Not Married, with Children

Somewhere in the mid-80s, I started having people call who were looking for apartments for themselves and their fiancées.  At first I would naively ask when the wedding date was.  It took a while for me to figure out that “fiancée” was a euphemism for “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” 

I started saying “if I had a nickel for every 'affianced' couple who calls here…”, and shortly thereafter got a coffee can, cut a slit in the top, and set up a Fiancee Jar. Every time someone would come in and use that meaningless phrase, I’d drop a nickel into the jar.  After about a year, we donated the jar of cash to the Red Cross. 

There was about 20 bucks in it.  How deeply do you want to think about that?

Oldtimer's Disease

C kept locking herself out.  Sometimes it was just outside the self-locking main building door.  When that happened, she’d ring neighbors’ bells until someone let her in.  But when she locked her keys in her apartment, she had to call me.  I only found out about all the other half-lockouts when I commented to a neighbor that I was worried, because it seemed to be happening more often.

By the time I realized how frequent it was, I was starting to worry about her faculties. C and I go way back, but neither of us is getting any younger, and our memories – see, I just had to go back and re-read this to remember what I was writing. 

Anyway, I suggested she leave a key with her sister who lives a few blocks away, but her sister was developing Alzheimer’s, so that wasn’t a good idea.  My other solution was to hide a spare key somewhere in the hall, so once she got in the building via a neighbor, she could use it to unlock her apartment door. 

A few months later, I checked under the hall pot I remembered hiding it in, and it wasn’t there.  And inevitably I got another call.  As I unlocked her door, I reminded C that she must’ve used and never replaced the spare I had hidden.  She, on the other hand, was congratulating herself because she didn’t lock herself out as usual.  Her purse overturned in a friend’s car, and she apparently didn’t see her keys when she was putting all her belongings back into it. Her friend found the keys, and she was happy that, even though the end result was the same, i.e. she was once again locked out, it wasn’t because she forgot them this time. Still, I was annoyed that the spare was removed from its hiding place, and made her promise to make and hide another.

While I was still self-righteously harrumphing around about it, it dawned on me that the hall closet might be a better hiding place for the future key.  I went to check the closet for something to hang a key on, and there, already hanging from a nail, with an accusatory glint, was the key I’d accused C of removing from the other location that I thought we used. 

Apparently neither of us remembered that, in the all-too-recent past, the hall closet was already our agreed-upon hiding place.  Oldtimers Disease.    

Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 3: Mr. Colonoscopy

When my son was planning to build his house, I stupidly offered to go to the town hall and apply for his building permit. Now, this is the town I’ve lived in for 30 years.  But I pretty much keep to myself, and don’t really know the elected or appointed officials. I figured they didn’t know me, either.  Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong.  They thought they knew me.  And my little dog, too.

I gathered the application, blueprints, and payment and went to see the building inspector, who I’d never met before.  He only worked part-time, so I made sure I got there early, even before he arrived for the day.  There was one man ahead of me, so as we waited in the little anteroom we made small talk.  The man happily told me “I’m getting my building permit today”.  Usually an innocuous remark, but his appearance smacked of a man just let out of the asylum:  the grin a little too wide, the eyes a bit too bright.  I asked him if it was his house.  No, he answered, he was the architect.  How long has the process been? “Since October”.  What??? It was March already, and he was trying to get a permit since October?  An architect?

I felt the twitch I developed when working with the Undertaker, and all of a sudden it was getting very warm in there.  But I figured I’d see how it went.  So I waited my turn.

The inspector, who I soon and forever more would refer to as Mr. Colonoscopy, came in, took one look at me, and announced “I’m not seeing you today”.  I was beyond shocked.  I quietly said “It’s okay.  I’m waiting my turn”.  He repeated again:  “I’m not seeing you today.”  With a question in my voice, I repeated, “But I’m waiting my turn”.  The third time he said “I don’t care how long you wait, I’m not seeing you today”. 

Well, that was it.  I was weaned on The Undertaker.  I was not going to be intimidated by this jerk.  So I told him that I was waiting my turn, and he was going to see me today.

At that point, he told me that if I didn’t get out (of the town office, not his private office!) that he would have me arrested!  I replied that if he weren’t going to do his work, I’d have his job! Like bullies before and since, he started backpedaling and whining about a sick wife.  What drivel.  Hiding behind a sick wife’s skirts.  At this point I figured “what the hell”, so I pointedly told him if family obligations prevented him from performing his duties, perhaps someone else should be doing the job. 

The long and short of it is that he did take my application, and when he told me to pick up the permit (no, it didn’t take six months), he wasn’t there.  He left it with the women in the office.  They were so intimidated that they left the permit perched on the edge of a desk, and never looked up from their paperwork when I took it.  It was like I had leprosy.  And it still frosts me because, to people who actually know me, I’m a pretty reasonable person.

Ironically, as far as we could tell, he never walked through the house during construction, and the only communication we had was when my son would phone him for permission to continue after different building phases were complete.  He always said yes, and the Certificate of Occupancy quietly came by mail when the house was done.  

To this day, I have no idea what that was all about.

The Girl Who Refused to Cash the Winning Lottery Ticket

A nice couple, both successful professionals, lost two children tragically, within a year of each other. One son died in a commercial airplane crash.  Almost a year to the day later, a daughter became ill while an exchange student in South America.  She developed an infection her mother said would have been cured easily in the States. But the poor hospital in the poor country didn't have the medicine.  And so, despite the doctors' best efforts, she died.

A few years later, the parents decided to go back to South America and make a donation to the hospital that tried so valiantly to save their daughter's life.  Though it wasn't part of their original plan, while there they thought about adopting an orphan from that country.  For, as the wife said, "The house was empty." 

As things turned out, there were four siblings in need of a family.  And so the wife traded her days at the office for days at the supermarket, pushing, pulling, and keeping count of her new brood.

Time went by, and the kids were growing up as nicely as the older children had.  Well, almost.

The oldest adopted daughter decided to leave home shortly after high school.  By that time the parents had invested some money for each of the four, so the girl had a nest egg to supplement her fast-food job.  She took an apartment, and soon after, a boyfriend.

My office at that time was directly across from the police station, where court was held every week, and a lot of my applicant pre-screening was done from my office window.  And sure enough, shortly after being on her own, I looked out my window, and there she was.  Although I couldn't hear her, I could see by her body language she was becoming what we called back then a "Ricki Lake Girl"... all head bobbing, finger pointing, teeth sucking attitude.

I sort of kept up with her, seeing her at one dead-end job after another, hanging around town in bad company, going nowhere fast.  One day her mother called me.  Apparently out of funds, the daughter now needed a place with rental assistance.  Would I rent her one of our subsidized apartments?  With nothing concrete to deny her, I did, but with misgivings.   

Bad news travels fast, especially in a small town.  Our other tenants soon told me her apartment was becoming a hangout for druggies.  We did an inspection.  It was filthy, nothing like the way she was raised.  Since she had to report any income changes, we also knew that she kept losing job after job.  Soon she wasn't paying even the nominal rent she owed.  We began eviction proceedings.

By the day she was due to be out, the whole building was in an uproar.  Traffic at all hours, random bell-ringing to get in the building, the usual drug behavior.  The constant traffic, and the prostitution which provided the drug money, was causing all our other tenants to lose sleep.  She herself was in jail.  I went to the apartment to see if her things were out, and discovered a crackhead girlfriend there.  The "friend" tried to tell us she was visiting, but it's hard to be convincing when you're wearing dirty Victoria’s Secret at 3 in the afternoon.  I called the police, and they escorted her out. On her way out, she loudly proclaimed ownership of the TV. Since my soon-to-be-ex tenant was otherwise occupied and not there to object, the police shrugged their shoulders.  I sure didn’t care.  It was just one less thing for us to eventually throw out.  The “friend” lugged this huge TV, and never missed a beat.  She immediately set up housekeeping a few doors down in another crack house, and a few minutes after her "move" was on the cordless phone on the front porch, like it all never happened. I changed the locks.

A long time afterwards, I spoke with the girl’s father.  He said that no matter how they tried, she was just headstrong and kept going in the wrong direction.  He commented that she was like a person who was holding a winning lottery ticket, but refused to cash it in.   

Diamond Park

The Rowhouses and the owner-occupied housing were back-to-back,  and it was nice to have new families with kids in the neighborhood.  But the kids were playing ball in our parking lot, and our tenants were complaining about their cars getting dinged.

At the same time, a thriving drug trade was being conducted in a vacant lot a few doors up.  So one day I was standing in our parking lot, trying to figure out a way to keep the kids out, and had an epiphany.  Why not get the city to convert that drug lot into a park?  It would move the drug dealing out, the kids would have a place to play, and I’d have them out of my parking lot.  

We got some of the neighbors together and presented our proposal to the city council. The city wasn’t interested.  Didn’t want to buy the lot, maintain another park, police it, lock it at night, blah, blah, blah.  So I called the lot's owner.  I told him if he’d have the junk cars hauled, we’d clean it up if he gave permission.

He laughed at me.  Said nobody would do it.  I told him to meet us at the lot the next week and we’d see.  So we went door-to-door, spoke to the neighbors again, and told them we’d all meet the owner that night.  At 7 PM on a nice summer night, a large group of people walked up the street to the lot, another large group  walked down the street to the lot, and the drug dealers, seeing this crowd, walked across the street.  The owner couldn’t believe all those people showed up, and I couldn’t believe how easy it was to move drug dealers.

We got big garbage bags, rakes & shovels, and everyone pitched in. Other people and businesses heard about what was going on, and donated stuff, unasked for but welcome:  gravel, picnic tables, a sign.  There was a barbershop next door to the lot, and the men used to sit out on the porch anyway.  Now they had something to watch out for. We never did get a fence around it, but we didn’t need it.  Too many eyes for the drug dealers.  They moved elsewhere.

The name Diamond Park was the brainchild of my assistant, B.  Columbia Street used to be called Diamond Street, back in the days when it was the red light district.  The new name worked on many levels.

And for a number of years it served as a simple but useful park for the neighborhood – until the owner lost both a building and the lot to a tax sale, and title transferred to new owners.  By then the crack epidemic had calmed down some, so while it never again was maintained like when it was Diamond Park, at least it didn’t revert back to the awful drug hangout it had been.

Until recently I had a magazine article in my desk drawer with pictures of a similar lot in a similar type of urban location, which had been turned into a small neighborhood splashpark.  I showed it to a few people through the years, but nobody picked up the ball, and I’m tired of crusading.  Recently I gave up & reluctantly threw the article in the trash. 

The American Dream

Working with government means you're usually behind the curve, and its decisions often seem random.  After many committee meetings, and poll-trolling, Word will come down that grants for this or that are available.  Then, every city worth its grant writer will miraculously find a need which must be filled to save the sky from falling.  In ensuing years I’ve often thought that if the government decided it was giving grants for fertilizer, we’d wake up one morning to find Warren Street covered in horse shit.    

So during one of its Eureka! moments, government realized that owner-occupied housing stabilizes a neighborhood.  Hudson applied for grants to build some, and when they were awarded, as Captain Picard would say, we were asked to “Make it so, Number Two.”  So we started building on one of the worst streets in Hudson – nice little 3 bedroom ranches on small but separate infill lots.  And started selling them.  We were knocking on our tenants’ doors to tell them of this opportunity.  Word of mouth got out, and we were getting calls. 

It was a pretty simple and straightforward deal for the buyers.  They received a $15,000 no-interest loan towards their purchase price.  For every year they lived in the house, $3000 was forgiven, so if they stayed five years, the loan was forgiven completely.  

We were on a roll, and had built 13 houses, when our architect clued us in that B, the unscrupulous new director of the community development agency and her husband S had been shopping our materials suppliers with our blueprints.  Apparently they figured if we could do it, so could they.  But they couldn’t.  Our construction came to a screeching halt, and although we were still fielding lots of calls about the houses, we told people to call the community development office.  Sadly, but not surprisingly, not a single additional house was ever built when we stopped.  Sometimes, while it’s good to be vindicated, it’s not really good overall.

Epilogue:  B and S didn’t last too long afterwards in Hudson, but not before making all kinds of internal deals, in which the community development agency passed along all its money to S’s private non-profit to “develop”, thereby squeezing two layers of administrative fees, and God knows what else, out of each round of funds.  She also “sold” many of the city’s loans to her husband’s private non-profit company, and later bought them back when he’d made a mess of things and needed quick cash.  Amazingly, none of this came to light while it was happening, despite my very loud protesting to anyone who’d listen. 

P.S.  I called them B & S because it reminds me of b.s., which is what this duo fed the city during their years here.  

Building Inspectors from Hell, Part 2: Revenge of the Undertaker

THE ROWHOUSES were 5 dilapidated townhouses, actually just shells. The city wanted to jump-start fixing that neighborhood, so they asked us to renovate those buildings.  Running the numbers showed that we couldn’t afford to just do the five townhouses, but if we added 10 new units on the lot, it would work.  But we were warned we’d have to work with The Undertaker, the local building inspector, on this job.  We hired an architect, kissed ass, and got the building permit.  But The Undertaker still had it in for us. 

Work moved along, and we were days away from occupancy.  Nothing new had been done in this neighborhood for about 50 years, so there was a lot of buzz.  By our projected opening date, we were fully rented and tenants were waiting to move in.  We were all just waiting for our Certificate of Occupancy.  All through construction The Undertaker had remained relatively sane, so we expected our final walk-through to be nitpicky, but doable.  Well, being the insecure jerk that he was, The Undertaker  said he had to call in backup, another inspector from the state.  While The Undertaker was nitpicking his way through the punchlist items, the state inspector took a quick look around, and announced that we had bigger problems: we didn’t have a firewall dividing the 10 new units.  By code, a firewall has to separate every 8 units.  There was a design change during construction on the new building that caused this problem, and the architect hadn’t picked it up. Neither had The Undertaker, despite his many preening walk-throughs.  His incompetence helps explains his inertia.     

At certain times in my life, when something momentously bad is about to happen, I get this strange feeling.  Everything sounds like I’m under water, my stomach drops to my knees, and I have to use the bathroom.  That’s how I know something is really bad.  And it happened with that announcement.  In one fortuitous fell swoop, The Undertaker was about to get revenge for his years of pent-up anger and frustration. 

He loudly announced that nobody could move in until this issue was resolved. Not in the original 5-unit building, not in the new one.  He wouldn’t issue a C.O. for any unit until we applied to the state for a variance from the building code.  With pressure from the mayor’s office, a few weeks later he relented somewhat and allowed us to rent the front building.  He also permitted occupancy of 8 of the 10 new units.  But just in case we were liars, we also had to not only guarantee that we wouldn’t occupy those two, but sheetrock over the windows in two brand-new apartments, to make sure they were uninhabitable. We begged him not to make us ruin perfectly good apartments.  We offered to give him the keys to those units, to check as he saw fit, but, no.  Sheetrock it was.

Meantime, in a small town, news travels fast.  The buzz that helped us rent the apartments now worked against us.  Word got out that our apartments were “unsafe”, and people asked for their deposits back. Every time we had a prospective tenant, we first had to go through the litany of the building being perfectly safe.

The state variance process usually took six months to wade through.  Throughout this whole process we would need to make payments on the maxed-out construction loan, with insufficient income to offset it. We begged and cajoled the state to hurry our application through. They moved as fast as government can, and it only took about 3 months for them to issue a variance.  Among the things the state required in a trade-off was a fire alarm system which rang in every apartment. 

The locations of the smoke detectors required by code, and high sensitivity of the system caused its own problems.  Every time a tenant made popcorn or took a steamy shower, the whole building’s alarm system went off, and everyone, including the person in the shower, was out in the street until the fire department came and the cause was discovered.

And usually when we opened a new project, the timing of the rents against the loan repayment schedule resulted in a little cash cushion.  This was just the opposite.  It felt like we were always playing catch-up, and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Years later, when the neighborhood didn’t change for the better, exhausted from trying to make a dog sing, we were forced to sell for less than we owed. 

Undertaker, if you’re reading this, you’ll be pleased to know that we’re still paying back part of the loan that we were upside-down on.