She said I could stay as long as I liked provided I didn’t complain about there being no hot water. Sometimes, they were: one of my landlords was a model who gave up on living with other models after one of them overdosed and died in their bathroom in London. ![]() I met so many kind people during those years, all hopeful that better things were just around the corner. The only record I have of the transaction is an email containing a phone number and a note that read: “I am willing to work out a round figure for rent.” I never bothered him about it, and he charged me very little to live there. I woke up one morning to find the front and back doors open, leaves blowing through the house, which appeared to have been ransacked. He had plans to open a fruit smoothie store, but mostly he just smoked weed and talked strawberries. Later, I lived with a guy who had run away from his home in Oregon and was sleeping in a space he created in the living room by hanging sheets from the ceiling he wanted to save money by renting his room. I would go on to live with a woman who owned two blind albino rats that would hide in my room once her boyfriend from Minnesota moved in with his Bengal cat. To my memory, these arrangements of shared inconvenience were common in those earlier years. ‘There is nothing particularly tragic or unique about my circumstances.’ Photograph: Julia Nikhinson/AP Our landlord’s income would go up and he and his wife and children would leave their rental apartment and move into the house. Eventually, so was the plan, our incomes would improve and we would move out and on with our lives. We didn’t fault him for it, because we all had an understanding: we paid $550 to live there, deposited the cash into a bank account number, and didn’t cause a fuss about rodents or clogged tubs. Our landlord always had a new plan for the mice but never quite put anything in motion. The mice remained, crawling on the stove and occasionally wandering out into the living room to die once our neighbor began poisoning them. It never worked, nor did anyone think it would. Our landlord’s solution was to drop off a small bottle of cinnamon oil and tell us to rub it on all the floor boards. It had a big living room with an old fireplace and a stained white couch where two of my housemates spent most of their time arguing, often throwing books about socialism at one another. It had a nice sunlit kitchen where we stayed up late playing Risk, smoking cigars, marching around the table like generals. ![]() It had four bedrooms, a driveway, and a quiet, overgrown yard. Though I hadn’t seen it at the time, somewhere in the 15 years since I’d graduated from college and moved to the city, my expectation for a stable, middle-class future lost touch with the reality of my circumstances.ī ack in 2008, I moved with friends to a two-story house in Brooklyn not far from where I live now. In the long term, the math just wasn’t there. ![]() But, with things on their current course, addressing these factors would only have delayed the inevitable arrival of this piece of paper in my door. And it is true that I could have spent more wisely, freelanced more often, and saved more judiciously. “You can’t eat prestige,” my friend in similar circumstances likes to joke. As might my choice to work in the media industry. The pandemic, which caused a citywide rent increase of 33%, might have played a role in this outcome. Somewhere in the 15 years since I’d moved to the city, my expectation for a stable future lost touch with reality Another told me the rent increase on their apartment meant, without a better salary, they would run out of money within the year. I’d noticed, in the past couple of years, friends and acquaintances finding themselves at a similar juncture: one, at 35, moved back in with a roommate. There is nothing particularly tragic or unique about my circumstances: I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, a marker of a middle-class lifestyle I had hoped but failed to attain by now, at age 36. In the past eight years, my salary, which had nominally increased from $55,000 to $64,000, had, when adjusted for inflation, in fact been decreasing, just as rents continued to rise. I’d known this was coming, in some ways for a very long time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |