Читать книгу I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican - Harry Stein - Страница 11

If You Can Take It Here, You’ll Take It Anywhere

ONE INTREPID NEW YORK CONSERVATIVE REFUSES TO BEND OVER

IS IT POSSIBLE to find a single individual whose experience exemplifies the special scorn liberal New Yorkers reserve for their intellectual and moral betters on the right - one lonely figure who takes the worst they can dish out and never breaks a sweat?

After some thought, I came up with a number of plausible candidates. Perhaps an activist with the Catholic League, that perennial target of local Catholic bashers. Maybe one of the good folks at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, whose paychecks are signed by Rupert Murdoch. How about one of the band of intrepid military recruiters stationed in Times Square?

Then it hit me: a landlord!

Talk about having it tough in New York! Even more so than other places, the very word instantly summons up “cold,” “heartless,” “greedy,” and worse. It is the landlord’s lot to experience 200-proof, self-righteous New York leftism on a daily basis - even from non-lefties! In this respect, even my beloved New York Post, for all the full-blooded conservative politics of its opinion pages, is right down there in the gutter with the Times. Just a handful of pertinent Post headlines of recent vintage:

• “SLUM BUM” JAILED - LANDLORD FROM HELL

• LEAD PAINT LOUSE - KIDS AWARDED $21M

• RENT-FREE FORTRESS - TENANTS LOCK OUT LANDLORD

• BRAIN-DAMAGE TOT FACES EVICTION FROM ICY HOME

• GET LOST, GRANNY - LANDLORD BOOTING SENIORS

• SCAMLORD CAUGHT IN OWN ’NET

• LANDLORD: I KILLED MY TENANT

I approached a number of landlords who seemed responsible, with well-maintained buildings and nary a murder or brain-damaged tot on their resumes. No luck getting them to talk. To a man (and, in one case, woman), they were as cagey and paranoid as mob hit men. Even offered the print equivalent of dark glasses and phony beard, they were convinced they’d somehow end up with a liberal shiv in the neck.

Then I came across someone even better: a lawyer, Brad Silverbush, who represents landlords exclusively. Silverbush had no hesitation. When I turned on the tape recorder, it was as if I’d simultaneously hit his start button.

Remember Nick Naylor, the protagonist of the novel and movie Thank You for Smoking - the brilliant lobbyist for Big Tobacco who breezily notes that he’s among the most despised people on the planet? Brad Silverbush is that guy, New York-style. Charming, plain-spoken, and, above all, thick-skinned, he knows he’s fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, so couldn’t care less that everyone he passes in the city’s streets believes he’s doing the devil’s work.

As the son of a Holocaust survivor, he grew up thanking the fates for the privilege of living in this country, under the free enterprise system, and has liberals and their moth-eaten dogma pegged for exactly what they are. Sure, he acknowledges, there are some rotten landlords out there. But he also knows that the overwhelming majority of building owners do their jobs honestly and well, and, moreover, that if under Obama, the rest of America ends up embracing New York’s entitlement mindset, we’re doomed to turn into Bulgaria, circa 1962.

“Listen,” he says, “you go out to Wyoming, or Virginia, or anywhere else where normal people live, and start telling stories about what goes on in New York, and they think you’re making it up. If anyone tried to pull that shit where they live, someone would pull out a gun and - bam! - they’d put a stop to it.” He laughs. “But in New York, it’s the way it is, it’s reality.”

What “shit,” exactly? “Say you’re an average guy,” he offers, “and you decide to buy a small building in New York City as an investment. Sounds good, right? Next thing you know, your tenants aren’t paying rent, the city’s treating you like garbage, and you’re getting dragged before the Human Rights Commission because someone called you a racist - and nobody cares, because they think you deserve it.”

Silverbush has lots of stories, full of horrifying particulars, and almost all of them in one way or another summon the same adjective: Kafkaesque.

But let him tell it:

The first thing anyone learns as a landlord is that in every situation he is presumed to be the bad guy. The evildoer. And everyone with whom he deals - his tenants, the city, the courts - is a potential enemy. I work with one guy, great guy, honest as they come, who runs a family business, a small company that owns and manages half a dozen buildings in Manhattan. I actually fear for him. Being a landlord in this city, putting up with the crap he has to, is literally driving him crazy. Not long ago he got a summons for a minor elevator violation in one of his buildings. It was a mistake - some bureaucrat had put down 2006 instead of 2007. So he’s charged with being a year overdue with making the repair, which is a criminal violation. He can go to jail for this. But he’s a trusting guy, so he goes down to Criminal Court, figuring he’ll explain the mistake and that’ll be that. Doesn’t even bring a lawyer. Right, fat chance. There he is, surrounded by hookers and drug dealers, “mother rapers and father rapers,” and they’re all getting off with twenty-five-dollar fines. When it’s his turn, the judge won’t even listen to his explanation, just assumes he’s a lying prick and starts threatening to throw him in jail! He ends up having to pay an $1800 fine - more than all the real criminals combined.

He pauses. “His crime was that he owned property in New York City.”

That’s how most of the Housing Court judges are - with only a couple of exceptions, maybe two out of twelve, just a real landlord-hating bunch. I had a case not long ago where we absolutely had the guy dead to rights. A dentist. He had an apartment on the East Side but was actually living across town with his girlfriend. I had testimony up the wazoo-I had the super, the managing agent, the doormen in both buildings, the mother of his child! But the judge, formerly a Legal Aid attorney, brushes it all aside with one sentence: ‘I find all the landlord’s witnesses not worthy of belief.’ Boom, it’s over. Even the tenant’s attorney couldn’t believe he won the case.

The former Legal Aid judges are the absolute worst. There’s one whose husband is the head of criminal Legal Aid in Manhattan. How’s that for a left-wing combo? Sometimes I just picture the two of them at dinner, sipping cheap wine and laughing at guys like me and my clients. I mean, these are people who never spent a day in the private sector in their lives, and just have real contempt for it. There’s not even any pretense: the rules, the regulations, the law, everything’s constantly open to reinterpretation.

I just had a case where the building had a firm “no pet” policy and this woman had a dog. The landlord wasn’t unreasonable. He would’ve allowed it, but the woman was incredibly nasty and the dog was even nastier; it kept scaring little kids in the elevator. So what happens? The woman argues that she’s entitled to “a reasonable accommodation,” which is basically a regulation put in for blind people with seeing eye dogs. She proceeds to produce affidavits from psychiatrists saying she’s depressed and needs a companion dog.

That’s another problem, by the way - you can get a New York psychiatrist to testify to anything. I have a friend who represents a guy who hacked up his girlfriend, boiled her in soup, and fed her to homeless people. Every year he applies for release because he’s gotten some psychiatrist to testify he’s no longer a threat to society. That’s a fun case. I go watch it whenever it comes up.

Anyway, the woman with the dog. Amazingly enough, in spite of everything, I win the case. But here’s the sick thing: Even when the landlord wins, he loses. Because what does she do now? She files a human rights complaint against the landlord for failing to provide the reasonable accommodation for her dog!

Oh, man, the Human Rights Commission! Their hearing officers are even worse than the Housing Court judges. The assumption is that the landlord’s done wrong - otherwise, why would you be there? So you walk in and all they want to talk about is how you’re gonna make it right by this tenant.

It goes without saying that in New York, everyone’s a protected class - blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, the elderly, the infirm. One woman went to the Human Rights Commission claiming that my client was discriminating against her because she was a young, single woman. I can’t tell you how many reams of documentation we had to file proving there were other young single women in the same building against whom he was demonstrably not discriminating - the difference being that those single women were actually paying their rent.

And try firing a lousy employee of the wrong ethnicity! One landlord had an alcoholic who never showed up for work, a Hispanic guy. After a hearing and arbitration, he had to pay to put the doorman in rehab, then rehire him. So the doorman goes back to work, and in a couple of weeks the same thing starts happening again, so there’s another set of hearings and more rehab - all out of his pocket. No exaggeration, it took four years before he could finally get rid of him - with a year’s severance.

Of course, there is a hierarchy of victimhood. Gay definitely trumps female and even elderly. I saw this firsthand with a case where a gay guy went up against a psychotic old woman. She lived below him and was making his life miserable, constantly complaining he was making too much noise - banging the ceiling with a broom or ringing his doorbell in the middle of the night. The gay guy was so terrorized that he was afraid to go to the bathroom at night and took a pee bottle to bed with him. So the landlord sides with him to try and get her out of the building. This miserable woman was no fool. She shows up in court with an oxygen tank, one of the huge ones, on wheels! Fortunately, we had one of the decent judges, a woman who knew bullshit when she saw it. Plus, the gay guy gets on the stand and starts crying. Plus, we had some terrific testimony from the previous tenant in the gay guy’s apartment. When he was up for a government job, she told the government interviewer he was a pedophile and a drug dealer. So we, the gay guy and the landlord, win the case!

But you think that’s the end of it? The gay guy goes back to court demanding a rent rebate for all the time he couldn’t make noise and had to pee in the bottle - and he wins! The landlord has to waive eight months’ rent, in addition to paying the attorney’s fees!

There’s tons of people in New York trying to scam the system, and feeling completely justified about it. Why shouldn’t they, when they’re only screwing a landlord? The city’s No Heat Line offers all kinds of opportunities for unscrupulous tenants - a quick call claiming inadequate heat, and an inspector shows up at the apartment and takes a reading. Tenants who are old hands at this just open up the windows before the guy arrives. The landlord gets a Class C violation - the most severe kind - and the tenant gets a rent abatement.

Anyway, it’s not like the city doesn’t do the same thing. Basically, as far as the city is concerned, the whole system is about one thing: making money for the city. They use this militia, inspectors, to go into buildings and look for violations. And if there’s nothing there, they’ll find something: a yogurt cup in the wrong recycling bin; trash cans put out too early; or the sanitation guys ripped open a bag and left stuff all over the sidewalk. God forbid there’s a snowstorm and someone leaves a patch of ice!

As for tenants, if they’re dishonest enough, it’s almost possible to live in New York and never pay rent. Some of these cases drag on literally for years. There was one guy, a CBS sports producer, who wouldn’t let anyone into his apartment to do repairs, then claimed he was living in a slum, and used this as an excuse to not pay rent for six years! We’re talking a two-bedroom apartment with a forty-foot terrace at Fifty-fifth and Sutton Place.

You soon realize that the people who yell loudest about other people’s greed are almost always a lot greedier than the ones they’re yelling about. They say it’s hard to vote Democratic when you have a Republican lifestyle - not in New York. Because when you’re a liberal in New York, no matter what else you do or how you behave in your own life, your politics make you a good person. I see it all the time. Someone’ll lie, cheat, take advantage of people, but it doesn’t matter, because supposedly the ends are right. It’s a great moral racket they run.

In most of these cases, it’s not like these people don’t have the money. We’re talking Wall Street guys, movie stars, people in television. The attitude in New York is that housing is a right. You shouldn’t have to pay for it. I once had to evict Bozo the Clown.

Some of the most outrageous cases involve non-primary residence. I’m working right now with a landlord who has a woman with a very cheap rent-stabilized apartment. The woman lives in Greece - basically, she uses the apartment as a cheap hotel room when she’s in New York. Theoretically, this is illegal, so when her lease expired, the landlord filed a non-primary-residence suit. Being in Greece, she kept filing for adjournments, until finally even the left-wing judge got fed up. For about five minutes, it looked like my guy might actually win - except now she’s got it in the Court of Appeals and, of course, they keep giving her more time.

Does all this piss me off? Hey, if I let it, I’d be in a constant state of rage. Because, believe me, I am a certified expert on the breadth and depth and infinite variety of liberal hypocrisy in this city. But the only way to do it is to fight the bastards with everything you have, seeing them for what they are - and to keep your sense of humor. There’s one landlord friend of mine who has it exactly right. I happened to bump into him right after he’d seen Rent, which at the time was being celebrated by every lefty in New York, and I asked him how he liked it. He gave me this long deadpan look, and said, “Like it? It’s the musical version of the Bronx Housing Court!”