Spring is a time for renewal.
The Newsletter regrets that the March 14 edition was not published owing to an ongoing real estate crisis, among other factors.
As always, subscribers may address complaints in writing to:
Complaints Division
PO Box 2256
Wichita, KS 67201
I should have known from the outset that I would never be able to renew the lease on my apartment. Last spring was a sort of fluke for Manhattan rents and, on top of an already low price, many New Yorkers — myself included — got free months of rent or the concessions as part of a desperate bid by landlords to fill apartments.
My rent concession — a splendid discount of $300/month — was explained in the lease rider as being “solely to compensate Tenant for the inconvenience Tenant may encounter during the unique circumstances of the Covid emergency.” The same document also warned grimly that, “Tenant acknowledges that Tenant has been advised that the Apartment is exempt from the Rent Stabilization Law and Code.” The translation: when the market comes back, Tenant can go kick rocks.
The problem, of course, is that Tenant fell in love with the apartment at first sight, even though it is on the fifth floor with no elevator and the lack of a freezer meant that having ice cream was only a possibility when the weather was cold enough to store it on the fire escape.
The news of the rent hike (which is called in the language of landlords a “lease renewal”) arrived by email on a gray February morning. The verdict? An increase of forty percent. I was one of the lucky ones. Spend a day wandering around in Manhattan and you are liable to overhear a conversation in a bar or on the train about someone’s cousin’s friend’s sister on the Upper West Side whose rent fully doubled. Those for whom the renewal email has not yet arrived live with the knowledge that the sword of Damocles hangs over their inbox on any given day.
Finding a new apartment and moving in New York is one of the worst calamities that can befall a person that does not involve a firetruck, hospital, or lawyer. I spent the first month living in denial about my rent increase, calculating the exact number of meals that would need to be composed only of instant noodles if I were to pay the new price. I tried sending an email to the landlord asking for a discount, touting my spotless payment history and careful maintenance of hardwood, only to discover that my offer was the discounted price. When I finally decided to give up the apartment, it appeared in online listings with astonishing speed and at a price sixty percent higher than what I now pay. It was off the market after just three showings.
The idea of the apartment showing is a unique indignity of renting. New York law makes no mention of the maximum number of showings that may be conducted in an occupied apartment so long as the warning comes twenty-four hours in advance, and three such showings were conducted in my home over the space of three days.
When a person sells a house (I am told) a realtor “stages” the place to make it look as welcoming as possible while removing all traces that an actual person lives there. The homeowner, keen to sell it, cooperates in this process. In preparation for the showings of my apartment, I did some staging of my own. The difference in my staging, however, was that my message was not “this is a comfortably impersonal and cozy home” but rather, “I live a more real, cool, and interesting life than you ever will with your ridiculous income, and you do not deserve this apartment.”
I left a copy of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (which I, like many people, have meant to read but never come close to finishing) on the dining table with a jazz club receipt tucked in as a bookmark in the last hundred pages to demonstrate my cosmopolitan-ness. I kept a half-ironed shirt on an ironing board for all three days to show how very busy yet well-dressed I am. I left a matching set of dishes in the sink to display my commitment to good Scandinavian design and also because I had not gotten around to washing them.
I made a point of being out when the appointed hour for the showings arrived each day. It sickened me to think of people walking on my beautiful floor with shoes, and to be around for the occasion might have made me vomit. In some small way, I feared that I might like the visitors — that they might be nurses or diplomats or musicians or a young family genuinely more deserving of the place, which would almost be worse than if they were intolerable rich people that I could resent.
I spent Saturday afternoon wandering around the neighborhood like a hermit crab looking for a shell, unable to return to my old one. At the same time, I like to imagine that my apartment was shown to a social media influencer from L*s Ang*les who had only just stepped out of their $300 Ub*r from JFK wearing an outfit of what they might call “vegan leather” but I would call “vinyl.” They might have looked at my bookshelf by the window and theorized that it would be the perfect place for a Pel*ton. They might have asked the broker about the possibility of painting the century-old, untouched brick wall or putting carpet over the wood floors. They did not mind the absence of a freezer because they do not like ice cream and they did not notice the proximity to the subway because they “don’t really take the train.” This, I have to imagine, is the person who will take my place.
I returned home each evening with the distinct feeling that my own home had cheated on me and that somebody’s shoes had come into contact with my area rug.
The only thing more exhausting than having one’s apartment visited is visiting other apartments. New York is somewhat unique in that this process is carried out largely on foot and facilitated by an incredible number of frantic emails and text messages with apartment brokers. Stepping out briefly on a Friday afternoon, the apartment hunter can find themself drawn into a vortex of real estate, brought around entire swathes of the city, and shown so many apartments that they soon forget which one had the washing machine or the rent stabilization or the strange rattling noise from the floorboards.
The worst part of all is the emotional exhaustion of picturing oneself in so many apartments, most of which are unbelievably inhumane environments. “What would my life be like,” the renter asks, “if I had $200 extra dollars of spending money each month and a dishwasher but never saw the sun again?” “Why were we so hung up on having electricity? Isn’t that a little bourgeois?” “When you think about it, people in other cities would kill to live twenty minutes from the subway.”
Invariably, there comes a point in the apartment search when all seems to be lost. For two years in a row now, I have broken down on Second Avenue and cried out with complete conviction (to the dismay and embarrassment of my apartment hunting companions), “We’ll never find it!”
Only then does the city itself (it listens, remember?) produce some small miracle — a great slice of pizza, a savvy broker, a fellow apartment hunter from Michigan who offers leads, or even the ultimate prize of a sensible apartment.
If there is any solace in the horror of searching for an apartment, it is that it is A Very New York Thing To Do. Much like attending an avant-garde cultural event or having a rat run across your foot on the street in the middle of the night, it is not particularly pleasurable, but it builds strength and makes a person feel a part of something that is somehow worthwhile. It only adds to the strange allure of the place and strengthens its residents’ resolve to sink their claws as far as they can into Manhattan schist and parquet floors.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Inside the Hot Market for Videos of Idling Trucks” from the New York Times.
Few groups in civil society (if they can even be considered members of civil society) behave with such recklessness and disregard for the law and human life as New York drivers. In a place like Manhattan — where about four in five households have no car at all — the result of this is that most people (at the risk of projecting my feelings onto others) despise motor vehicles. In New York, cars and trucks seem to do little else than risk lives, pollute the air, erode the pedestrian fabric of the city, and create a ceaseless racket at all hours of the day and night
The average New Yorker has little recourse against the wretched machines except for one marvelous program: the Citizens Air Complaint Program, in which the city pays bounties to anyone who takes an acceptable film of a truck idling for more than three minutes.
One man, the Times reports, pulled in $64,000 last year. Aside from the threat of a crazed driver chasing you down the street (it happens!) what’s not to love about easy money that makes life a living hell for careless polluters?
Helvetica is streaming for free through Wednesday on the occasion of its fifteenth anniversary. You can rent or buy it if you miss the boat.
I stumbled across Helvetica — a full-length documentary by the excellent filmmaker Gary Hustwit — by chance one night in high school as I sat awake waiting for a snow day that did not come to pass. It would be difficult to point to another work that had so much influence on the creation of the insufferable man that I have become today as this film. It completely altered the way that I think of the world and of design.
It is strange that a film of an hour and twenty minutes that discusses only a single typeface could seem too short but Hustwit makes it so.
Highlights include an interview with Massimo Vignelli, whose (correct) subway map has adorned my shower curtain for three years and is beginning to make a slow return in its natural home, and an interview with Michael Beirut that I once sent to my boss in response to a complaint that a bulletin board I had made as an RA in college “could use some color.”