Trying to Choose a NYC Neighborhood - Advice?

I'll take a different angle that I don't see mentioned yet.

You're working from home. This needs to be the single axis you make your decision around.

There are a lot of factors to choosing a home in New York:

• concentration of basic services (groceries, laundry, coffee shop, drug store, etc.)
• proximity to transit (if you take it)
• amenities in the building
• commute time to office (if you ever have to go in even though you're home-based)
• space for your needs
• light and exposure
• noise and sound
• doorman
• elevator versus walk-up
• and so on ...

Most of those are irrelevant relative to the single criterion of how well the home you choose sets you up to be happy and successful working out of it.

You want:

• a very defined separate space for work; this means a two bedroom, and ideally a floorplan where they don't share a common wall
• a quiet street; there's a difference between a quiet neighborhood and a quiet street - some neighborhoods are quiet (like Noho, which has wide streets with great lighting, low level of foot traffic, and relatively fewer loud ground-floor tenant businesses like restaurants and bars), but streets within them can be worse (like Great Jones, which has a firehouse on it that trucks come screaming out of)
• a doorman, or at least a virtual one; the iconic New York apartment buzzer really grates on you when three separate boxes from the same Amazon Prime order show up within four hours of each other and interrupt every call you're on for the day
• ideally a building with FiOS; Spectrum blows and you don't want any headache around connectivity for work

Assuming a $320,000 income, you can afford to take a different path to picking an apartment: live in different neighborhoods for a week or month at a time before signing a lease.

You can do this with Airbnb, Frele, Landing, or even corporate stay-type offerings like AKA. Try a short stint in a few different areas before you commit.

For generic quality of life topics, I'd recommend Noho, Soho, and the upper West Village (Meatpacking, effectively, but lower than 14th).

Noho gives you the 4/5/6 at Bleecker, BDFM at Houston (also a Bleecker entrance), and NQR at Prince. It's clean, surprisingly quiet, spacious (which means lots of light in your home), has good small restaurants (Lafayette, Bond, and Great Jones are dotted with them), and no friend you invite over or girl you take home will fail to react positively to your home.

Off the top of my mind, buildings here would include:

• Avalon (look at all their properties through the city, but this one is called Bowery - there are two buildings that face each other on 1st Street, you want the north one to avoid the noise of Houston)
• 2 Cooper
• Silk Building (these will be condos rented directly by the owner, not a professionally managed rental building)
• Soho Court (old and ugly, in my opinion, but never any vacancies which means people aren't turning the units over so it must not be awful)
• 284 Mott (probably under your budget)
• Schumacher Building (probably above your budget; again, condos, not professional rentals)
• 11 Great Jones

Soho would give you the same subways: 4/5/6 at Spring, NQR at Prince, BDFM at Houston, ACE at Spring if you're farther west. There are limitless options here for restaurants, both east of Broadway (aka Nolita) and west. It's a cliche that this is the best neighborhood to see girls on the street. All kinds of events happen here: galleries, parties, product launches, you name it. Know going in that you'll always have heavy foot traffic; Soho is a people magnet and both tourists and New Yorkers alike pour through the streets on evenings and weekends. Most blocks are pretty quiet at night though.

I'm running out of time so I'll skip pointing out a bunch of buildings. If you want "modern highrise with a view", you're going to want the western area of Soho. Some brokers will call that Hudson Square, but note that they're using it to refer to anything west of Varick and will take you as far west as the highway. I'm referring more to the stuff on Mercer, Broome, and Crosby where there's a decent number of buildings over seven stories with doormen, as well as over toward the tunnel entrance like Renwick, Charlton, and Hudson where it seems like there are new highrises coming online continually.

The Meatpacking area I'm referring to is pretty narrow geographically. I have the same stance you do on the West Village overall; inventory tends to be old, tight, and dirty relative to its price point. Things that are new and clean still tend not to be spacious, and they come at such a significant premium to their exact comp in a different but still 'trendy' or desirous neighborhood that it makes no sense.

Some of the northern blocks below 14th are interesting though. They're open and airy and have newly-converted buildings. Off the top of my head most will be above your price point (I recall seeing things in the $15-25,000 range) but I bet there will be expensive one-bedroom units or smaller twos in those type of buildings. Look for great buildings north of West 10th. Try to stay below 14th and not on it, otherwise you'll get a ton of foot traffic and probably audible street noise as well. Look at 66 Ninth if you want inspiration.

Beyond my neighborhood recommendations, I'd say Tribeca can be fun but is pretty family-oriented. You'll see a lot of strollers, and the restaurant scene is much more sedate. Lots of people there are established couples, even if they haven't started a family yet.

Avoid Midtown overall. Midtown East is stale, and since you mention wanting to avoid the immediate post-grad crowd, you'll hate it (Murray Hill, Turtle Bay, etc.). Midtown West (Hell's Kitchen especially) is getting a ton of new highrises, but if you go check them out you may get the sense that it's like being in a vacuum. You can easily miss a lot of the character of the city in a big sterile tower that's in a pocket of other big towers.

You're correct that the Upper East and West are very relaxed and family-oriented.

LES is changing a lot. Essex Crossing was in the works for quite awhile and then sprang up almost overnight. There are way more viable buildings than just three years ago. Most are midrise; streets like Orchard and Rivington aren't zoned for massive buildings. 196 Orchard is a good example, I loosely know one of the principals involved in the deal, they bought air rights from Katz's and had a pretty splashy sale of the retail portion a few years later. I'll tell you the same thing I told a friend who took a unit there; get used to loud streets at night (tons of really popular cheap bars over there), round-the-clock traffic noise (bridge traffic on Delancey), and dirty, narrow streets. In 10 years I bet it will be a lot cleaner, but that probably only helps if you're buying, not renting.

Good luck man. Sounds like you've got a nice role. My advice is to take several weeks to check out the places you're thinking of settling in to get an actual feel for it, and make sure to prioritize a home where you're able to work productively.