People Like Us
“People like you, we don’t like,” the man from the real estate management company said to me.
He didn’t get to see my disgusted reaction since he never looked up from the paperwork between us on his desk. He did eventually explain that he was referring to the fact that I was the roommate of a lease-holder who’d decided to break the lease a little more than half way through, causing the poor, unsuspecting management company no end of stress.
Of course, we’d jumped through all the hoops they’d asked us to. We’d obtained two notarized letters stating his intention to leave and my intention to sign a lease as of his departure. I’d paid close to a hundred dollars in fees for the privilege of having credit checks done for me and my father, who was needed as a guarantor since after seven years of employment at a union job, I don’t make enough money to rent an apartment on my own in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Then, when they’d informed me over the phone that they were willing to rent the place to me, they’d stopped answering the phone or returning my phone calls for several months. They persisted in this rather rude behavior just long enough for the lease in my long gone roommate’s name to run out. At this point they’d sent me a renewal lease in his name, with the full rent-control-allowed increase tacked on to the rent.
I had an epiphany. They weren’t being flaky; they were stonewalling me so that they could jack up the rent months before they could have if they’d signed a lease with me when my roommate had left. Incensed, I started calling them again, and to my surprise they responded and set up an appointment for me to come to their offices and be insulted.
In the end I signed the lease, the first legitimate lease with my name on it since I moved to New York more than seven years ago. In a few months it will expire, and they will surely raise the rent, so I’ll have to move again. And though after sealing every crack with boric acid, steel wool and expanding foam, the occasional mouse or roach sneaks through, and even though a teenage kid was shot and killed in front of the next building over at the beginning of last summer (for a couple of months there was an NYPD “mobile command unit” parked right outside of my bedroom window with its lights on day and night), I’d still like to stay.
After all, in my last apartment there were four bedrooms, and that meant I had to find a new roommate to fill one of them every three months or so. Now it’s just me and my friend. Also, my current place is in a big prewar breadbox of a building, which means it’s actually illegal for them to let the heating system break and say “screw you” to the tenants. In the old four-bedroom our heat stopped working in October. Before paying to fix it myself in February (after daily calls to 311), I learned of a delightful loophole in the property law of NY: in buildings with three residential apartments or less, you can have what’s called an “as is” lease. Of course, the lease didn’t say, “The apartment is ‘as is’” at the top in bold letters. I’ll always remember the landlord, after I’d demanded he’d fix it like he’d said he would months before, saying to me, “Read paragraph nine of the lease, and don’t tell me what’s legal. I own two hundred units.” The poetic language that I found in paragraph nine went something like, “The tenant will maintain all appliances and fixtures in their original condition.”
So at this point I know the score. I’m glad to pay 50 percent of my income to share an apartment in a neighborhood that’s a forty-five minute commute to work. I mean, it’s New York City after all. The Bass family has even been having trouble paying rent to the real estate company they own from the earnings of the bookstore they own that is located in one of the buildings their real estate company owns. I know, it confuses the hell out of me too. I’ve told these tales of woe to co-workers and friends before and often gotten a response that went something like, “That’s just how it is. Maybe you can charge someone $400 a month to live on your couch.”
Well, those of us who have decided to draw a line over the concessions the company is asking for in their contract proposals this time around are finished accepting the race to the bottom mantra of, “That’s just how it is.” If I have to go through the aforementioned trials just to keep a roof over my head with a union job that (until recently) at least guaranteed a buck or two of cost of living increases through the life of a contract, I shudder to think how all of the fast food workers, janitors, under the table domestic workers, and non-union retail employees in this city keep body and soul together.
I know Mike “Luxury Condo” Bloomberg isn’t doing anything to make living in New York any easier for people who do the unglamorous, sometimes dirty work needed to keep things going. In national politics it seems that for at least thirty years the only idea anyone has had is to cut taxes. Well, if there’s one thing I can do to stand up for the marginalized and seemingly almost forgotten concept of a living wage, it is refusing to take any steps backward in my own standard of living for the benefit of people who’s standard of living I can scarcely imagine, and to stand in solidarity with anyone else who is ready to do the same.