The Nightmare Share

She posted an ad for a roommate. What’s the worst that could happen?

- By Bridge Tread

Heidi Russell in her bedroom. Her roommate has taken over the rest of the apartment.

As it goes in New York City, the apartment was small, it was expensive, but it was theirs. Heidi Russell and Valentina Bajada owned an 860-squarefoot second-floor walk-up, and they loved its single living-room window, cramped kitchen, and two little bedrooms. Their building was on a quiet, treelined block of Barrow Street close to the Hudson River. Neighbors kept libraries of free books and walked their dogs in leafy, open courtyards. It was as close to a village as the West Village gets.

Bajada, a Soviet immigrant who owned a catering company with her ex-husband, spent ten years on a waiting list before she was approved to become a tenant in 1998, back when the West Village Houses were still subsidized. They were the result of an affordable-housing triumph of the ’60s, when Jane Jacobs defeated Robert Moses’s plans to demolish the neighborhood and build a highway. Now they are market-rate co-ops in one of the most upscale neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Bajada and Russell, who met in 2005 at ladies’ night at a bar in the Village, bought their place in 2016 for just over $450,000, an insider rate offered exclusively to tenants. Like many of their neighbors, the couple could only really afford their apartment by renting a piece of it out. Bajada, 55, had a chronic pain condition and no longer worked; Russell, 56, was a fine-art photographer with a day job as an executive assistant. They put a listing on Airbnb: “Really historic place,” it read, with pictures of a tidy spare bedroom with a red curtain, a black-and-white print of snowcovered trees, and a chandelier.