The Sign

Yesterday we sold mom's house.  That house was built by my husband 35 years ago, on part of the land that was our first rental purchase.  It was the first spec house he'd ever built, and it sold to a family who didn't like that we built our house next door a few years later, and made no bones about showing it.  Their kids would literally take a stick and draw a line in the dirt to show our 3-year-old where his property line ended and theirs began.  So we were very grateful when we saw a Realtor's "For Sale" sign on the lawn a few years afterwards.

Mom was up from Long Island visiting, and when I asked her "Did you see the sign?" she misunderstood me and exclaimed:  "A sign?  You saw a sign?  I was praying for a sign!".  And, without even going inside, my widowed mother bought the house, sold hers on Long Island, and moved next door to us, in the house that she and my father loved when it was built, but weren't in a position to buy at that point.

She helped raise our kids.  She would be home after school for them while we worked.  She later helped my sister and her kids when they moved in with her for a while after getting divorced, and she loved that house until the day, almost four years ago, that she landed in the hospital, and from there a rehab stint in a nursing home.

As many old people do, in her later years, she adamantly refused to allow us do any updating inside her house.  As a Realtor, I'd often go inside a house being sold by an estate. I used to wonder what kind of family would allow their elderly parent to live like that, in dirt and disrepair.  I came to learn that it's often the parent that's obstinate, and eventually the children get worn down and have to choose their fights.  The house often loses, when medications and proper eating are more urgent.

 So we took advantage of her rehab stint.  We went in without her knowledge and had the whole interior repainted.  We also installed new laminate floors, as the worn carpeting had become a major tripping hazard.  As it turned out, she never returned home, and for three years we kept the house vacant, awaiting a return that we, and she, knew wasn't going to happen.  We just didn't have the heart to sell it while she was alive.  It may have been false hope, but for a long while she harbored the hope that she would return to her beloved house.  She was allowed to keep a few thousand dollars in cash, and by judicious budgeting, we were able to pay the upkeep.  

I estimated we had enough money to keep her household bills paid through this spring.  I informed my sisters that we might have to kick in to keep it going after that.  As it turned out, mom passed away in February.  So in early spring, we donated her clothes and some of her furniture, and staged the house with her remaining furniture for sale.  I acted as the listing broker, put the house on MLS, Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com, and stuck my sign in the lawn, in much the same place as it was when mom bought the house over 25 years before.  Spring turned into summer into fall, and we had very little interest.  Then another agent brought a family, and the house was finally being sold.  Expecting a complicated mortgage, we were pleasantly surprised when the buyers came with a conventional mortgage, which made the whole process smoother for us.

Yesterday, November 26th, the day before Thanksgiving, in the middle of the first big snowstorm of the year, we closed on the house.  My two sisters and I had gone through the whole process without having any serious disagreements.  We agreed on the big things, and divided the sentimental keepsakes between us so that we were all satisfied with our portions.  My main goal was to get through the process with our family intact, so I was content.  The closing went smoothly, and mom's checkbook had $40 in it at the end of the day.

Afterwards, as we were leaving, my youngest sister stopped to use the rest room.  The other two of us waited in the foyer for her because of the snow.  My phone dinged with an email alert.  The message was "Your For Sale listing on Zillow expired on Wednesday, November 26, 2014."

Another sign.  Thanks, mom.  For everything.
    

Taste of Hudson

We've become so chi-chi that we now have named our small sections of the city, a la NYC.  They have SoHo, NoLita and the Upper East Side.  We have BeLo 3rd and The West Side, and will undoubtedly have more hyphenated acronyms before we're done.  But I'm happy, thrilled even, to see the changing face of Hudson.

BeLo 3rd has a pretty creative and savvy group of organizers.  They took a decided geographic negative (being below Third Street) and turned it into a chic moniker.  Perception is everything, and soon what was a vast area of nothingness became the darling of the gallery set.  In fact, along with the antiques and art galleries, Hudson has become quite a foodie mecca, and BeLo 3rd has become Restaurant Row.

One of their more popular events is "Taste of Hudson", where Warren Street is closed off the street to traffic and numerous Hudson restaurants and caterers set up under a big tent, right in the middle of the street in front of my office.  Customers come from all over, buy "BeLo Bucks", and spend them on various small portions at different vendors' tables, so for $5 or $10 you can get a pretty good sample of what a lot of great cooks are doing.  And they are great cooks.  In fact, if you eat on Warren Street any given day, you'd be hard pressed to get a bad meal.

So here we were, sitting at cute tables under a billowing white tent, in the middle of the street in front of the Girly House, where not that long ago, for the same five bucks, crack was the main dish. And although the crack was also heated, it just didn't have the same panache as Taste of Hudson's offerings. At one point all those bad memories came rushing back, and between bites of tasty morsels, I turned to another old-timer and commented "Do you believe we're sitting here in the middle of the street, on the 200 Block of Warren, eating catered food with tourists?"  We were laughing so hard we nearly lost our lunch.

Ain't life grand?

Random Plantings

I happened to be wandering through my second home, Lowes, on the last day their garden shop was open. They were pretty much giving plants away, and I picked up a random bunch.  Since I had no idea where I was going to put any of them, I brought them down to my basement and left them to over-winter.  I didn't expect much, and, in fact, some animals managed to get in and eat a few especially tasty ones, but a bunch of others struggled through the cold season.

In spring, I saw that two little Rose of Sharon plants were still alive, so I decided to plant them in the front yard at the Girly House.  I only chose them because there were two, and I wanted to keep the symmetry of the building intact.  I didn't know much about the plants themselves, and was surprised to see them growing rapidly in a short time.  But as they grew and bloomed that first season, I remembered the Rose of Sharon in the front yard of a neighbor in Brooklyn.

And then my sister reminded me that Rose of Sharon was our father's favorite flower. So now when I see those hardy little plants, and remember what they survived that winter, they bring back smiling memories of the hard times we survived when I was a child on my beloved Brooklyn street.

Rose of Sharon is my new favorite shrub.

Cheap Evictions

During the drug epidemic, every once in a while we'd get a tenant who looked good on paper, but turned out to be something else in real life.

Doorbells would be rung indiscriminately all night long, self-locking doors would be propped open, cigarette butts would be put out on hall carpeting, dirt, noise, and abnormal amounts of "visitors" would come and go all the time.  And I would get complaints from my good tenants, who gave me the heads up, but who also would move if the situation wasn't resolved.

Drug activity is easy to spot, but hard to prove.  And the courts take too long for law-abiding tenants to go without sleep.  So I devised a plan.

I sent a note to all the tenants in the building that we were having a problem with the exterior door  locks and the intercom/doorbell system, so we had to do two things:  disconnect all the doorbells until we could get them "fixed", and change the exterior locks.  Please come to the office for your new key, and I apologize for the inconvenience until we can get the doorbells fixed.  Your guests will have to call ahead so you can meet them outside to let them in until we get the problem solved.

Simultaneously I would send the bad tenant an eviction notice.

Oddly, I sometimes forgot to send the note to the drug tenant.  And they never seemed to call for a new key, or to ask why their building key wasn't working.  Guess they didn't want to come face the landlord. Inevitably, they would just quietly abandon the apartment for greener pastures, and in the meantime, my good tenants would get uninterrupted sleep.

Yes, eventually the doorbells were "fixed".

"A Good Talking-To"

Last year, within the span of two months, two of our long-time residents moved from the Girly House.  We had all developed a comfy cohabitation, and it was more distressing than I let on that the equilibrium of the house was about to change drastically with the introduction of two new tenants to the mix.

I guess I wasn't the only one stressed.  All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the house started having problems.  First, just two weeks after we repainted, something leaked from upstairs into the newly-renovated downstairs apartment.  In another apartment, a window blew in during a windy night.  A bathroom faucet loosened up on the sink.  A kitchen cabinet's center post came unglued.  A kitchen faucet started leaking. A toilet stopped flushing. Another second floor leak ruined the ceiling in a first-floor bathroom.  And somehow, a feral cat managed to get into the basement, but couldn't get out, and meowed pitifully for days until we finally left the door open long enough for her to find her way out.  Our house was obviously crying and having a nervous breakdown!

So, one evening, around dusk, I decided the house needed a good talking-to.  I made sure everything was quiet.  I spoke calmly.  I reminded the house of it's inglorious past as a crack house, and how we saved it from that fate.  I reassured it that I loved it and wanted to keep it.  I reminded it that we were getting older, and couldn't do the physical work like we used to.  I told it that if we kept having problems, we would be forced to sell it.  And I wrapped my arms around the opening between the two rooms and gave it a big hug.

I told my son.  He thought I was nuts.  But so far, so good.

Don's Crazy Friend

Is that even a viable contact name?  Because that's what I had to list him as.  I don't even remember his name, but I needed to know it was him calling...

My excellent tenant Don called me, asking me to help him solve a problem.  Apparently he fell for some acquaintance's hard-luck story, and let him crash on the couch of his one-bedroom apartment for "a couple of days".  The days turned into weeks...and you know how those song lyrics go.  And now Don was calling me, asking me to compose a stern email saying he couldn't have another person living there or he'd be in violation of his lease, etc., because all of his efforts to get the guy to leave failed.  Maybe a firm email from his landlord would do the trick. Don told me the squatter was "a very good salesman", and every time he tried to reason with him, the guy would talk his way into staying another night.

But just from this short description, I really knew this guy was crazy.  And desperate.  Don't ask me how I knew.

So I told Don to forget about the email.  That would never work.  Is he in your apartment now?  No.  Are you home?  Yes.  OK, this is what you're going to do:  go to Lowe's.  Buy a new lockset.  Come back home and install it.  Pack all his belongings and put them outside the apartment door.  Then call me when it's all done and give me his phone number.  Then leave the house.  Do you have a place you can spend the night?  Yes?  Good. And under no circumstances are you to answer his phone calls, text messages, or emails.  Total silence.  We will be bombarded for a while, until he moves on.  And by winter, he'll be someplace warm. Got it?  Agreed?  OK.

Don calls back a few hours later.  The deed is done & he's leaving his apartment.  So I call Don's Crazy Friend, tell him "The locks are changed.  Your suitcase is in the hall.  Take your stuff and do not show up at this building again or I will call the police."

Desperate people always try to engage you in conversation, but it's futile to try to reason with a crazy person.  So when he kept asking me what he did wrong, etc., I just repeated "You're not my tenant of record.  I'm not having a conversation about it, nor do I owe you any explanation.  Just take your things and go." And I hung up.

But, as predicted, that didn't end it.  For weeks after I was getting voicemails and texts, some cajoling, some threatening, even some in which he thought he was texting Don (but was actually texting me) and told Don his landlord was "Crazy. Looney. Really nuts."  None of which I responded to.  All of which I saved.  Don was getting messages too.  I had to keep calling Don to make sure he wasn't capitulating, because that would undo all our work, and the end result (although I didn't share this with Don) was that I'd have to evict him...and I didn't want to do that just because he was too nice a guy to stand firm.

It's been a couple of months now, and it's been all quiet on the eastern front.

Laugh of the Day

In answer to an apartment for rent ad:

Me:  So, before I show you this apartment, as the ad specifies, we need three things:  good credit, work, and rental histories.
Him:  I work.  Renovating houses.
Me: Are you self-employed?
Him:  No, I work for someone.
Me:  OK, then, you'll be able to give me pay stubs...
Him:  I work for cash.
Me:  How about your credit.
Him:  Oh, I have credit.  It's pretty bad.
Me:  I didn't mean any kind of credit.  You need good credit to get through the screening.
Him:  Well, I guess this isn't going to happen.

No, I guess it isn't.

A Modern Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, across from the house on the Worst Corner in Town, in a lot nobody paid much attention to, a ramshackle garden sprang up.  Over the years, people tilled the soil, planted, and harvested.  At some point it was officially named, became a non-profit, made small improvements, and was fenced in with an unassuming chain-link fence.  In recent years, each growing season, 40 families have farmed their little plots within that garden, pretty much undisturbed.

Recently Habitat had determined that the Land of Hudson was fertile ground for their housing projects, especially since, as one of their board members admitted, Hudson gave them free land, where no other kingdom would.  And since even Hudson was running out of "free" land to give them, they decided they wanted the four building lots that comprised the Community Garden.  The land is owned by one of the alphabet-soup city agencies, whose purpose, though foggy for twenty years, has been to encourage housing. So the king and the princes decided to give the lots to Habitat.

The good people of the land rebelled, and collected over 1500 signatures on a petition, asking the royal family to leave the garden alone, as it served far more families than four houses would.  But, even though their numbers were mighty in a realm of less than 7000, their pleas went unheeded.

Thinking they were making a Solomon-like decision (never mind that Solomon never completed what he suggested -- that, in fact, it was just a test) the Royals decreed that the land should be split in two -- with the larger portion going to Habitat, and the smaller parcel (which unfortunately included a large tree which hid the sunlight) being left for the garden.  And even that small piece would only be lent for another year.  And it was made so.

The moral of the story, boys and girls, is that there isn't always a fairy tale ending.  Another reason I won't donate to Habitat.

You Know You're a Landlord When...

...a very nice tenant shares the happy news that she's going to have a baby soon, and, while your mouth is making appropriately nice noises, your brain is actually thinking "Damn.  Now they'll be using more water and stressing the well."

Great Guns!

So although Hudson has become decidedly trendy, and we're attracting new residents and visitors from all over, there's still, as in every city, things that go on beneath the shiny veneer.

The Girly House is one of the few on Warren with a front lawn, and, as a result, we're always picking up street litter that blows into our yard.  So one morning not long ago, I'm coming into the office and spot a yellow ShopRite bag wedged between the hedges, tucked away up against the building.  It was in a hard spot to reach, but since it was bright yellow and made the place look trashy, I sighed and went over to pick it up.  As I went to lift it, I noticed it felt very heavy for something that blew into the yard.  So I peeked inside.  There was another black bag inside of the yellow one, with something wrapped up in it.  It was still too heavy for a discarded sandwich, but I still I couldn't see what the thing was.  So I pushed that bag around to find yet a third black wrapper.  Now I was really curious.  Opening the innermost wrapper I spotted a gun! A real, live handgun, which I've only seen before either on the hip of some cop or on TV!  I called the police, stood guard over it until they came, and they took it away.  All the time I'm waiting for the cops, I'm picturing the jerk who planted it looking at me from some nearby hidey-hole, watching his gun go bye-bye.

But here's my real question:  why would some idiot, who obviously carefully wrapped and left that gun there for another idiot to pick up, put the yellow bag on the outside where it would be noticed, when he obviously had more subtle bag colors to choose from?

They should give IQ tests before they let just anyone have illegal handguns.

Redundancy

I've come to realize that, for the last twenty years, more so in the last five, I've been sleeping in Claverack, but living in Hudson.  It's Hudson where neighbors recognize me, where I eat out, where I walk the main street, where long-made business connections exist.  Claverack, on the other hand, is where I sleep, bathe, sometimes eat, and get in my car to go elsewhere.  So, despite the incredible prices Hudson buildings are bringing, the thought of selling our last remaining building, the old crack house where my office is located, leaves me extremely conflicted.  I've been trying to figure out a way to both sell (to eliminate the work The Man has to do, not because of the money) and yet stay.

I made a deal with The Man.  Well, it was actually a one-sided deal.  We would sell our Claverack house, live on the lake for the summer, and move to Hudson for the winter, interspersed with trips to warmer climes. Since I was the only one who thought that was a good idea, The Man has been less than enthusiastic about both selling the house he built and we've lived in for 35 years, or moving to Hudson.  He's a boy from the Bronx who's really country at heart.  

So yesterday I went to see the Armory Houses, as they've been dubbed.  A developer has been buying and fixing up tons of buildings.  One particular house has always caught The Man's eye, so I drove by to see how things were progressing.  Even though the thought of going from landlord to tenant makes me feel unsettled, it might be a way to ease his transition into city living if we can buy or lease it when it's done.

Two men who obviously had something to do with the work were talking outside, so I asked if I could go on the porch to peek in the windows.  Probably without realizing it himself, he quickly scanned me, and then politely told me that he would prefer I wouldn't, because it was a construction zone, and he had to think of safety.

At that instant I realized that, to them, I looked like an old woman who they had to worry about. I myself have caught sight of that stranger, usually reflected on a store window as I walked by.  But the person I am, the one they didn't see standing before them yesterday, is the capable, sure-footed person who spent her career crawling around job sites.

The Brits have a good word for it:  redundant.  Hell, not without a fight.

A Walk on Warren

Today, taking my constitutional, I stopped at the thrift store.  It's about at the halfway mark, and a nice reward for walking.  There, browsing, or should I say, nervously twitching amidst the merchandise, was Ed, an old tenant.  Ed lived in one of our buildings for years, until we sold it.  His apartment was spotless, and, despite being under the long-term care of Mental Health, never disturbed anyone.  But Ed had one weird habit:  he cross-dressed.  No, not like a drag queen, more like a disheveled old bag lady.  Today's outfit consisted of a printed skirt and top, but two completely different prints, accessorized by a ratty purse straight out of somebody's grandmother's closet -- the top shelf, rear, where it hadn't been seen since 1950.  He also sported a full, straggly beard, long stringy hair, and hairy legs shod in size 12 sneakers - no socks - hanging out below the hemline.  He looked like an aging '80s rocker who crash-landed into his grandma's closet.  Quite the vision.

There was a group of three people near the cashier, and, as Ed nervously made his way past them, one commented loudly "What the hell was that?".  Not content to leave it at that, they went outside to watch and laugh as he made his way up the street.  Well, I would've let their first rude remark go, but when they went outside for a better look, and to continue mocking, I spoke up.  I told them that Ed was a nice guy, I'd known him for 20 years, and he was dressing that way before it was fashionable.  I also pointedly told them that everyone has problems, but some are more visible than others.  With that they all shut up.

But here's the best part:  with the nearest food store over two miles away, those three nonchalantly picked up their grocery cart, which had been curiously standing outside the store, and proceeded up fashionable Warren Street, looking for all the world like three homeless bag ladies--correction:  2 bag ladies and 1 bag man!

Seriously?  And they were laughing?

Deja Vu All Over Again

Some days I think I'm better at getting rid of applicants than I am at actually renting my apartments. I already knew on the phone that I wasn't going to rent to this girl.  She had all the right answers:  yes, I have good credit and rental history.  My income is from SSD & my child gets survivor's benefits because her father died.  But something was being left unsaid.  Still, without a concrete reason to deny her, I agreed to an appointment to see the apartment.

When she came (with her mother) she elaborated:  she'd been living for the past 2 years with her mother in Austerlitz, but she didn't have a car, and wanted to move somewhere that she could get around and "have fun" without one. I lived in Austerlitz, coincidentally on the same road as they do.  Nobody lives there without a car.  Even George the Hermit had an old Jeep!

I told her that it would be hard to get through the screening, because she hasn't rented anywhere in the past 2 years, and her sources of income are protected -- in other words, if she didn't pay her rent, it would be impossible to get the money from her social security checks.  Her mother offered to co-sign -- said she was a professor in NYC for 20-plus years.

Things that made me go "hmmmmmm":
1.  Austerlitz.  No car.  Hmmmmm.
2.  Why was mamma so quick to offer to co-sign, effectively getting rid of her "disabled" daughter & granddaughter, hmmm?
3.  She had no visible disability -- she was an attractive, late 20s girl with all her fingers and toes;
4.  Getting social security money garnished if she wigged out & didn't pay would be impossible;
5.  Her mother actually got the check in her behalf.  (Why wasn't she in charge of her own finances at 28?)  Hmmmm, hmmmm, and hmmmm.

But the weirdest thing was that, about 20 years ago, I had an almost identical situation in the very same apartment!

In that case the mother was a lawyer, they lived not far from these people today, the girl had no car, mom offered to co-sign, and stepdad had her things on the back of the truck the same afternoon.  I lived to regret taking her, as she was a big druggie who got back in the groove when she moved to Hudson.  It was a short and tumultuous tenancy.

So today, as I was making polite small talk, a loud voice in my head was shouting:  DRUGS! DRUGS!  DRUGS!  Still crazy after all these years. (Sorry, Paul.)  And I may have to get a shaman to cleanse the place now.

P.S.  Is the Chatham/Spencertown/Austerlitz area the place that parents bring their children to dry out?  And do they really think Hudson in the '90s, with the service road behind our building nicknamed "Crack Alley" is the place to re-introduce them into society?



    

The Butterfly

This has been a bad week for death, or maybe, a good week for  a Death with a sick sense of humor.  Two of my past tenants have died, neither of natural causes.  Mr. Hunt, 73, drowned in a fishing pond when his boat capsized and he couldn't get out of the water before help arrived.  And Bach Vo, 50-something, was stung by bees so severely when making repairs on his new mobile home that he collapsed on the ground trying to get help, and also died.  Both these deaths were bizarre, but Bach's reminded me of an incident some 40 years ago.

I was a young wife, driving down the highway with my visiting teenage sister, when she started motioning wildly while trying to speak.  She couldn't describe what she was looking at:  a butterfly had gotten wrapped around our car antenna, and the car's speed prevented it from getting free.  When she was finally able to explain it, I quickly pulled the car onto the side of the highway, whereupon the butterfly promptly fell to the ground.  We both got out, and my sister, tending towards teenage melodrama, began petting and encouraging it, saying "You can do it.  Please, come on, little butterfly, get up and fly". Well, unbelievably, the butterfly actually started moving, then lifted off the ground, a little wobbly at first, but finally flew normally across the highway -- where it was hit by a tractor-trailer coming in the opposite direction!

Bach's life reminded me of that butterfly.  He came to the U.S. with the first wave of refugees commonly known as the Vietnamese Boat People, a harsh beginning to life in a new country.  He lived alone, cocooned in his apartment for about 15 years.  Then, returning from a visit to Viet Nam, he brought back a wife.  Life was undeniably good.  He quit smoking, their apartment was aired and cleaned, he looked healthy and happy.  A few more years passed, and recently he'd told me they'd bought a mobile home in a local park and would be moving out.  I was happy for him.  It was only about a month after moving that Bach was repairing something in the ceiling of his new home when the bees attacked him.

On the occasion of the butterfly's temporary escape and subsequent untimely demise, we stood by the side of the road, both laughing at the absurdity and crying for the butterfly.  This time there'll be no laughing.

Ho-Ho-Humbug!

I read recently that you know you’re a landlord when you can evict someone on Christmas.  I laughed, because I actually did that once. 

I rented to a young woman with two kids, who had left her abusive husband.  They “reconciled”, and he moved in, but they were fighting so much that everyone in the building was calling me.  It wasn’t that they were fighting so much as it was actually him beating the crap out of her, accompanied by loud crashing into walls – my walls.  (Not surprisingly, her beautiful mother used to get beat regularly by her ugly, skinny father who thought he was Hot Sh-t.  It was a real Ike & Tina story, but one left for another time.)

When they wouldn’t stop and we couldn’t stand it any longer, I took them to court to evict them.  The case came up right around Christmas, and even though I won the eviction, the judge took me aside and said he was going to give them a few extra weeks because it was Christmas. 

Even a Jewish judge had more Christmas spirit than I did. (But, then again, he didn’t have to live next door to them.)

Mini-Me

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, our neighborhood started out really nice, a patchwork of brownstones and small wood frame houses, some with Rose of Sharon growing in tiny front yards.  Every corner held adventure:  the candy store, the library, Herman’s grocery, the Chinese laundry where I was warned never to enter alone because of opium.  School was within walking distance, and most of what we wanted could be found without leaving the block. 

I was too young, and playing too hard, to see the neighborhood changing for the worse.  The remaining people, as well as the new ones, had fallen on hard times.  My father had a mental breakdown, got sick for what seemed like eternity, and was hospitalized for what felt like eons.  Actually, I found out when I was grown, he was only in the hospital for a few months.  It just felt like forever, while I watched a produce clerk trying to score points with my mother by giving her extra vegetables, and hoping dad would get better before the creep was successful.  Since I was the oldest, it was my job to write the rent receipts, record the receipt stub, and forge my dad’s signature on the insurance check each month.  To this day, I have no idea why my mother didn’t just sign my dad’s name herself. I suspect she was scared, but, then, my mother was always a scaredy-cat.  It kept her out of trouble as a motherless child herself, and kept her clear of that produce clerk, so I should be thankful for it.  

Between being in the hospital and unemployed, it was probably a couple of years until dad was finally hired, one Christmas season, by the post office as a “Temporary, Substitute, Indefinite Clerk”.  His title pretty much summed up the total experience of our neighborhood in those final years we spent in Brooklyn.  Meanwhile, we were better off than many of our neighbors, because my mother had three rents and my dad’s small monthly disability check to tide us over.

By then, every family left in our neighborhood had problems. One friend’s father had a heart attack and died in the men’s room of the local movie house.  Two others had no father that we ever saw, and were raised by their mother and grandmother, who worked at Chock Full O’ Nuts and ironing laundry, respectively.  Another one’s father hung himself, someone else’s mother would regularly be dragged home from the corner bar by strange men, stinking drunk.  There was Crazy Josie, and, of course, my dad, who, after wandering the streets talking to himself, spent time in a mental hospital. Our neighborhood and our families were a mess, but fortunately we kids were mostly unaware of it.  As a kid, I didn't think we were overcrowded.  I thought it wonderful that, without leaving our own four-family building, there were over 20 kids to play with in the hall on a rainy day.  We’d sit on the steps for hours, playing school, or cutout dolls, or having “tea”, until the sun came out again.

But I’ve come to realize that early experience probably had a lot to do with becoming a landlord myself:  the relative security in hard times, being able to look beyond the surface of people’s lives, and just the “normalness” of being a landlord. 

   

Crazy Josie

I guess it was inevitable that I’d be a landlord.  I grew up with tenants all around me.  My parents owned a 4-family house in Brooklyn, and until I was 12, we lived on the top floor – a 4^th floor walkup!  I remember racing up and down those stairs a thousand times a day like it was nothing.  It was nothing.  If the ice cream truck came and I needed money, if it was suppertime, if I needed my skates, if it were time to come up to bed – those three flights of stairs zipped by.  Sometimes we’d ride down the banister just for fun, and have to run up the stairs to do it again and again. Every one of those trips passed the homes of three other families who were my parents’ tenants.

As the neighborhood got seedier, the tenants were sketchier, until, just before my parents sold, we had Crazy Josie living in the apartment below us.  The woman was really crazy, with a brood of kids, some young and some almost grown.  I don’t recall there being a Mr. Josie. 

Whenever Josie got particularly out of control, my mother would threaten to call the authorities on her, but she never did.  I have no idea what Josie cooked, (and by extension what her family ate) but used to imagine it was cats or old clothing, because the smell that came out of her apartment and oozed into the hall required running as fast as I could, while holding my breath for a full flight of stairs and the landing.  Every day.  A thousand times a day. 

Thanks to Josie, we also developed a problem with bedbugs, which ran up the airshaft with the roaches and mice, and infested the entire building.

By the time we finally sold the building, Josie was starting to make my mother crazy, too. We left Josie, with her brood, bedbugs, roaches and mice, to the next owner. 

For the next eight years we lived in a little one-family ranch house, without tenants.  But then my folks must’ve forgotten what it was like, kind of like you forget the pain of childbirth after a while, because their next house, and the one after that, both had small walk-out apartments downstairs, and they continued with tenants for many years afterwards. 

Some years after we sold the Brooklyn fourplex, in the A&P in our new neighborhood, a man came up to my mother and introduced himself as one of Josie’s sons, now grown. He thanked her for not reporting his mother.  My mom always said she was glad she didn’t, because the outcome of that encounter might’ve been different if she had.  But, until I became a more jaded and practical landlord, I thought of it as keeping that hardscrabble family together when they needed it most.   

Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 5: The ceo

Notice I used lower-case letters. See, that’s the main problem with code enforcement officers: they’re ceo’s, but think they’re CEOs.  Often they’re just insecure bullies with a badge and some power.

The Undertaker was finally gone, and we got a reasonable building inspector.  And now permits were sprouting up all over, like mushrooms after a summer rain.  In the years of drought, one building inspector did everything (which wasn’t much), but now he needed help.  It came in the form of assistants - code enforcement officers.

One day we had a bathroom flood from a second floor apartment.  It ran down the wall that housed the electrical box for the apartment beneath.  The first floor tenant, who had always been a needy pain in the arse for other, minor issues, called the fire department instead of calling us.  We heard the call over the scanner, met them at the building and stopped the water.  After inspecting the problem, the chief told us to turn off some of the circuit breakers in the first floor apartment for a few days so the wires could dry out. 

But the pain in the arse wasn’t satisfied with that.  Since she was inconvenienced, the next day she called the building department, and they sent a brand, spanking new ceo.  I was in my office when I got an angry phone call from this guy, demanding my immediate presence at the building.  I told him I was right around the corner, and would be right there.

When I got there, with all 6 foot something of him towering over me, he got right in my face, and started loudly pushing his weight around about violations in this woman’s apartment.  “Whoa”, I said, smiling, “you’re overreacting.  Let me tell you what happened and why some of the breakers are off.”

But he wasn’t having any of it, because he knew something I didn’t know:  that all landlords are bad, and all tenants are good. In the course of his inspection, he noticed the smoke detector was knocked off the ceiling, which was obviously done by the landlord, no, make that “slumlord”.* So now he got louder. He threatened that, if the power wasn’t back on and the smoke detector re-installed within 24 hours, he was going to close the whole building down.  And, by the way, here’s a $100 fine.  See ya in court.

Well, now I was fuming.  I did quick math.  It would’ve been a quick and cheap eviction to be rid of that troublemaking tenant, who, as we know, knocked her own smoke detector down because it needed a new battery.  All I had to do to be rid of her was nothing!  Only, I had four other tenants in that building who didn’t deserve to be out on the street.  So I grit my teeth, had the smoke detector re-installed, turned on the power, and called my lawyer.

I was not going to pay that fine without a fight.  Even though it was going to cost me more to have my lawyer in court than to pay the fine, and I might lose anyway, I was furious.  As it turned out, I won the court case, but it wasn’t over just yet.

A few months later I had occasion to go to the building inspector’s office on some unrelated matter.  There, sitting at the first desk, so it was impossible to bypass him, was the ceo I’d tangled with.  There were two courses of action I could take. I chose the high road:  I put a big smile on my face, thrust out my hand, and suggest we start over.  He sheepishly shook my hand, and, here’s the best part, actually apologized!  He said he was new on the job and didn’t know there were both kinds of landlords as well as tenants. 

So, this story ends well.  But often, it doesn’t.  The Undertaker would go around citing people for litter in the alley, but couldn’t act when something bigger needed his signature.  (He once cited a woman for grass being too high in her front yard, only to find out she was a famous horticulturist, and the “weeds” were exotic specimens.  Was he embarrassed by his gaffe?  Probably not.)

And it didn’t surprise me at all to learn that the BTK Killer was a ceo.

*See Dec. 7^th post.

Homeless Housing, Part 3: Groundhog Day

The current “solution” DSS has come up with to defray some of the exorbitant cost of housing the homeless in motels is this:  DSS will rent two apartments for “congregate housing” for up to 6 people.  They assure us there will be rules:  no drinking, drugs, guests, or disturbances, or they’ll be evicted.  Aside from the obvious question of who’s going to be on-site, monitoring the tenants to enforce these rules, (answer: nobody) I have to ask:  Where do you go when you’re evicted from homeless housing?

The answer:  They get “sanctioned”, which theoretically means their benefits are terminated.  But they immediately apply for a fair hearing, and DSS is required to house them, probably back in a motel, until the hearing results.  Out the front door, in the side door. 

Groundhog Day. 

Homeless Housing, Part 2: Abe

Talk and finger-pointing about homelessness rears its head periodically. You have to read the paper between the lines to know that the press releases which substitute for news are all about building public sympathy for a homeless shelter.  But rather than just speak the truth, they use subterfuge.  

Blaming landlords for substandard apartments has always been good sport, because we all know that landlords regularly sneak inside their apartments after they’ve rented them, punch holes in the walls, throw garbage around the rooms, bring their cats in to pee on the rugs, and, oh, just for fun, as they’re going out the back door, break the windows and knock the smoke detectors off the ceilings because they’ve started that annoying chirping. 

But now there’s a new villain on the block:  the “rich” who bought dilapidated buildings, put their hard-earned money into them, and have the audacity to actually live in them!  Gentrification, and those who gentrify, are the new bogeymen.

Unfortunately, it’s easy and p.c. to blame landlords and the rich, yet it’s suicidal to even imply that the homeless are to blame in any way, or even that their problems are self-contained. In reality, the problem is not “the poor”, i.e. people without money. People who are chronically homeless have other problems – drugs, alcohol, mental -- that cause them to use up all their chips and end up on the street.

And while it’s easy to vilify “slumlords”, those same slumlords usually provide the housing of last resort for people who would otherwise be homeless.  And I can verify that throwing an apartment at the chronically homeless is not the solution. 

I give you Exhibit A:  Homeless Abe.

I was contacted by Abe’s court-appointed guardian.  She was frantic because Abe was living in his unconverted school bus, surrounded by his beloved old tires.  It was getting cold, and the court required her to find Abe more suitable winter quarters.

I rented her a brand new apartment for Abe, complete with dishwasher, wall-to-wall carpeting, the works.  But, try as she might, she couldn’t get Abe to stay in there for more than a month.  He felt too “confined”, and was back in his unheated bus before the snow flew. 

So, was it lack of housing that made Abe homeless?