Nitwit, Now You’ve Got Us Feeling Bad For Developers!

As a renter, you know your landlord-tenant dispute is flimsy when even the Village Voice makes you seem unsympathetic:

Two years ago, his landlord, Larry Tauber — by accounts, neither a sleazy slumlord nor a chummy pushover — offered Peckham $75,000 to leave his $1,007-a-month West 21st Street one-bedroom, so that he could begin a gut renovation of the building to convert it to swanky rentals. Peckham’s refusals led Tauber to up the offer; by this summer, he’d tried to tempt the tenant with an $800-a-month lease governed by rent-stabilized guidelines on a renovated one-bedroom on West 69th Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, a five-minute walk away from the apartments of Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis.

. . .

“It’s your business,” one of Peckham’s West 20th Street neighbors in a Tauber-owned building told him when they ran into each other the other day, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t be holding out for any southern exposure. If you can get an apartment at a decent rent in a decent building, take it.” Had the neighbor known of the apartment Peckham has refused to take — at a rent less than half what its previous tenant paid — he surely would have shared his shock at Peckham’s seeming greed.

Dude, for the benefit of every other renter in this city, take the fucking deal!