When life is real as rent

You don't know anything about poor, working and middle-class America until you try to rent an apartment. I'm not talking about renting an apartment for yourself. I'm talking about renting an apartment to someone else.

My wife Deborah and I own a three-decker Victorian-era house of the kind some people call a "tenement." We live in one apartment and rent out the other two. The place is in good shape. All the appliances are new, the heat works, the windows close, there are hardwood floors throughout, we just had the bathrooms redone, and when I say it's a quiet neighborhood, I mean there's a cemetery across the street.

Not fancy is what it is, although there are people in New York City who would commit many crimes for the built-in china cabinets on every floor.

And one of the tenants moves out, and we take pictures, and we advertise the apartment in a couple of places, and we get:

Applicants who make so little money they plan on having three roommates in a two-bedroom apartment.

People who work for Amazon, none of whom can afford the place unless they commit 70% of their income to rent, which is unsustainable. If you work for Amazon, sleep in the parking lot of the warehouse. It's your best shot at having a place to live. I know. I've seen the pay stubs.

The homeless. The actual by God homeless, some of whom have some kind of government piece of paper that will cover 30% of their rent. There are three or four programs that will pay either the first month's rent, security deposit or 30% of the rent. Even after that, most applicants would be putting more than half of their income into rent, which is not sustainable over the long term. One $300 car repair and you're not going to be able to pay me that month.

People with three jobs, who will still have to pay more than half their income in rent. They lose those 10 hours a week delivering pizza, and they can't pay me.

Retired working people, most of them with nothing but Social Security and sometimes a $300-a-month pension. Most people think the word "pension" means a cop's pension, or an autoworker's pension. It doesn't. Some people worked 40 years in a now defunct factory that made shoelaces. When the factory closed, the government swooped in and took over the pension fund, and now the pension is paid by an agency called the Pension Guaranty Benefit Guaranty Corporation. That's considerate, but it's still $300 a month.

And yes, I've increased the rent over the last few years, trying to keep pace with property taxes, water bills and the cost of repairs. A few years ago, I put $10,000 worth of roof on this house. I live in the house, so that was my stuff in the attic, too.

I'm charging more rent than I used to, but how low would I have to go to make it affordable for homeless people and Amazon employees? Also, if you move in, and you're a good tenant, I don't raise the rent, sometimes not for three or four years, and then maybe $25 a month. The corporate-owned apartment complexes hand you an increase every year.

I've lived most of my life in working-class communities. My father was a bartender. I lived in rented apartments until I got married, and rent was never more than 30% of my income, and that includes my first years in the newspaper business, when I made less than I would have in almost any other white-collar job.

These are my people, the people whose applications I turn down because I have to or I'll lose this house, the Amazon workers whose jobs are harder than any newspaper job I ever had in my life.

And I have to tell them no.

© Creators, 2023