Meanwhile, I'd applied for an apartment in a lovely old family-owned building just below Mosholu, where a friend of a friend lives. She put in a word with the landlord. He called her back -- having googled me, I guess -- to say "this person you're recommending... you know she's an activist." He said (reportedly) "you know, sometimes we get an applicant and, ah, we recommend them to a building that might be better suited to them."
I was already in contortions to get the apartment. I was begging my girlfriend to let me get the lease without her name on it, to avoid credit drama. I was offering my richest, most prestigious relative as my guarantor. I was calling the landlord and being so nice and flexible. I hand delivered the application fee to Westchester with the swiftness of silver-heeled mercury, outfitted in my best smart, going-places white lady drag. Also, I #$%^& needed that apartment. So I did one more contortion: I didn't post those notes. For 3 months! And that's what you have to do to get an apartment. In the Bronx.
For the record: like most housing geeks who love the old beautiful buildings themselves, I'm a great tenant.
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July 2007
(...before the mortgage market plotzed)
We've been looking for apartments in the northwest Bronx. There are signs there of the same things that are happening everywhere else. Anywhere there's an empty lot, there's just as likely to be one of those faceless orange-and-yellow cinderblob buildings going up. They're not quite as bad as the condos in Brooklyn and Harlem, which mock the idea of "infill" by stuffing million-dollar apartments into sliver lots on blocks where the longer-term [Black] male residents are 50% unemployed. My consolation is that the free-wheeling lending that banks have been doing is about to end, so the pool of people who might buy those condos is shrinking dramatically and a bunch of those developers will lose their shirts.
I find myself on both sides of the struggle, though. On the one hand, we're the priced-out-of-Manhattan tenants that Bedford Park landlords have been waiting for. In one place, the super enthusiastically told us that the neighborhood had been "bad" but "not anymore," and that they were getting rid of the welfares, the Section 8s, "you know, the tenants who sit around all day." In the 90-unit building, they'd recently cleared 17 apartments. Sure enough, the hallways were full of families moving their stuff out. I guess the broker thought we looked like the kind of people who would take that as good news. The broker whose earlier career was as a superintendent herself, in the NYS prison system.
How do you get rid of Section 8 tenants, I asked? Oh, everyone does some little violation of their Section 8, the super said. Which presumably means that, not only are they losing their apartments to the re-branding of the Bronx -- they're probably losing their vouchers as well. For the record, his building was a total dump.
On the other hand, even though I'm pretty much the person for whom those condos are being built, I can't get an apartment. I'm a comfortably-situated white lady with high class credentials, and my girlfriend is too. (Yes we are, honey.) But our credit isn't that good. And one of us lived in an apartment where the tenants were once in housing court many years before, when a building burned and the owner didn't repair it -- which produces an "automatic denial" of our joint apartment application, according to the managers at Bedford Park Apartments. I've been in school, so I have no recent income history to speak of. Worse, now I'm self-employed. At the age of 33, when Jesus was already saving the whole world forever, I still need a guarantor. (One of the benefits of being the condo-target person is that I can easily find one... but that's another story about how inequality is multi-generational.)
More on how the Bronx is going, coming soon.
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