Thomas Nyle hasn’t owned a car in seven years. “Not since I was 28,” says Nyle, a computer programmer who specializes in academic material. “I was living in Manhattan in 2007, and I could take the subway everywhere I needed to go. And when I didn’t want to ride the subway — say it was really late or the weather was really bad — I’d take a cab.”
Although he was renting at the time, Nyle said he made the decision to eventually buy a place that had access to public transportation. “I realized I really didn’t need a car,” says Nyle. “If I had to live out in the country or somewhere in the suburbs, I’d probably need one, but I always wanted to stay within a large, urban area, so the country and the suburbs were out anyway.”
Nyle says his attachment to city living is based on his high school years, which he spent in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. “My parents split up, and my dad kept our house in the northern suburbs, which is where we all lived before the divorce. My mom and I moved in with her sister, who had a three-bedroom condo that overlooked the Lincoln Park Zoo,” Nyle says. “It was incredibly cool. I was this 14-year-old kid with my own room, right in the middle of one of the best neighborhoods in the country.”
Nyle went to Lincoln Park High School and DePaul University before heading to the East Coast for his first job. “I bought a car when I graduated and moved to a small town outside of Philadelphia,” he says. “I was miserable, having to drive to the center of Philly every day for a job I liked, but the commute was awful.”
When the opportunity to transfer to New York City became available, Nyle took immediate advantage of it. “I moved to Queens, then Brooklyn, then I eventually bought a studio in Greenwich Village,” he says.
When Nyle sold the studio last year on his own, he specifically targeted people who didn’t own a car or didn’t want to own a car. “You’d be surprised how many people respond to a housing listing ad if the first line says something like ‘Commuter’s Delight,’ he says. “I used that a couple of places. In other places, I used ‘No car? No problem’ as the headline.”
The idea, Nyle says, was to appeal to people with similar sensibilities, specifically that sensibility that deemed a car an inessential element of daily living. “I didn’t want to show my place to people who would ask about parking,” says Nyle. “I kept my car in a guy’s garage in Queens for $250 a month, but it wasn’t exactly an easy commute to get the car when I needed it. People living in New York pay ridiculous amounts of money for a space in the city, like $100,000 to buy a space. I didn’t want to deal with those people. I wanted the man who preferred the subway over a car.”
Or in Nyle’s case, the woman. “My buyer was a hardcore urbanite,” he says. “She was a teacher, and she told me she took the train, rode her bike and occasionally skated anywhere she needed to go, so my whole ‘No Car?’ message got to her.”
After testing her commute for three days — she would start outside Nyle’s building and head to the school she taught at in Harlem, then return to his building after the school day ended — the teacher made Nyle an offer. “Exactly what I asked for, which was $389,000,” says Nyle. “She told me she would never have a budget for a car, so she could pay more for her mortgage. Sounded good to me.”
After Nyle moved to a larger place a few blocks from his studio, he thought about the words of the new occupant of his previous place and came to a similar conclusion. “I was paying an obscene amount of money to store a car that I never used,” he says. “I cleaned it up and sold it on Craigslist within a week. Really, I don’t need it. Why bother hanging on to it?”
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