For the past two years, former Goldman Sachs vice president and senior counsel Raffael Fiumara worked from his one-bedroom Tribeca apartment where he lived with his husband, a CTO at a startup.

Renting in a global financial hub with seemingly endless opportunities for dining and entertainment had been worth it while the Hollywood Beach, Florida-born lawyer developed his career in New York. Then, the pandemic stripped many of those benefits away, and Fiumara’s husband’s job eventually went remote. After that, it wasn’t too long before they got to thinking about their options.