I Dormed in Downtown Brooklyn in 2002 and Nobody Thought to Hire a Cleaner

In 2002 I moved into Polytechnic University’s brand new dorm in Downtown Brooklyn (the school is now NYU Tandon). We were the first class to live in it. These weren’t traditional dorms with a shared bathroom down the hall. They were real apartments. Full kitchens, full bathrooms, living rooms. The kind of setup where you could actually cook a meal, have people over, and live like an adult if you wanted to. We were eighteen-year-olds with adult apartments and absolutely zero adult habits around keeping them clean.

And there was always something better to do than clean. I’d walk past a sink full of dishes on my way to play ball at Tillary, knowing I’d walk past them again when I got back. Classes all day, basketball practice, pre-game gatherings that turned into real parties that turned into after-parties. The apartment was just the place you crashed between everything else. Cleaning it was genuinely not a priority for any of us.

I want to be clear about what I mean by messy, though. It wasn’t filthy. It was normal college teenage mess. Clothes that didn’t make it to the closet, dishes that sat in the sink a day longer than they should have, a bathroom that got wiped down when it occurred to someone, which was not often. The kind of apartment where you’d look around and think “I should really deal with this” and then not deal with it because you had somewhere to be.

Hiring a cleaning service for a college apartment never even crossed our minds

That’s the part that gets me now. Not that the apartment was messy, that’s just college. What gets me is that in a building full of students living in real apartments in New York City, not a single person I knew even considered hiring someone to clean. The thought literally did not exist. It never entered the conversation. If you had suggested it to us in 2002, we probably would have laughed. That felt like something for adults with real jobs and real money, not college kids splitting rent in Brooklyn.

The closest thing we had to a cleaning service was a friend who was slightly more bothered by the mess than the rest of us and would start tidying up out of frustration. Or the full-apartment panic clean that happened when someone’s mom was coming to visit. That was a real phenomenon. You’d hear “my mom’s coming Saturday” and suddenly the apartment would get the most thorough cleaning it had seen in weeks. Counters wiped, bathroom scrubbed, shoes put away. It was basically a deep cleaning performed under parental pressure, and it lasted about forty-eight hours before everything reverted.

College students in Brooklyn are booking apartment cleanings and it actually makes sense

I noticed this pattern while going through appointment data a while back. There’s a real and growing number of college students booking cleanings. Students at NYU, Columbia, Pratt, LIU, and other schools in the city are living in apartments that are basically identical to the ones I lived in twenty years ago, and they’re doing the thing that never occurred to us. They’re hiring someone to come in and clean.

Some of them are booking it themselves. Some of their parents are booking it for them, which honestly might be the smarter move. A parent who knows their kid is living in a college apartment and decides to set up a recurring apartment cleaning is solving a problem that the student might not even recognize as a problem yet. It’s the kind of practical decision that just removes a source of low-grade stress from a kid’s life without them having to think about it.

I’m genuinely proud of these students, not in a patronizing way, but in a “you figured out something I didn’t” way. The logic is so simple it’s almost embarrassing. You’re busy, your apartment needs to be cleaned, and there are people who do that professionally. An entire generation of us missed the connection completely.

The dorm cleaning snowball effect is real and it starts with one neighbor

I noticed something else in the data, and this one actually made me laugh. When a college student in an apartment building books a cleaning, there’s a very good chance their neighbor books one within a few weeks, and it snowballs from there. Someone walks into their friend’s apartment and it’s noticeably cleaner than the last time they were there. They ask what happened. The friend says they hired a cleaning service. And suddenly the idea goes from something that never occurred to them to something that feels obvious.

This happens in regular apartment buildings too, but it moves faster in student housing because college students are in each other’s apartments constantly. You’re not just passing your neighbor in the hallway. You’re hanging out in their living room, using their bathroom. The before and after is impossible to miss. I’ve seen one student booking lead to three or four more in the same building within a month.

What I’d tell my 2002 self about student apartment cleaning in Brooklyn

If I could go back and talk to the version of me who was living in those Poly dorms, I’d tell him two things. First, that the apartment doesn’t have to look like that. Not because there’s something wrong with a little mess, but because the energy of a clean apartment is different from a messy one, and you don’t realize how much the mess is quietly draining you until it’s gone.

Second, it’s not as expensive as he thinks. A house cleaning once or twice a month for a student apartment is pretty affordable, especially split with a roommate. It’s less than what we were spending on pizza and takeout in a given week. The barrier was never really money. The barrier was that nobody around us was doing it, so nobody thought to do it.

That’s what’s different now. The students who book a cleaning aren’t doing anything revolutionary. They need their apartment cleaned, they don’t have time to do it themselves, so they hire someone, and that’s really all there is to it. The fact that they’re twenty instead of forty doesn’t make the logic any less sound.

One student hiring a cleaning service in my dorm could have changed everything

I say this as a joke, but there’s a real thought behind it. If one person in my building had hired a cleaning service in 2002, and if I’d seen the result, I might have started thinking about this industry a decade earlier than I did. The ingredients were all there. A building full of people who needed their apartments cleaned and had no interest in doing it themselves. A city where the demand for cleaning services in NYC is basically infinite. All it would have taken was one person breaking the pattern.

But nobody did, and the timing worked out the way it worked out. What I find satisfying now is watching the pattern that didn’t exist in my college years become completely normal. College students hiring a maid service isn’t unusual anymore. It’s just a practical decision made by people who have better things to do than scrub a bathroom between classes.

I think about Othmer Residence Hall sometimes. Different students live there now, in the same apartments, probably with the same kitchen layout and the same bathroom tile. The difference is that some of them have figured out you don’t have to choose between a clean apartment and having a life. You can have both, and I wish someone had told us.