Before anything else, I need to say that moving into our new place, despite moving sucking generally, has been an absolute treat. We (my partner and I) love it with our entire hearts. I’ve been feeling especially lucky these days and that’s a special feeling I do not take for granted. For the first time in a while, I feel hopeful about myself and my life.
We loved this place at first sight. We viewed a lot of apartments in a short period and despite there being a few that we felt like we probably could live in, this was the first place we saw that we wanted to live in. (Well, there were a few others that we wanted to live in and applied to but didn’t get so they are dead to me now) Most of them were the kind of places you walk into and immediately get the sense that something terrible happened just moments before your arrival but somehow all evidence has mysteriously and rapidly vanished. The appliances were suspiciously new for otherwise unkempt apartments. There were holes where there shouldn’t be, needles scattered here and there, the ever-present sound of leaking, and an uneasiness (water damage) and dread (mold) that couldn’t be painted over even if one thousand nails and all the outlets were. You know that no one wants to talk about it. My radar may be off though because I didn’t get that sense in this apartment and we have since found out that something terrible was happening in this apartment only weeks before we moved in. I’ll tell you soon don’t worry.
Brokers, though I suppose are a thing in the rest of the country, really do not have the unlimited power that they seem to wield in NYC. I had never heard of the practice of broker’s fees before moving here. For my non-NY readers, a broker’s fee is a service fee charged by a person the landlord hired to open the door to an apartment and try to “sell it to you”. I put that in quotes because in my experience the brokers hardly make an effort to make you like the place as much as you have to make an effort to make them like you in the hopes they’ll process your application before the other people you moped around the apartment with pretending to not see the aforementioned scaries. When the place sucks they know that unfortunately there will always be someone desperate or gullible enough to rent it anyway. The broker’s fee is also regularly as high as 15-20% of the total annual rent. So on a $2500/mo apartment that could easily be $4500, which is on top of the security deposit and first month’s rent. This means that, in total to move into that $2500/mo apartment you would have to fork up just shy of 10K up front. Insanity. There are apartments with no fee just like there are rent-stabilized apartments, seemingly few and far between. This creates a huge barrier to entry for housing for anyone let alone someone who is homeless or seriously at risk of being so. There have been some battles at a state level to regulate this practice but of course, like most problems perpetuating the housing crisis in NYC, there has been little movement. As all those anti-Eric-Adams posters around town were saying- “Tired? Hungry? Poor? Leave.”
I see the broker we rented this apartment from around the neighborhood all the time now. I don’t think I should tell you his real name since he is very Google-able (I just checked) but it is something like John Mysterious. Use your imagination, it really is that awesome. Just last week he saw me pick up a pair of cheap pink sunglasses out of the grass at the park and I had never even considered that could be an immoral thing to do until I saw the way he looked at me doing it. He asked, “Drop your glasses?” In his thick Brooklyn accent and without thinking and a large smile I said, “No I just found these!” I could tell immediately that I disappointed him. He allegedly vouched for us to get this apartment because he thought “We’re nice people”. Listen, a wallet or something sentimental I wouldn’t have taken but I guess I figured the dirty plastic sunglasses were fair game. Maybe they mattered deeply to the person who lost them.
When we got approved for the apartment we had to sign the lease in person. This was my first in-person lease signing experience. At my last two apartments in NY, I was just emailed a lengthy and nonspecific lease with all kinds of rules and statements that had nothing to do with our specific unit only to never hear from the management company ever again. This one was different, this one was intense; many pages that we had to read in front of our broker and several other much older men in a very small office space off a busy avenue.
The office was in a nondescript location that seemed to be connected to some sort of other larger nondescript business where Hasidic men were moving around large boxes of some-things. The room was tight with three shared desks occupied by men, also with very thick New York accents, who were (I’m not kidding) discussing things like who had or hadn’t disrespected their fathers and their father’s businesses. It would seem that even grown men are sensitive about perceived transgressions on Instagram.
John Mysterious was very stern that we respect the place like it’s our own and pay our rent on time (yet to be determined if in person) every month. Nothing unreasonable, pretty standard besides the lack of web portals. Something about the environment did instill the fear of getting our kneecaps broken if we didn’t behave. Maybe it was the man sitting behind us loudly pronouncing how something needed to be done about the “hunchback woman who never pays her rent”. Though in all honesty what I have gathered so far is that it takes a lot for this management company to evict someone, and I respect that.
Moving in, as it always is, has been a real process. One thing that it seems like everyone in the entire world can agree on is that moving is hellish. I believe it’s even been ranked as one of the most stressful experiences the average person goes through. But what the average amount of horrible is for someone to go through one lifetime seems extremely debatable.
Our neighbors consist of a (seemingly very popular) couple of old women on the first floor, one in a wheelchair and one with a booming voice. Neither have spoken to us much but a couple of their regular visitors have introduced themselves. Their visitors are usually older men bringing them various things and having loud conversation and occasionally younger women that seem like caretakers. Upstairs there is a man named Charlie. He seems to be around all the time and is very friendly, we have spoken to him on a number of occasions. He is another very classically Brooklyn guy in his… fifties? [Age ambiguous] He tells us to let him know if we ever need anything because everyone in the building looks out for each other. He’s the one who told us about the terrible things that were happening in this apartment just before we moved in.
According the Charlie the woman who lived here before us became a hoarder at some point during her time in this home. It got really bad, like the kind of thing you see on a television program. She had seven cats living in here that were being neglected. They had peed all over the wood floors so much that it was bubbling up in places. It makes sense why the floors look so good now, they’re brand new. Charlie said that when they first opened the doors to clean out the apartment all the “critters” scattered out of the apartment and into the other units where they unfortunately bit up the legs of the woman in the wheelchair and Charlie’s neck. He showed us the scars they left, it’s no joke. When we called to set up the electricity they let us know that there was a large balance left unpaid at this unit. They wouldn’t tell us exactly how much but it is a “substantial amount, not a couple hundred dollars”.
This is all terrible. It’s awful that the other tenants, especially a disabled old woman, were so viciously affected by this happening. But I’ve been thinking about this story a lot and I can’t get the woman who lived here with the seven cats out of my mind. From what I understand about hoarding, it’s largely about comfort. It’s like how extreme overeating can build a “protective” wall around yourself, so too can a massive pile of shit. The cats as protection against loneliness since she seemed to live here alone. Before she lived here, her mother did. I don’t know what their story was, how long they lived in this neighborhood, if she grew up here or anything else so what I am about to say is entirely conjecture based on the very limited details I have. But I can’t help but draw the connection between the rapid gentrification of this neighborhood and the experience this woman was having.
There’s something very fitting, logical even, about building a fortress of junk around yourself to fortify your home at a time when the neighborhood you’ve grown up in and presumably are tethered to is changing so rapidly. Nesting is a self-defense mechanism. I wonder what happened/ will happen/ has happened to her. I wish I could know that she would be okay, but there is no way to know. Neighborhoods always change, the people you know always change, leave, or die at some point or another. I know our neighbors are glad to have new neighbors to take better care of the building with them at least.
I can tell this is a close-knit community and it’s already domesticating me as I fantasize about baking something to share with the building. One of the building attendants I actually already know from my last apartment on Myrtle. On the day we moved onto Myrtle, there was a man outside who was trying to set my then-roommate and me on fire with a lighter and trapping us in the building by standing outside the door peering in, threatening us. He was unfortunately suffering from a drug-induced psychosis so there was no getting through to him. No one was able to get him to leave us alone except for this very kind building attendant who uttered something mildly under his breath which got the man to simply walk away. I sometimes wonder if he remembers that day and how much of a disaster it was. He always gives me a warm smile when I see him.
[The move into my apartment on Myrtle is a story for another time and was infinitely worse of an experience than this most recent move. That day remains one of the most stressful and humbling days of my life.]
Moving is hard I think mostly because when you get to your new home, there you are. You expect things to change inside you more quickly than they do but you are the same person just in a new home and that new home always feels alien no matter how happy you are to be there. It takes a while to settle in somewhere and to feel comfortable there. I wrote a lot of this in my first week of moving in but I have now lived in this apartment for a little over two weeks. I can officially say I am starting to, just starting to, feel at home here. This is my first time moving into a place that feels like my own and I feel like the luckiest person on earth.
At time of finishing this, men are yelling in the hallways trying to find the sensor that turns on the heating for the building because it’s apparently not working. They just checked for this mysterious sensor in our apartment to no avail but before leaving they called our place beautiful exclaiming, “The people who used to live here, phew”.
Till next time, thank you for reading and I love you (maybe).