Property Values is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, January 17, 2004. It is part of Journal.
A bit of whining about the housing market.
I live in a building that is in the midst of a transformation from an illegal immigrant cold storage facility to expensive flats. It’s currently somewhere in the middle the process. The landlords aren’t renewing the leases of long standing tenants, preferring to replace entire families of freshly arrived Chinese with singles or couples from more high-market demographics.
The landlords are not yet confortable with their new role as non-slum-lords. Consequently, I have the following complaints:
- There are no doorbells. The building is six stories, but there are no fucking doorbells.
- There is an army of rats living within my walls. They claw and scratch and search for ingress to my flat to ravage my food supplies and give me the plague, which would kill me because I don’t have employer sponsored health insurance.
- The ventilation system for the building dumps the cooking smoke from all the other floors down into mine.
- It is, at this moment, raining piss in my bathroom because the upstairs neighbors have toilet trouble. This is the second time this has happened in the last few months.
- There are no fire alarms, sprinklers or extinguishers and the fire escape is broken. This building is a death trap.
- I had no heat until a few weeks ago because the landlords mistakenly removed the radiator through which steam was to enter my apartment. When I told them there was no heat they denied it. It took a combined threat of litigation, cessation of rent and physical violence to persuade them of the importance of heat in the winter.
- During the late fall monsoon season it rained in my kitchen.
- I pay eighteen thousand six hundred dollars a year for the privilege of living in this tiny space.
The apartment is still, all that said, nicer than I had expected to be able to afford in New York City. If you live somewhere else, stay there — we’re full.
Thank you.