Home NEWS She Scoured the New Jersey Waterfront on a Budget. Which Home Would You Choose?

She Scoured the New Jersey Waterfront on a Budget. Which Home Would You Choose?

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Five years ago, Dory Shields was living in a co-op in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, when she decided to try country living. She sold the apartment and bought a house in Putnam Valley, about 50 miles north of Manhattan.

“I am of the generation that got lucky with real estate if you bought anything,” said Ms. Shields, 58, who grew up in Saratoga, N.Y. “I benefited from the Ponzi scheme that is real estate in New York.”

But it didn’t take long for Ms. Shields, who has two grown daughters, to feel distant and disconnected. Her steep driveway iced over in winter. And the commute to her Midtown office, where she works as a textile designer, was burdensome. “It was a struggle getting to the train station,” she said. “The city is so much easier and more convenient. The subways are always running.”

[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com]

She also had trouble selling the house. “Putnam Valley doesn’t have the same trajectory of housing prices as New York City does,” she said.

So she rented the house and returned to Windsor Terrace, settling in to the top floor of a limestone rowhouse, where she paid $2,300 a month. But a year ago, when her elderly landlord died, his heirs sold the house, and Ms. Shields had to move again.

She hoped to find a one- or two-bedroom rental, preferably in Brooklyn near Prospect Park, where she could run. And she wanted laundry in the building. Aside from that, she knew it would come down to “a feeling of ‘I can live here,’ whatever that feeling is,” she said.

Her budget was “as low as possible,” which meant something under $2,400.

The places she saw were tiny, ugly and depressing. “I loved Brooklyn, but I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “These apartments were so crappy, they looked like drug dens.”

She expanded her hunt to New Jersey, where she had a friend who lived in a co-op building in West New York, directly across the Hudson River. At last, she began seeing acceptable apartments in her price range.

She was tempted by a large two-bedroom for $2,300 on the renovated top floor of a lovely Victorian house — until she opened a kitchen door that led to a back staircase reeking of cat urine from the clowder that lived downstairs.

As she hunted, she was finally able to sell the Putnam Valley house for $439,000. She intended to save the money so she could buy a place in the future. “I wasn’t in a rush to buy anything,” she said. “I didn’t know whether it would be a really small co-op in Brooklyn or a little house in Bloomfield, N.J., because it’s cheap out there.”

Among her options:

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