The "Hunt" for a toffee nut latte

The Times real estate section, which last profiled some unemployed UChicago grads looking to move to NYC, now has a "Hunt" piece on an 18-year-old girl, Melanie Fontana, whose apartment hunt is complicated by the following factors: a) She doesn't exactly have a job, b) Her mom won't let her take the subway, and c) She needs to live down the street from a Starbucks.

Clearly this girl's mother isn't doing her any favors. "'She may or may not go to college, so we see this as an investment in her future,' said her mother, Janis Fontana. 'Instead of paying tuition, we are paying rent.'" In a world in which even the Olsen twins attend college, it's unclear exactly how Melanie Fontana, degreeless, is going to make it if her parents ever decide to cut her off. Then, there's the reason she needed to move to NYC from Connecticut in the first place: commuting costs were making her family broke. "Because her mother didn't want her on the subway, she took cabs everywhere." No one in NYC takes cabs everywhere. A quick visit underground will reveal that everyone, except perhaps Nan Kempner, takes the train. Unless her mother relents and lets the girl on the subway, the Fontana family's financial situation is unlikely to improve. And finally, there's her mother's strange loyalty to the Starbucks chain, a loyalty which made apartments in the East 80s and 90s--which by most standards is an enviable location--out of the question: "[Melanie Fontana] also felt the location was too far north. 'My mother wanted me in a nice, safe neighborhood where there's a Starbucks on every corner,' she said." Funny, though, because a quick look on the Starbucks store locator reveals that the East 80s and 90s are teeming with Starbucks. In the interactive feature on Melanie Fontana's apartment hunt, Ms. Fontana explains that she simply cannot function without her toffee nut lattes. So her mother probably thinks she's just looking out for her daughter's interests.

Fair enough, the girl sounds idiotic, the situation sounds incredibly idiotic, and the girl's mother seems to be giving her daughter advice that will make it just about impossible for her to function on her own in the city. So why does the Times think to cover this story?

My guess is the appeal has something to do with the popularity of shows like "The Simple Life," and just generally with the novelty, in these times, of a young woman whose main interest seems to be a specialty coffee drink, with no college behind her, just picking up and moving to East 60th Street. The paper can expect letters to pour in about how silly Ms. Fontana is, her parents paying for her to sit around the Upper East Side and sip lattes, when so many adults, with college and graduate school behind them, are struggling to find anything within the five boroughs. But Melanie Fontana is no Paris Hilton, looks-wise, fame-wise, or money-wise, and her whole "I don't take the subway, I need my toffee nut lattes," routine is likely to end in disaster.