New York Daily News, 1977, from the Up From Flames exhibit
Last week’s Village Voice doom-and-gloom piece on gentrification and heavy-handed landlords in Bushwick was not the tour de force I thought it would be, and that the interviewer on the accompanying audio clip made it out to be. It has some interesting anecdotes, but that’s really all it turns out to be: just a series of scary stories, probably a selection of the most shocking ones.
The piece begins ridiculing the admittedly lame tactics of the real estate agents: they’re all stuck on “East Williamsburg” when the zeitgeist has moved on to “West Bushwick.” They’re too stupid to realize Bushwick is considered cool. Fair enough. It goes on to lionize a few scrappy old timers who stay on defiantly while their buildings fall to shit around them. Why do they stay? Author Tom Robbins’ student contributors don’t care to find out, or maybe they’re just poor journalists so early in their school careers.
I can’t imagine there are many people who would want to live in apartments where, for example, they’re in danger of getting their balls crushed as they fall through rotten floor boards. But then again, I have been inside homes where literally everything is falling apart, every wall has holes, every stair is cracked, every floor board is warped, toys are covered in grime, mold grows unchecked in every corner — neglectful landlords are a shameful phenomenon, but isn’t it more shameful to never ever pick up a mop to clean your own floor, or a sponge to clean your own bath tub? This is a two-way street, and I can tell you right now that dirty, slimy, rat-gnawed dishes do not build up in sinks full of moldy water because the landlord didn’t fix the wobbly banister.
The slum doesn’t come about because landlords are greedy and evil. It comes about because of government intervention in the housing market: the people who are generally attracted to subsidized housing are those who are the least employable and the least educated; those attracted to owning properties where they have to cut corners and throw their weight around to make a shred of profit are not going to be the sweetest apple-cheeked humanitarians.
Put ignorant tenants and aggressive landlords together — pretty much the only combination possible with such miniscule legitimate profit margins — and the result is slum conditions. It’s the same reason why drug dealers are the killing sort: who else would be attracted to a trade punished so severely? Do you see liquor store owners having shootouts in the streets? No, that stopped when booze was re-legalized. In the same vein, you rarely see profitable housing in bad condition.
Housing is a product provided by entrepreneurs to make money. If you remove the profit motive from the equation, you end up with very little new multi-family housing, the primary product built by developers in Bushwick in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the vast majority of the problem buildings in the area.
I happen to think that anyone who lives in an apartment building for years after a landlord abandons the property — painting walls, fixing leaks, keeping the lights on, sweeping the hallways — should have available some sort of fast-track to official ownership. And I think the stories of people who have lived in this situation for years only to have a new landlord come in and demand back rent are scandalous. But this just deals with the currently flawed situation: does anyone really think a landlord would abandon a profitable property?
I was interviewed by one of the students who contributed to the piece, but literally not a word of the long exchange we had was included. Tamaki Ondo asked me, for example, what I thought about the fact that gentrification made landlords neglect properties so that the tenants would be forced to leave. Shocked at such a simplistic view, I explained that Bushwick’s tenements didn’t start deteriorating when the first ironic paper pastiche grafitto went up on local lightpoles — they have been falling apart for decades, and the recent hot real estate market is just another reason. After answering a few questions and making a few comments of my own, Tamaki admitted “I have to say…you are really confusing the idea I’ve had put into my head.” Brainwash your teenage reporters and send them forth to find news that fits your preconceived notions. I suppose that is preparing them adequately for their future careers in the mainstream media.
Long, long story slightly less long, gentrification is not to blame for the terrible conditions in which many people inexplicably choose to live, when literally thousands of better, easier options exist across this huge country. Gentrification is to “blame” for these people’s buildings being sold to gruff investors whose keen noses sniff out underexploited opportunities, and who act to make their investments pay off. That includes using all means to get the tenants out. In other words, housing pressure in New York demands more every day that artificially cheap housing be valued at market rates. The market is rarely ignored for long. No amount of anti-capitalist bellyaching has ever changed that.
It’s not about the landlords, it’s about the system that turns them bad.
BklynGirl July 12th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Jeremy, when did u see these bad homes – while you were shopping for your own home?
bushwick still has loud music, drugs, and other problems. often this goes along with poor housing and landlords that don’t care.
Darlene Berube July 12th, 2007 at 1:30 am
In regards to your last statement:
It’s not about the landlords, it’s about the system that turns them bad
I agree to some extent with you statement above.
If it were not the landlords, then why don’t they turn around. It is up to them, they are not being forced to ignore problems in their buildings, it is by choice or either they don’t care. No one is telling them to follow the system when it comes to freedom of choice, as in their choice to make certain decisions regarding their buildings. Yes, they do have to follow housing or building codes which is only to be expected.
Where I live, they have choices whether or not to hire a professional remediator, and they chose not to. The toxic molds have been in my building for years, did I know it before renting, No I did not. These landlords choose not to tell tenants.
Please visit my website: The Nation’s Indoor Environment — Toxic Mold at http://www.moldenvironment.com
We are dedicated to helping toxic mold victim’s around the world. Join in our free forum to explore the valuable and knowlegable information. Read mold victim’s stories on the main sites page, in which we will be adding many more stories from our members with what their lives are like today as toxic mold victim’s.
Respectfully,
Darlene Berube
Founder/Owner
The Nation’s Indoor Environment — Toxic Mold
http://www.moldenvironment.com
adam July 12th, 2007 at 2:33 am
Don’t know why people stay? Well then I guessed you missed the point of the whole article, if you don’t see why people stay.
Why do you think that people stayed through the disinvestment, through the fires, through drugs and the crime? Through you, maybe?
Because it was their home, and someone telling them to move, even a board in the balls, is just a voice that won’t be heeded.
Lucky you don’t have to live that way.
Guess you can pay the landlord enough…
or maybe you own.
Lucky.
PS: “For those that cannot, would please leave Bushwick now?” Is this what you are saying?
I guess it sells apts…
Ben July 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Well said Jeremy.
Unfortunately, many of the people who live in the most run down buildings have the same mentality that was discussed on the “welcome to da neighborhood” thread regarding littering.
I’ve seen many a building where the hallways have graffiti in them, holes in the wall etc. And it’s not because random kids are coming in off the street and trashing the place. It’s the residents or their guests that cause the damage to their own buildings.
There are many people who don’t have a sense of pride towards their own living quarters. I’ve been in rent control apartments that were spotless, clean, and in good repair. I’ve been in others that were a dump. This was not because of the landlord but rather how the tenants treated their own places.
There are always bad apples on both sides but human nature will lead people to follow other’s actions. So in the same way that one person littering will cause others to do the same, tenants trashing a place will cause the landlord to not fix things. If tenants take care of their apts. most landlords will fix real issues when they arise. But if they spend money to fix a hole that someone punched into a wall and know that another one is going to appear a month later, they may not fix the first one.
If people take care of their apts. and then a leak springs up that is causing damage the landlord will want to fix it. If the building has been abused for so long the leak will be written off since it’s not going to make things much worse.
It’s all about pride and respect for one’s surroundings and one’s self. You don’t have to have a lot of money for this. But if your attitude is “it’s the ghetto, it’s just a rental, f**k the landlord, etc.” then you will live in shit. Unfortunately this is the attitude that too many people have.
dana July 12th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
When I moved to b’wick 3+ years ago I was very startled by the number of neglected apartment buildings I would walk by. There are some very sorry cases out there and it caused me to write some letters. While I can understand Ben’s thoughts above I must emphasize that it’s a 2-way street. When landlords allow their properites to fall apart to the point of no heat or hot-water, rodent infestations, crumbling stoops with holes, water-damaged structural support, and the like that takes some doing. SERIOUS NEGLECT of many years – way more than the frustration of a punched hole in a wall and having to fix that. It’s shameful, really. Yes, there are crappy tenants, but that’s the deal. You are a landlord and this may happen – you roll the dice when you get into this business. I think if landlords are around and take care of things that will follow over to the tenants. 2-way street.
And the vague argument of the VV article that gentrification is the ’cause’ of the landloard neglect is so lame.
dana July 12th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Also – I have seen several of these especially horrible buildings torn down in the last 3 three years – one being a notorious drug den on Troutman. I do wonder what will happen with the new buildings – will they be market-rate or low-income or what and what does that mean/what is fair.
Thanks Jeremy for your cogent response to this article. I think you are on to something.
Ben July 12th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Dana, I fully agree that it’s a two way street, I guess that’s the point I was really trying to make.
I think that in many cases the really run down buildings are that way due to what Jeremy cited, i.e. they are not profitable because of gov’t controls. I have seen some buildings where there are so many rent controlled tenants paying $200 a month to live there that the rents collected do not even cover the expenses much less a mortgage of any kind.
Many of these run down buildings are owned by people who don’t have the money to invest into them and so if it can’t come from rent collected then the building just deteriorates.
Regarding the new buildings, I doubt that many of them will be for low income unless they are being built by a gov’t organization or a non-profit. Sometimes this is the case if they building/land is taken by the city due to non-payment of taxes. It is then turned over to a developer who will build affordable housing.
dana July 12th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Gotcha. Rent control is an interesting issue – when it gets so crazy low like that. I find myself wondering if it’s really fair or good (in cases where the rent is $200/month). What a mess.
Andrew July 12th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Jeremy, thanks for your well-written response to this disgraceful piece of journalism. The system of price controls on residential rentals is definitely to blame for the appalling state of the housing stock in Bushwick. Supporters of rent stabilization often miss the point that by imposing rent ceilings, the state also has to guarantee tenants against eviction – no matter how awful those tenants are. As a landlord you want the best tenants you can get, people who clean up after themselves, don’t make too much noise, are respectful of neighbors, and so on. As a rent stabilized landlord, you have no control over your tenant base, and it is this lack of control that in many cases makes a building difficult to improve. Case in point, I recently owned an 8 family stabilized building in your part of Bushwick that had problem tenants in three of the apartments. A family in one of these units were using their apartment as a drug running operation. They were stashing the drugs in the mailboxes to avoid the risk of getting busted by keeping the dope in their apartment, since these guys were the biggest dealers on the block. They would constantly break open the mailboxes and bust the locks on the front door so that their customers could gain access to the building to pick up their dope. All the other tenants knew what was happening but understandably no one wanted to squeal to the police for fear of reprisals from the family dealing the drugs. Now I ask you, how much harder do you think it is to evict tenants like that under a system of price controls vs a free market system? Quite a lot harder, I can tell you (the tenants were paying below $600/month in rent) – these are the same tenants that if you try to evict them for bad behavior, they will constantly call HPD and tell sob stories about the condition of the building. In fact, when HPD came, they wrote up violations for the broken mailboxes and the busted front door—problems that these tenants created in the first place! These people know the system, they are professionals, and they play the game very well. They make everyone’s lives a misery and it’s a shame that so many people in this city think it’s always the landlord’s fault. The system encourages bad tenants, rewards them for being bad, and makes it very difficult for landlords to evict them.
When professional landlords do try and clean up their buildings, they get hit with stories like this one in the Village Voice. The story you refer to was written by cub reporters who, incredibly in this day and age, perpetuate the myth of the evil landlord. Of course, it’s true that there are many bad landlords, some of whom dangerously imperil the lives of their tenants. However, it is the system that has historically attracted these people to the business and driven away the good guys. Thankfully things are beginning to change.
Market incentives have changed and we now have some good, honorable landlords buying buildings in order to fix them up. Of course, as with any market, the good landlords require a decent return (in the form of higher rents) to make it worth their while, especially given the obstacles the city places in their path. We should give these landlords every encouragement as they are working for the betterment of us all.
Matt July 12th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Thoughtful explanation of that side of the equation but I have to ask…knowing full well the potential for the very situation you describe, why did you even BUY a stabilized building? And from the sounds of it you sold recently, so why in the hell did someone else buy YOUR building?
Ben July 12th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
People buy these buildings because there is potential to profit. If you can take on the drug dealers and get them out you can raise the rent on that unit and get rid of the headache that the previous owner had. If you can clean up the building and attract the good tenants you add value to your asset.
As Andrew mentioned, there are obstacles but if you succeed there is a payoff.
Jeremy July 13th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Darlene (#2) — if you read my post you’d understand I didn’t mean good landlords literally turn bad. As I explained, the more below-market a property rents for, the more aggressive and well, scumbaggy the investor attracted to such a property is likely to be.
Adam (#3) — Wow. I have to go get some paper towels because your heart just bled all over my screen. I don’t even understand what you were trying to say in some of your post (“Through you?” and “PS: “For those that cannot, would please leave Bushwick now?” Is this what you are saying? I guess it sells apts…” — huh?).
But let’s go to the meat of it where you say that people stubbornly stay for years in apartments that are literally collapsing because — it’s their home!? That’s a non-answer. You know what most people do when their rented “home” starts falling apart and the landlord does nothing about it? They move to a place that is not falling apart and sue the former slumlord for their deposit back. Revo-fuckin-lutionary, I know. I mean, this isn’t some European town in the mountains that reared 100 generations, it’s Bushwick, these people came from somewhere else, or at least, from another apartment in Bushwick. They have most likely moved before in their lives.
Then you say I’m lucky because I can afford to pay market rent/own a house. I guess that means the vast majority of Americans are lucky, because most of them do just that. In fact, only a frustratingly small percentage of Americans still live in crumbling tenements in 2007 like people in 1907. So calling me “lucky” is not only ridiculous, it’s insulting: you don’t know what I have gone through. Luck had fuck-all to do with it.
So you have left my question unanswered, and left me a little flabbergasted at the fact that you are 1) a teacher and 2) the curator of…anything. You have a fundamentally immature view of how the world works.
Jeremy July 13th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Dana: to my knowledge, most of the stuff on Troutman will be market-rate and condominiums. A couple of them seem to be those blond-brick buildings with the sea green trim that I see everywhere, and which are always in really nice shape — are those subsidized or what? They are all over this part of Bushwick.
dana July 13th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Yes, i think the nice blond brick with green trim buildings are subsidized. not 100% on that. but I totally agree that whomever is in charge of them does a very nice job.
dana July 13th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
i wish they would take over(the blond/green owners) all the run-down buildings cause i know they will be decent. there are 2 big renos on my street that are almost done. i am watching to see what happens with them. they seem okay??
Andrew July 13th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Sorry folks, I didn’t have a chance to post yesterday, but I just wanted to respond to Matt’s question. Matt asked why I even bought a rent stabilized building in the first place, and why someone else wanted to buy it from me. Well, I bought the building hoping to turn it around – buy out some tenants, fix up the apartments, and re-rent them for market rates (the strategy employed by many new landlords in Bushwick today). Unfortunately, I’m just one guy and I underestimated the amount of time, effort and money this would entail. Not to mention that I didn’t know one of the tenants was operating a drug selling operation from one of the apartments. Luckily I bought at a good price, so when I decided to sell, I didn’t take a loss on the investment. During my period of ownership I was able to vastly improve the building’s mechanicals and the safety of the occupants by installing a new boiler, putting in carbon monoxide detectors, and upgrading the electrical system so that it was no longer dangerously overloaded as it had been under the previous landlord. However, it was left to the new owners, who are a little more experienced than I am, to ultimately buy out the majority of the tenants and renovate individual apartments. As I understand it, the drug dealing family is still firmly lodged in place, since they continue to pay rent and are thus protected by the rent stabilization laws. So thanks to the efforts of enterprising new landlords, the building is much improved. However, the system of residential price controls remains a hindrance in making the building, and the rest of Bushwick, as good as it could be.
Jimmy Legs July 13th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
part of the fallacy of the article to me is that the editorial slant on the tenants profiled in it somehow ‘deserve’ better treatment. i mean, of course everybody should have decent affordable housing, but the sick punchline of what is happening is that the longstanding tenants who stick it out year after year are ultimately in the same boat with Andrew’s drug-dealing, mailbox-smashing, neighbor-intimidating tenants: they’re getting forced out. we don’t have an moral law that would stand up in court over an eviction notice. the new gentrification throws it into stark relief, but really, this was going to happen sooner or later anyway. it’s still sad, but given the situation, what can be done?
dana July 13th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
andrew,
do the cops know about the drug dealing apartment? i assume it is a well-known thing on the block and that they have to, right? so frustrating.
Andrew July 13th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I really don’t know if they are aware or not. It’s a delicate situation, and I did not want to be the one to report them (I do value my life somewhat). There is a program operated by the police in which you can apply for a building to be monitored – that is, you leave a copy of the front door keys with the police and they come in periodically throughout the night to kick out anyone who might be sleeping in the hallway or otherwise causing trouble. It probably would deter the druggies somewhat, although given that the druggies kept busting the front door lock, the police had access whenever they wanted anyhow. I do remember that there were a lot of undercover police operating on the block, so maybe these guys will get busted eventually. I am optimistic that, ultimately, gentrification will solve these problems, and we will see less anti-social behavior as time goes on.
long time in the wick July 31st, 2007 at 9:58 pm
The vast majority of rent protected tenants in Bushwick are extremly happy about the changes happening in Bushwick. Unfortunatly the laws do more than keep the rents low , they protect the minority of scum bag tenants, limit the amount of housing driving up rents for the new comers. Lets face it Bushwick is still a dump though definatly a nicer dump than it was. The rents paid by the new comers, for what would be the sociecomic equivlent of the worst sections of some mid west city, most seem out ladish to those that come to visit from out side NYC. Rich kids don’t move to Bushwick, just poor and lower middle class ones do for now. Probally for at least anotherten years at least before upper middle class consider this area.
complex October 6th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Put cameras up. i will combat the damage and drug dealing when they are caught on tape or realize that they are being watched. It will make the house and communitity a safer place. The mpolice also embrace this participation and will go after the perps.
complex October 6th, 2007 at 8:19 am
CORRECTION and Freudian slip; it, not i will combat the damage and drug dealing …..
howser October 10th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
If rent stablilzation were really to blame for all the crummy conditions in Bushwick, lots of fancy neighborhoods in Manhattan would be in equally bad shape.
This is because although rent stabilization regulates rent increases, as anyone who has lived in a rent stabilized unit knows, that rent goes up the maximum every year. This leads to a gradual move to market rates over time, as has happened in many Manhattan nabes.
If, however, landlords can’t find tenants at the higher prices allowed under rent stabilization, the rents will stay low, perhaps at unprofitable levels.
I don’t wish to argue that rent stabilitation is without serious problems, but trust me, lots of building owners make all kinds of profits on rent stabilized buildings.
Bushwick has been full of poor people for a long time now. As noted above, many of these people do care for their apartments, but they also won’t be able to afford rennovated, market rate apartments. Where are these people going to go if they lose their affordable apartments?
One more note: rent control is distinct from rent stabilization, and is much more rare. Where it exists, rents in those apartments are insanely low.