Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles TimesWith rents continuing to increase, some folks in New York have moved into RVs, parking them in their ideal neighborhood.

NEW YORK — Steven Cintron kicks back on a small sofa a mere couple of feet from his kitchen table. The breather from his construction job is welcome, even if cramped like everything else in New York City.

The couch doubles as a bed for his pit bull, Bruno. Cintron’s own queen-size mattress is shoved in the back with the TV, a hunched walk past the mini-fridge, three-burner stove and closet-size bathroom.

Cintron’s roughly 200-square-foot pad isn’t just any tiny apartment in the Big Apple. It’s an RV.

As the most expensive city in the country gets even pricier, Cintron and other New Yorkers are taking drastic steps to survive the most brutal real estate market in the United States. They are ditching sky-high rents and buying secondhand recreational vehicles.

“I’ve got everything,” said Cintron, a husky 34-year-old with a close-cropped beard and gold chain, as his fan and portable air conditioner whir. “I’m comfortable here.”

Cintron was looking for a new place to live last spring after splitting up with his girlfriend. Unable to find an affordable apartment that would also allow his dog, he found inspiration in a friend who owns an RV. So he bought a 1996 Gulf Stream Ultra posted on Craigslist for $5,000.

He wound up parking near Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, where he grew up but now can’t afford to rent.

By turning to mobile apartments, RV dwellers are something of real estate pioneers in New York. RVs give New Yorkers a way into hip or exclusive neighborhoods they otherwise might not be able to afford. They don’t have to worry about nagging landlords, rent increases or upstairs neighbors tap-dancing at midnight.

But there are obvious trade-offs. Getting electricity takes some effort. Heating during the winter can get costly. Mail may need to be delivered to post office boxes. There’s also the issue of how to hook up sewage lines.

And RVs may not offer much social cachet.

“The ladies aren’t really kicking down the door,” said Rick Hall, who gave up on trying to find an apartment before he moved to New York to study at St. John’s University. Hall bought the RV from a friend when he was still in Ohio and parked his home near the school’s campus in Queens.

New Yorkers have long struggled to find affordable shelter in a city bursting at the seams with more than 8 million people. They have crammed extra roommates into bifurcated living rooms, converted closets into bedrooms and moved into house boats.