Bloomberg Asks Us to Leave Our Apartment

My girlfriend Susie is cheap. Not just thrifty, which would imply a certain amount of flexibility, but a self-flagellating penny pincher. *

So when I say that she spent the better part of two months deciding if she should buy a stove, don't misunderstand that to mean she just couldn't get around to making a decision. No, Susie spent days and nights price matching, comparing models, saving extra from her paychecks instead of dipping into her savings. She was going to get the best deal on a gas oven that neurotic, fastidious worrying made possible.

Yesterday it was delivered, wheeled through the front garage door of Goliath, the gallery in the back of which we live. And quite literally as she was unpacking it inside our apartment, our neighbors and lease-holders Eric and Mayumi pulled me aside to inform me that the whole building was to be made vacant—in the words of our milquetoast landlord—"as soon as possible."

I walked back into our apartment, where Susie was giddily pulling out protective cardboard framing from the box and shook my head as I told her the news. I'm not sure what upset her the most: the fact we had to start looking for a new place which will inevitably cost us thousands of dollars to move into, or the fact that she might have wasted $400 on a stove. She sat down to cry and I went outside to smoke.

We've been told it's some sort of rezoning in the Greenpoint and WIlliamsburg area; something that makes commercial "live/work" leases like ours now invalid, but only twenty-percent of the time. Eric and Mayumi, who sublet the apartments in the gallery to us, have already visited a real-estate lawyer, who said there isn't much we can do. A "new ruling in the highest court" has made it impossible for artists to fight for their loft tenements in ways they could before, making it effectively useless for us to contest it.

(I'm not even sure what this "80 percent can stay, 20 percent have to go" ruling is. I can't find it online. I guess it doesn't really matter.)

We'll be fine, I'm sure, so I don't want to imply that we are completely distraught. I'm sort of looking forward to getting a new place, even if this is all a bit sudden. But it's sad. We love this part of Greenpoint, and were really starting to feel like part of the neighborhood. People knew my face and greeted me in Polish, which may or may not be a sign of familiarity, but that's how I took it. The likelihood of finding a new place in this exact neighborhood is slim.

We've been told this has something to do with Bloomberg—something to do with a restructuring of tenants' rights that he slowly has been, at best, allowing to erode. I honestly don't know—it's not the sort of stuff that really interests me until it affects me, for better or worse. But I'm learning how to be a New Yorker as I go, and it seems clear to me that no matter the reality of the situation, it is my duty to somehow blame this on the mayor.

* She is, it must be qualified so near to the me-getting-things season, seriously generous when it comes to gift-giving.