, with the things a student budget usually forgets already inside it: electricity, gas, heat, water, sewer, trash, air conditioning, Wi-Fi and weekly housekeeping.

• Deluxe Room — $525 a week, shared bathroom, full bed
• Studio Basic — $650 a week, en-suite, queen bed, private entrance off the hallway
• King Studio — $745 a week, en-suite, the largest room, shareable as a twin

The part worth knowing before you arrive

There is no full kitchen in a room. No stove, no oven. Rooms have a mini-fridge, a microwave and a kettle, and real cooking happens in the communal kitchen downstairs.

For a lot of students that is a fair trade for a Midtown address on a student budget. For someone who cooks every night and wants to do it privately, it is not, and it is better to decide that here than in September.

The rest of the week, not just the commute to class

East 40th between Lexington and Third is residential on both sides and stays quiet, which is unusual two blocks from 42nd Street and matters the night before an exam.

Grand Central is four minutes away, so an internship anywhere on the 4, 5, 6, 7 or S is one ride, and Metro-North gets you out of the city without crossing it first. The New York Public Library and Bryant Park are both nine minutes on foot when the room stops working as a study space.