Come inside a shoebox studio apartment with a stripper pole in downtown Manhattan that rents for $2,095, or just over €2,000, a month. Or an $800 housing-project unit with hand-painted kitchen walls. What about a luxury $5,000-a-month rental with marble countertops? Curious voyeurs can see them all on Caleb Simpson’s TikTok, and they won’t be alone. About six million people follow his short-form house tours, romps that he bills as “this generation’s MTV Cribs”.
“Seeing the inside of someone’s home is one of the most intimate things you can ever do,” Simpson says. “And then there are the price points, what you pay for your space – people will be curious about that.”
That’s why, three months ago, the 30-year-old began walking up to strangers in Manhattan and Brooklyn parks, asking them how much their rent was. Those who answered got a pretty bold follow-up: Can I come look inside?
“The first day I did it was quite defeating and comical,” Simpson says. “The amount of people laughing at me or snarking at me for asking that question was incredible. But by the end of the day, I’d made my first video.”
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The house tours began as a way to learn more about strangers’ lives after working at home alone during the pandemic left him “craving human connection”. He is a videographer – he’s worked in music marketing and for house DJs such as Diplo, Blond:ish, and Black Coffee – not a journalist, and says man-on-the-street interviews make him nervous. He’ll get himself in the spirit by jumping up and down before ambushing pedestrians, Billy on the Street-style.
“I try to treat every situation like this is my best friend and I’ve known them for 10 years,” says Simpson, who uses his iPhone to film the tours.
Though the clips usually clock in at just under two minutes, Simpson usually spends about an hour with his sources. “We typically only film for 15 minutes and then we sit around and chat for a bit longer,” he says.
Not all of Simpson’s videos are true man-on-the-street footage. Sure, he does pluck strangers passing by, but he also enlists friends to show their apartments and lets fans submit their homes. Recently, he’s worked with celebrities like the Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Haley Kalil, who have invited him into their homes.
“I will spend one day a week walking around asking people on the street,” he says. “Then I get inbounds from the Google form, but I still consider all those people strangers, because I’m literally meeting them for the first time at their homes.”
On TikTok, “man-on-the street” videos have more than 766 million views. It has become a tried-and-true genre on the app, with hosts asking strangers about everything from their sex lives to how fast they can answer random math equations. No matter how he finds subjects, Simpson always films the interviews in vox pop style.
“It’s the format people like to see,” he says. “Someone once said, people want you to be authentic online. But that’s not true: they want you to be consistent. People recognise [the] format and they like that. So does the algorithm.”
Simpson says about one in 10 strangers on the street will agree to bring him into their homes. “I try to ask as many people as possible, make no preconceived notions of anyone, and just keep asking until I get a yes or maybe,” he says.
Many of Simpson’s house tours star a certain type of creative, and Simpson will list their job in each post’s caption. Recent subjects have called themselves a YouTuber, management consultant, and influencer marketer. One “spiritual teacher” showed off the $12,000-a-month apartment she shares with her partner, which featured a closet full of Louboutin stilettos, multiple levels and an outdoor shower. Given New York’s current cost-of-living crisis and lack of affordable housing, it can be tough for the rest of us to peek at how the 1 per cent lives.
“You do have to sit down and have a conversation with these people and tell them: you are going to get every range of comments from ‘I love you’ to ‘I hate you’,” Simpson says. “It’s unfortunate because it’s impossible to tell someone’s whole story in 60 seconds. And, to be honest, that’s why the series does so well: it’s easy to make a judgment call.”
Many of Simpson’s tours take place in neighbourhoods like Williamsburg or Bushwick, where new development and high rents have had devastating effects on long-standing communities. “I don’t think that me showing off what happens in the neighbourhood is contributing to [gentrification],” he says. “We’re able to see the neighbourhood change in real-time, which is beneficial and educational if anything. You hear about neighbourhoods [changing], but unless you live there, you don’t see it in your face. But now you can see it online.”
There is a transactional nature to Simpson’s videos: if a subject consents, he’ll tag their name in the comments, and he says the exposure has led to people getting their dream job or selling the art they showed off in their home.
“Clout is the most valuable asset right now, and it’s a form of clout to say that you’ve been in one of these videos,” says Jeremy Cohen, a photographer and friend of Simpson’s who let him into the $5,700 Brooklyn apartment he shares with three roommates. But Cohen made sure to specify that he’s only responsible for a third of that rent, or $1,900. “I didn’t want to say the total, because I didn’t want to make it seem like I’m just a baller,” he says.
Fritz Bacon, a 27-year-old film-maker, let Simpson film his $2,700 East Village studio after bumping into him at a mutual friend’s Halloween party. During the shoot, Bacon accidentally showed off thousands of dollars worth of fake prop money he’d been hoarding in his apartment.
“People in the comments were like, ‘I can’t believe he showed that off, it’s so dangerous,’ and I didn’t even think of that,” Bacon says. “I quickly commented, ‘It’s prop money, please don’t rob me’. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen that I have what looks to be half a million dollars in cash.”
Simpson plans to expand the series outside of New York, and eventually the US. Though he has more celebrity homes in the works, he says he’ll keep filming with “regular people” about 80 per cent of the time. He doesn’t feel the need to compete with Architectural Digest or Apartment Therapy, two older outlets that often focus more on a home’s design than its owner’s story.
“Architectural Digest, in my opinion, is a bit stale,” Simpson says. “I’m trying to make this more fun, personable and real. If I toured with someone AD [also toured with], it’s going to be a different experience. I’m going to go in there and mess around in the apartment, have some fun, and not just talk about a table. At the end of the day, AD is more about the things, and I want more of the human.” — Guardian
