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?