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I Stayed At The Cheapest Airbnb In NYC

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Thirty bucks a night in Manhattan sounded like a scam — it wasn’t.

Personal finance YouTuber Ryan Scribner and fellow creator Jake Carlini set out to answer a simple question in January 2020: just how cheap can a night’s stay in New York City actually get? They found their answer in Washington Heights, at the top of Manhattan, where a bare-bones studio Airbnb was listing for $30 a night — a fraction of what most travelers budget for a single meal in the city, let alone a bed.

• The listing ran $30 a night for a one-room studio in Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan.
• Scribner and Carlini chose the spot mainly for its price and its proximity to the subway, which let them move around the city without racking up transportation costs.
• Scribner’s video, “I Stayed At The Cheapest Airbnb In NYC,” was picked up by Boing Boing on January 7, 2020, as a viral example of extreme frugality in one of the most expensive cities on Earth.

The Setup

Scribner has built a following on breaking down money decisions in plain terms, and this trip started, by his own account, half as a joke — a dare to see whether “cheapest” and “livable” could coexist in New York City. Instead of hunting for a deal near Times Square or Midtown, the pair went north to Washington Heights, a neighborhood far enough from the tourist core that rents and nightly rates drop sharply, but still on the A train line into the rest of Manhattan.

That subway access was the deciding factor. A $30 listing does nothing for a traveler if it costs another $30 a day in cabs to reach anything worth seeing. Washington Heights solved that problem, putting Scribner and Carlini a short ride from downtown without the markup that comes with staying closer to it.

Thirty Dollars Provided Significant Value

The unit itself was a one-room studio — no separate bedroom, no frills, just the essentials packed into a small footprint. Scribner and Carlini went in expecting the kind of horror-story conditions that usually come with rock-bottom listings in a city this size. What they found instead was a space that, while obviously stripped down, functioned.

“Wasn’t too bad!”

That was the verdict Scribner landed on by the end of the stay — a modest, almost surprised endorsement rather than a ringing one, but a real one. For a room booked specifically because it was the cheapest thing either of them could find in New York City, “not too bad” was the best-case outcome.

A Companion Piece From Carlini

Carlini didn’t just tag along for Scribner’s video — he shot and released his own companion piece covering the same trip, giving viewers two separate takes on the same $30 room. That kind of double coverage is part of why the stunt traveled as far as it did online, landing on aggregator sites like Boing Boing within days of posting and turning a niche personal-finance video into a broader talking point about what “budget” really means in a city where the average hotel room routinely runs well past $200 a night.

The appeal is the same instinct behind other extreme-budget travel content that circulates well — the same curiosity that draws viewers to stories about turning an SUV into a camper or squeezing a livable setup out of minimal space. Scribner and Carlini just applied it to the most expensive real estate market in the country instead of the open road.

The Proposal Resonated With Audiences

New York City lodging prices are notorious enough that a $30 nightly rate reads as almost implausible on its face. Part of what made the video land was the gap between expectation and reality: viewers tuned in expecting a squalor tour and got a mildly cramped but functional studio with a bed, a kitchenette, a shower, and a television. The novelty wasn’t that the room was bad — it’s that it wasn’t.

For a channel built on practical money advice, the trip doubled as a real-world test case rather than a stunt for its own sake. If the cheapest Airbnb in the most expensive city in America can pass as “not too bad,” it says something concrete about how much slack exists in what people assume a New York trip has to cost.