MICE ARE GOOD PEOPLE
My father, Toby, owned a modern “apartment community.” The complex was “garden-style,” meaning three-story buildings grouped around a parking lot and pool. The buildings had mansard roofs and looked like McDonald’s. The place had an Anglo name. Jamestown. Should have been Jonestown.
The development looked genteel but wasn’t. One guy peed in the heating ducts and poured aquarium gravel in the toilet on his way out. Some tenants used the hollow-core doors for karate practice.
A high school wrestling coach, who was also a multi-millionaire, bought the complex and turned it into condos in 1977. Worked out for everybody. As the banker said to Toby, “You made your money, and he made his. Be happy.”
I used to repair the complex’s roofs, mostly replacing lids on vents. The lids were called Jap caps because of their coolie-hat shape.
There is no more peaceful place than a roof top — at least a flat roof. You can see everybody, and nobody can see you. That’s why cops in The Wire go on roofs so often.
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“I’m in real estate.”
I say that whenever I don’t feel like saying “I’m a landlord.” If I say “I’m a landlord,” people often hear “I’m a slumlord.”
I don’t sell houses or flip properties. I collect rent, evict people, charge late fees, and look for cats in apartment windows so I can charge pet fees. Does that sound like a slumlord?
When I vacationed at the Michigan alumni family camp, I introduced myself at the meet-and-greet as a landlord and klezmer musician. People laughed at the “landlord” part, particularly the campers with advanced degrees. “Landlord” was so bad it was good. “Klezmer” was cool — the arts.
I came across a Yiddish anti-landlord song in the klezmer business. “Dire Gelt” (Rent). The lyrics, in brief, are: “Why should we pay rent when the stove is broken?”
I’ve heard that line before about the broken stove. Not often. It’s usually “My bathroom ceiling is falling in.” It’s all about water damage in the landlord biz.
And it’s occasionally about animals.
What bugs me: tenants who ask for a hotel room because they saw a mouse.
Mice are good people. I’ve had mice in my house. I don’t run to a hotel every time I see a mouse, and my bank doesn’t give me a reduction on my mortgage payment.
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1 of 2 posts for 4/21/10. Please see the next post too.
3 comments
As you said, mice are no problem. On the other hand, I cannot tell you how often my daughter and her two roommates in Lower Manhattan have had the landlord bring the exterminator in for bedbugs.
Apparently. New York is awash in them and they don’t stay away for long.
Seems like the NY Times has been running at least one article on them a month this year.
All variations on the theme of how prevalent they are, what services do to get rid of them, and how people survive them. Not without a compulsive feeling of itches. At least with mice you don’t worry about itching.
I withheld rent and ‘strong-armed’ our landlord into buying us a new dishwasher just this month.
How often does that work?
I’ve become one of those nightmare law student tenants.
Teddy:
Law student tenants aren’t that bad. They’re too busy studying!
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