But he did not wish to leave his school, “a really vibrant and exciting place” where he knows nearly all of the students.  So he checked the map and found that Astoria, Queens, was just across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge from the Bronx. He could certainly bike to school from there. Real estate prices were starting to drop, and he figured they would only fall further. To test the waters, he rented a one-bedroom in a midrise building in Astoria for $1,300 a month.  He loved the diverse and lively neighborhood. “In Astoria,” he said, “if I want to bike a mile and discover a new restaurant, it is pretty easy to do.” That wouldn’t happen in Hudson Heights. “I am a vegetarian,” he added, “and that always made my selection of restaurants very limited.”  Last spring, he began searching for a one-bedroom to buy in Astoria.  Because Mr. McLaughlin had lived mostly in basements and on low floors, he realized “more and more how the view outside of my windows really mattered.” In the fourth-floor Astoria rental, “I had a nice view of weather patterns developing,” he said. “It was a whole lot nicer than looking at just one street or one building.”  He also favored a top floor to avoid the clomping of neighbors above. “I learned that the hard way in an apartment in Inwood where the toddler upstairs dribbled a basketball all day,” he said.  And he preferred an apartment with some kind of interior hallway where he could lean his two bikes against a wall. He wasn’t interested in a building with a bike room. “I want my bike with me where I am,” he said, “because it is the way I get everywhere.”  His price limit was $320,000.  Few co-ops were available in Astoria, where the housing stock is mostly rental buildings and multifamily houses, with a scattering of condominiums. Mr. McLaughlin found that condos typically had the same inconvenient layout: two boxy rooms and no hallway.  He considered a place for $279,000 in a six-story co-op building on 31st Avenue near Crescent Street. A hallway separated the main rooms. But the available unit, on the top floor, had only a partial view of Manhattan.  “I didn’t want to compromise on that for the place where I will live for many years,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “I was seeing the Upper East Side from 65th to 75th Street or something like that. I thought: If only I were looking at another unit in the building.”  A listing in another six-story co-op, this one on Newtown Road, sounded promising. According to Google Street View, the building was surrounded by shorter ones. The apartment, listed for $330,000, was on the sixth floor.  As Mr. McLaughlin had hoped, every window had a view of Manhattan. There was a hallway for his bikes. In the living room, he could create a seating area around the television as well as a dining area with a table for six, just the right size for playing board games with friends. The owners had redone the kitchen and bathroom.  The building is “farther east than the more happening part of Astoria, and it’s not as close to tall buildings, which is what gives it the nice view,” said the selling broker, Maria Aidonis of Aidonis Realty in Astoria. Mr. McLaughlin’s offer of $315,000 was accepted. Monthly maintenance was to be around $530.  But the deal ran up against the difficulty of obtaining a mortgage in a building with an owner-occupancy rate of about 50 percent. And his credit score came in at a surprisingly low number. He couldn’t figure out why, until he realized he had put a big dental bill on his credit card. He paid it off immediately, and a later reckoning found his credit score much improved.  Meanwhile, with the deal in limbo, Mr. McLaughlin went to see a nine-story condominium, Newtown Tower on Newtown Avenue. The one-bedrooms there had great views and balconies, but less closet space than he wanted. And they had the no-hall layout that he found so inconvenient.  Fortunately, his mortgage came through and he was able to buy the co-op on Newtown Road.  Mr. McLaughlin, along with Parvati the cat, moved in last summer. It took trial and error to figure out the subways for the times when he doesn’t ride his bike. “You find yourself with a much more difficult trip home if you stay out too late,” he said.  Even with a top-floor apartment, he sometimes skips the elevator and carries his bike up the stairs. But those stairs are easy, he said, compared with the ones he must climb on his trip along the R.F.K. Bridge, which does not have ramps for pedestrians and cyclists. When the bridge is icy or impassable, as it was on some days last winter, he’ll take the subway and bus. Otherwise, he enjoys his bicycle commute to school, six and a half miles, which takes around half an hour.  Most of all, Mr. McLaughlin luxuriates in his view. To him, the city looks prettier after dark than in daytime. “I love coming home and seeing the twinkling lights of Manhattan,” he said. “That’s what gets me every night.”  A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2010, on Page RE4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Man With a Bicycle to Consider. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Matthew McLaughlin always bicycled to work and “made it a point to live in apartments that were a reasonable distance” from work.