It is the height of the evening rush hour on 6th Avenue near 57th Street, and the enterprising young man is hoping to make a quick sale. ”Mink stole here, mink stole here,” he chants to the passersby. ”Genuine mink. Check it out, check it out.”
Could it be that the garment encased in see-through plastic and dangling from a hanger carried enticingly by this unconventional peddler is indeed genuine? Perhaps it is part of a shipment hijacked from the fur district down on 28th Street. Perhaps it is worth thousands. Perhaps it is a moth-eaten muskrat from someone`s attic. Perhaps it is a fake fur from Taiwan. How much do you suppose he wants for it?
Except for a couple of Uptown women who pause instinctively, no one pays the young man much mind. This, after all, is New York City, where the bizarre is supposed to happen, where goods ranging from fenced Calvin Klein jeans to heroin by the fix-size packet are routinely and brazenly traded right on the sidewalk. So what if one larcenous hustler is expanding into mink? Or muskrat? Or Taiwanese synthetics?
It has been 359 years since those vanguard hustlers of the Dutch persuasion hoodwinked the Indians into giving up Manhattan Island. The precedent thus established, this mecca of unfettered capitalism proceeded to compose a suitable history with the recurring motifs of greed and lawlessness. These notes were struck during the Revolution, when the city`s avaricious merchant class chose continued British trade over idealism and patriotism. They were heard again at the end of the 19th Century in the rise of the great robber barons and the 5th Avenue mansions they flaunted, and later in the wholesale graft of Tammany Hall, and still later in the shameless profiteering of World War II.
But always there were understood rules that defined the accepted limits of acquisition and exploitation, rules that prevented the unraveling of an urban fabric unprecedented in its complex diversity. Only recently, in the last decade or two, has this great megalopolis, America`s first genuine world- class city, started to spin out of control.
It is evident from countless personal stories–the bank trainee, despairing of ever finding even the tiniest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan under $1,200 a month, finally agrees to bribe a building superintendent with $2,000 in ”key money”; the middle-class couple in their 30s who pay a staggering 12 percent of their combined salaries in state and city income taxes, yet complain bitterly that they receive in return less than rudimentary police protection, street-cleaning and public education for their children;
the elderly woman with elephantine legs who, having lost her apartment to the inexorable push of gentrification, takes up residence in a cardboard box atop a steam vent on Park Avenue; the four black youths who are gunned down on a subway train by a tormented white electronics engineer who is then widely hailed as a hero.
Some say the disintegration began with the fiscal crisis of the early 1970s, that perilous period when the city`s government teetered on the edge of bankruptcy as generations of mismanagement and creative accounting crashed into a brick wall called reality. Virtually all municipal services were slashed by a third or more in the ensuing cost-cutting drive. Today, despite a local economy that is on the whole robust, the police and fire departments remain woefully understaffed, the neighborhoods are ridden with the most aggressive drug pushers, the school system moves from ineffectiveness to paralysis, the streets are filthier than ever and the subways, well, everybody knows about the subways.
It can be argued that the roots of the problem reach back much further than the fiscal crisis, back to the the late 1940s, when New York`s political leaders, never a courageous lot, bowed to public pressure and declined to follow other big cities in repealing wartime rent controls. That failure to lift the curb on rent hikes for those apartments occupied prior to a certain date has, over the years, created huge inequities in the housing market here. It is not unusual for the rent for identical units in the same building to range from $300 to $2,500 a month, depending on when the present resident took possession. This gap means that young people arriving in the city are forced to exist under conditions normally not seen outside the Third World, while longtime New Yorkers live in comparative luxury. There is, therefore, a pervasive and curious kind of resentment, a resentment that is based on the long-term residency of one`s neighbor rather than on his actual economic condition.
Whatever their genesis, New York`s shortcomings are becoming more obvious, at least to those who have lived elsewhere. Forty years ago, the quality of life for the average person was similar in all of the country`s principal Northern cities. A one-bedroom apartment cost about the same in Detroit or Chicago or Boston as it did in New York. Police protection was adequate everywhere. Taxes were uniformly low. Violent crime directed at strangers was rare.
The halcyon days are gone in every urban area, of course. But so is the uniformity from place to place as, gradually, New York separated itself from the pack, so much so that a strong case can be made that this city has become singularly unlivable.
Before arriving in New York in 1980, I had lived and worked as a Tribune reporter for four to five years each in three other major cities: Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington. Such a varied experience can serve to expose New York`s problems in sharper contrast. But even those who have not moved around so much, even some native New Yorkers, are starting to question the inherent health and vitality of their environment.
Many have already fled, it being a standard West Side joke that the last stop on the ”A” train is now Burlington, Vt. Many more are pondering the future, wondering how much longer they can hold on, how long before their budgets snap from the pressure of a $2,000 rent check, how long before they are mugged, how long before they go plain crazy like all those poor souls who stumble down the street shouting obscenities into the air.
This is not to say that the city has lost all of its special allure. This is still the cultural capital of the world, more so than ever really. Most trends–be they in fashion, finance, the arts or the media–either are born here or come to fruition here. Nowhere else on Earth is it possible to find such variety: of cultures, of languages, of foods, of opinions. If there is a center to the universe, it is probably located somewhere not too far off tawdry Times Square.
But New York`s cosmopolitan verve is, for many, no longer sufficient compensation for its grating flip side, for a cost of living that is incomprehensible to any outsider, for a meanness of spirit that is
particularly obvious in the dangerous state of race relations, for an inherent ugliness that extends from the crumbling physical cityscape to the pervasive fear of crime, for the general dulling of the populace in this age of MBA-driven yuppies.
Any serious examination of the city`s shortcomings must dwell at some length on its ever-worsening housing emergency, a situation that has reached such critical proportions that New York, or at least Manhattan, is today largely a closed society to which no one, save for the wealthy, need apply.
It all began in 1943, with the passage of a ”temporary” rent control ordinance to restrain those unscrupulous landlords determined to make a killing off the war. Forty-two years later, the law is still on the books, covering all apartments built before the statute`s enactment and occupied continuously by the same tenant or a member of his or her immediate family before 1969 to the present.
The rent on these units, some 218,000 citywide, is absurdly low. Not surprisingly, those fortunate enough to possess such a treasure are willing to fight ferociously to retain it. One unshakable axiom of New York politics holds that any officeseeker who even hints at altering the rent control law can anticipate a horrible death come election day.
Most of the city`s apartments do not fall under rent control. The bulk of these, about 945,000 units, are regulated by a second system called rent stabilization, which has its own rules and its own bureaucracy apart from the rent control apparatus. Rent stabilization came into being in 1969 to cover controlled apartments that became vacant. The rent charged for these units is often seven or eight times higher than for comparable controlled apartments, although still not as high as the city`s third category of rental apartments, the so-called ”open market” units, those in buildings constructed after 1974.
There have been a number of undesirable consequences of this crazy-quilt structure, not the least of which is a current vacancy rate throughout the city of less than 2 percent. (Almost anyone with a rent-controlled apartment and most people with a rent-stabilized apartment figure that the smart thing to do is to die in their units.) Another injurious effect of the system is to force through the roof the rent on those apartments that do become available. Recognizing that it may be a chance-of-a-lifetime opportunity, any sensible landlord will respond to a vacancy by drastically upping the rent for the new tenant, frequently by 400 percent or more. The result, over the years, has been creeping escalation for rents on vacant units to the point where they have become astronomical.
In Manhattan, decent studio apartments generally run around $1,000 a month, according to one Realtor familiar with the scene. One-bedrooms range from $1,000 to $1,800. And that is not the worst of it. Since it is such a seller`s market, it is all but impossible to find an apartment without a broker. The standard fee for this service is 15 percent of the first year`s rent. In addition, a two-month security deposit plus the first month`s rent must be paid in advance to the landlord. Thus, a new tenant who has found a $1,000 studio (one room) must produce $4,800 up front, this for the privilege of living in an apartment no larger than most people`s kitchens.
There are a couple of other options. The most popular is the sublet, a rent-controlled or -stabilized apartment that belongs–by something akin to Divine Right–to someone else. In order to secure one of these jewels, it is necessary to pay the ubiquitous key money to the landlord or the building superintendent. This is nothing but a bribe and is wholly illegal. Yet it is the accepted practice all over Manhattan. Nor is the bribe unsubstantial. One young man who was excited recently to find a 10-by-12-foot apartment for the unheard-of price of $600 a month had his enthusiasm dampened considerably when informed by the super that upon assuming possession, he should have at the ready an envelope containing $4,000–in cash, naturally.
Another housing option is to live in one of the outer boroughs or in the suburbs. But the closer-in and desirable (i.e., safe) areas, such as Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens and Hoboken
(yes, Hoboken) in New Jersey have gotten to the point where they aren`t much cheaper than Manhattan. To live farther out means a commute of at least an hour and, in many instances, two hours.
Tired of flushing enormous sums in rent money into the city`s antiquated sewer system, more and more New Yorkers these days are considering buying a co-op. Within just the past three years, there has been a 40 percent increase in the number of these units. Although there are attractive tax benefits in ownership, there are certainly no bargains to be had. Indeed, the prices are
–when viewed from a comfortable distance–laughable. A recent study by the Corcoran Group, a large Manhattan realty firm, found that the average price of a luxury two-bedroom co-op in the borough last year was $368,640. The term
”luxury,” incidentally, generally refers in New York to a building with a doorman, sometimes even to one merely with an elevator. The obvious question is, Who besides CEOs and cocaine dealers can afford such prices? According to the Corcoran report, more than half of the buyers of these apartments last year were under 40, and a third of them were in finance or stock brokerage. Their average annual income was–are you ready?–$199,000.
More than any other factor, it is the high cost of housing that separates New York from other cities. In Chicago, for instance, it is still possible to find a good one-bedroom apartment near the lakefront renting for $500 a month, with no fee whatsoever to the broker. In Los Angeles, a two-bedroom condo in a convenient, middle-class neighborhood can be bought for perhaps $140,000.
Devising a strategy to cope with the housing market can often determine a New Yorker`s destiny, for better or worse. It can contribute to the breakup of a marriage or to a decision on whether or not to have children. It can make some people millionaires.
