The problem most Brooklyn owners run into first
If you have just leased an electric car and you live in a brownstone in Park Slope or a row house in Bay Ridge, the excitement usually lasts about a week. Then you notice there is nowhere to plug it in. No garage, no driveway, maybe not even reliable parking on your own block. You are circling for a spot on Fourth Avenue at ten at night the same as always, except now the car also needs to charge.
This is not a flaw in your planning. Most housing stock in this borough predates the automobile entirely, and what came after was built for parking on the street, not powering anything from the curb. The lease paperwork assumes a plug near where you park. In a lot of Brooklyn, that assumption just does not hold.
What your building actually allows you to do
Start with what you can check yourself. If you own a brownstone with a small front yard or a converted garden level, look at your electrical panel and see what amperage service you have. Pre-war buildings were often upgraded decades ago to 100 amps, which is enough for a house but tight once you add a charger pulling significant current for hours at a stretch.
If you have any kind of off-street parking, even a single car pad behind the house reached by an alley, that changes everything. Running a dedicated circuit from the panel to that spot is a job for a licensed electrician, not a homeowner, but it is usually a one-time project rather than an ongoing headache. Get a couple of electricians to look at the run before you commit, since older buildings sometimes need conduit fished through masonry or under a yard, and that price swings a lot depending on distance and obstacles.
More on this from Charging An Electric Car Without A Driveway.
Street parking and what it actually means for charging
If you are one of the many Brooklyn owners without any off-street parking at all, be honest with yourself about what the lease is asking of you. Alternate side parking means you are not guaranteed to park in the same spot two nights running, so a home charging solution tied to a fixed location on the street is not realistic without a special arrangement, and running a cord across a public sidewalk is against code and a tripping hazard in icy weather.
Public charging becomes the default, and that means factoring in winter. Cold snaps in January and February cut into range noticeably, sometimes by a real margin, and charging itself slows down in the cold because the battery does not accept a full charging rate until it warms up. If your routine depends on topping off at a public charger a few times a week, build in extra time on cold mornings, and do not assume a charging session will take as long in February as it did in September.
What the seasons do that people do not expect
Brooklyn's humid summers matter here too, just less obviously. If you did manage to install a home charger outdoors on a rear pad or alley, make sure it is rated for outdoor use and that the electrician sealed the conduit properly. Summer humidity and winter freeze-thaw cycles both work on any gap in that sealing over a few years, and water finding its way into an outdoor electrical box is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a bigger repair than it needed to be.
Salt is the other seasonal issue nobody mentions. If your charger or cable runs anywhere near where the city or your super salts the sidewalk or a shared driveway in winter, that salt spray corrodes metal fittings over time. It is worth a look each spring, just checking the connector and any exposed hardware for white crust or pitting.
Where to draw the line yourself
You can reasonably handle checking your panel capacity, deciding whether you have any usable off-street space, and building a realistic charging routine around your actual parking situation rather than an ideal one. You can also keep an eye on outdoor equipment for weather damage and catch problems early.
What you should not do yourself is any of the electrical work, obviously, but also the harder judgment calls: whether your building's electrical service can take a dedicated high-draw circuit without upgrading the whole panel, and whether a landlord or co-op board needs to sign off before anyone touches shared electrical infrastructure. Those conversations are worth having before you sign a lease on a car that assumes a plug you may not have.