What’s it like moving to NYC today?

I've been living here for a long time. Rents are astronomical. A building near me that was renting for $4300. for a one bedroom is now getting $7600. for a one bedroom. The thing to do now is to buy if you can. Prices haven't come up that much and there is a lot of inventory for purchase. Not so much for rent.

Recently moved to NYC from another city on the east coast. It is expensive to live here, but month over month rent is not excessively expensive depending on where you live. The more frustrating thing about living here is the peculiarities of real estate transactions that I haven't seen in other American cities. There were some substantial discounts pre-COVID but things are normalizing.

In short -- there are five boroughs in NYC - the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and Staten Island. When most people talk about NYC they are talking about Manhattan, but most people tend to live elsewhere. The housing stock is very old (e.g. pre-WWII) and not very sizable compared to other cities. If you are looking for a one-bedroom high rise in Manhattan, expect to pay a lot and see high rent increases. Rents are going up throughout the area but nowhere near what is described in OP.

One of the bigger and more frustrating issues for renters is that due to the density in the area, there is a strange custom where rentals are often managed by real estate brokers who charge a commission similar to the closing cost for the sale of a property, but unlike selling a house where closing is covered by the seller, the broker fee for a rental is typically born by the tenant. The broker fee is often about 8% of the yearly rent -- in other words, about a month's rent (!!). The justification for this is that NYC is a high-density area where there are lots of tenants chasing a small number of properties. In reality, due to Internet postings brokers due practically nothing but opening the door to a prospective tenant and showing up for the signing. This isn't a universal thing, but unless someone tells you that there are "no broker fees" you should likely expect this to be a common occurance

There are some odd things about renting in NYC compared to most US cities that long predated COVID.