Brian Harkin for The New York Times
NEW VIEW Marilyn Kotcher moved to Manhattan to find “community.”
ALMOST four years ago, Marilyn Kotcher suddenly became a widow. And the large — 2,250-square-foot — condominium in Fort Lee, N.J., that she and her husband had bought together and lovingly remodeled no longer seemed like home.
Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Ms. Kotcher moved to East 79th Street from Fort Lee, N.J., after the death of her husband, Stanley Michelman.
“It had a lot of wonderful memories for me,” said Ms. Kotcher, a clinical social worker. “But I didn’t have a sense of belonging there anymore.”
She was similarly disenchanted with Fort Lee. “I felt very isolated,” she said. “There are just a lot of large buildings on the water. If you’re part of a couple, it’s O.K., but I wanted a sense of community.”
In the past, space had always trumped location for Ms. Kotcher when it came to choosing a home. Now, location was going to be her priority. And so it was that last May she moved to a one-bedroom rental on East 79th Street in Manhattan. “I had a zillion friends in New Jersey, but I would never just bump into them,” she said. “In Manhattan if I run into someone on Second Avenue, we go out for coffee.”
That kind of spontaneity reminds her of college dorm life, though the adult version has “everyone in a separate apartment.” On the Upper East Side, she said, “I can always find something to do. A long weekend no longer creates any anxiety for me.”
Legions swear by retail therapy as a way of dealing with a bad day at the office, a bad hair day or a really bad number on the bathroom scale. But people who are going through more substantial life crises — the death of a loved one, illness, divorce, a messy breakup — may be able to work through the pain with the aid of real estate therapy. A new home, after all, can be much more than a change of address.
“If real estate is a big part of your problem, it’s possible that real estate can solve it,” said Elayne Reimer, an executive vice president of Halstead Property and a former marriage and family counselor. “If you live a two-hour commute from work, moving closer to the job might be very beneficial to your health, and to improving relations with family members because you’d have more time for them.”
But “a lot of people use real estate as an escape,” she added. “If you’re living in the suburbs and you aren’t happy in your home life, you may think if you move to the city your life will be better. But the location isn’t going to make a difference if the unhappiness is internal.”
When you decide that a new residence is the best solution to a problem, your emotional baggage gets loaded in the moving van along with the linen and flatware, said Beth Fisher, a senior managing director of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “But changing real estate can really be psychologically healthy under certain circumstances.”
Such circumstances include what can be described as the Second Mrs. de Winter Syndrome. “We see marriages where the new couple is burdened psychologically living in the same apartment that had been occupied by the former spouse,” Ms. Fisher said. “It’s a burden, especially for a second wife. To get out of the shadow of someone’s stakehold in a particular neighborhood is very empowering.”
Ms. Fisher has also known of cancer patients who abandon a longtime address for a home in a newly built development. “There’s nothing more beneficial and promising,” she said, “than deciding, ‘Not only am I going to survive; I’m going to triumph; I am going to live in a fresh new environment.’ They’re using real estate to make a therapeutic — positive — bet on the future.”
Two years ago, Matt Holbein was grieving for his partner’s father, who had just died, an event that hit the couple very hard.
“He was like my father, too,” said Mr. Holbein, 44, a vice president of Douglas Elliman. Soon afterward, he and his partner began a trial separation that quickly became “a pretty dramatic breakup,” Mr. Holbein said. “It was very painful, and we dealt with it in very different ways.”
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