For Fey Sandoval, the Covid-19 pandemic created a sense of restlessness. She was in her late 20s, still living in Dallas where she’d grown up, still in her parents’ house, working a corporate marketing job from the kitchen table.

“I had this appetite to just leave all that behind and do something completely out of the ordinary,” she said.

So in August 2021, she packed a suitcase and a backpack and moved to New York. “I always had the dream of living in New York and working in advertising,” she said.

Ms. Sandoval had a job she could do remotely but was leaping into a city where she had no close friends or family. “A lot of my friends asked me if I was crazy,” she said. “And I said, ‘Probably — but I think this is really my chance to experience New York for all it’s got.’”

She rented a room in a Williamsburg duplex through roomrs.com, a website that manages co-living spaces. Ms. Sandoval was matched with five roommates in a six-bedroom apartment.

“I lived with five complete strangers,” she said. “They sent me the names of my roommates and introduced us via email and that was the first time I knew their names or anything about them.”

Ms. Sandoval lived downstairs in a 100-square-foot room that was filled by her desk and bed. She shared a bathroom with a man who lived in a room across from her.

“I had not shared a bathroom since my freshman year of college,” she said. “I went from having a double vanity bathroom in Dallas to having to share a bathroom with a stranger.”

There were also the neighbors, who threw a lot of parties. “Every night,” she said. “Weeknights, weekends — and I was working from home.”

The apartment had a balcony, which Ms. Sandoval hoped would become an oasis of sorts, but it felt more like a train station.

“Immediately, there’s the Williamsburg Bridge and then the train passing every 15 minutes, which also rattled the building,” she said. “I wasn’t really used to that level of life outside of my window. That was a learning moment, for sure.”

She reached that learning moment just as the soft rental market of the pandemic, which helped lure her to the city, was becoming harder to afford. In May 2022, she was told that her $1,500 rent would increase to $2,200.

Ms. Sandoval searched for a different place but only found rising rents and stiff competition. “I realized there were still things I had to work out to really make my dream happen,” she said.

So she returned to Dallas.

“I was honestly crushed,” she said. “I was just depressed.”

$3,300 | Coney Island

Fey Sandoval, 32

Occupation: Corporate marketing

On castles: One of the details Ms. Sandoval appreciates most about her new home in New York, 1515 Surf, in Coney Island, is the facade. “I really just like the way the building looks — it feels a little bit like a castle,” she said. “I’ve nicknamed my apartment the Coney castle.”

On streaming: A friend in Dallas introduced Ms. Sandoval to streaming. “He and I would play Fortnite a lot,” she said, “and we both got really good at it. So he threw around the idea of streaming. I got curious, started watching his stream, and then said, ‘You know what, I could do that too.’ I have a stream deck but now I’m so busy with work and my social life here has really taken off, so I only do it a couple times a month.”

When Ms. Sandoval left New York, she wound up back at her parents’ house. They were supportive, as were her friends, but it took several weeks to gather herself.

“I’m a very emotional person, so I did kind of sit in those feelings for a minute,” she said. “But once I let myself feel that, I could go right back to being goal-oriented. I’m a strategist and I’ve always been like that from a young age. I don’t see things as obstacles, really. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s a minor inconvenience right now. Let’s figure out how to get rid of that thing.’”

Ms. Sandoval moved to the United States from Mexico with her family when she was 3. She said her family’s journey, and their experience building a life in a new country, came to define her approach to work.

“I’ve always kind of had to work with less,” she said. “I think that’s where my resourcefulness comes from. Honestly, when I’m feeling uncertain, it’s like I’m no stranger to it. It’s almost like the time to thrive for me. It’s like, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s set a plan in motion.’”

Ms. Sandoval started budgeting for a post-pandemic New York, and working as much as she could to save as much money as she could, taking on freelance clients in addition to her full-time job.

Her life went on like that for longer than she expected.

“It was ups and downs. I remember when I hit the year mark, I was like, ‘This kind of hurts,’” she said. “It was a lesson in patience. With the strategy brain, sometimes there’s a little bit of the need for instant gratification because you’ve figured it out in your head. I had to really just put in some hard work. It was going to happen. Maybe not on my timeline but on life’s timeline, essentially.”

Roughly two years after returning to Dallas, Ms. Sandoval finally had the savings and the new, higher paying job she needed to make life in New York possible.

Finding an apartment was the last big piece to put into place. She knew she wasn’t looking for a return to Williamsburg. “It’s too loud,” she said. “I got into the mentality of ‘I’m not really into the partying anymore. I’m more of an adult, and I like to be at home.’”

She said it was her parents who proposed an unexpected location: “‘Well, what about Coney Island? You love the beach.’”

She started looking online and was drawn to one of the first available options she found — a one-bedroom apartment in 1515 Surf, a building with views of the Atlantic Ocean and Luna Park.

It didn’t take anything more than a virtual tour to convince her it was the place she wanted to live. “There was just something in me that was like, ‘This is the place. This is why you’ve been working for two years,’” she said.

Ms. Sandoval moved back to New York in October. She picked up surfing in the Rockaways. “It was like a life-changing experience,” she said. “I just rented a board and very much with the same courage that I moved here, I went out into the ocean.”

She said Coney Island feels like a quirky beach town.

“That was something I didn’t think could exist in New York,” she said. “You get to cut away from all the seriousness of the city, the seriousness of your corporate job. You forget you’re in New York but the big city life that you still crave is right there. Once you get out of the station and you’re fully in Coney, right next to the beach, there’s just a sense of peace that comes over you.”

She added, “Honestly, this is the first time that a plan of this caliber has played out for me. I’m very excited to be back in New York and a part of something bigger than myself.”