Who Is “They”? I’ll Tell You Exactly Who “They” Is!

It’s not often that you can pin the shadowy, nebulous forces of gentrification on one person. Good thing we still have Clinton to kick around:

Harlem residents gathered outside President Clinton’s office yesterday to protest against the former president as a symbol of Harlem’s gentrification and the displacement of its residents.

The Harlem Tenants Council hosted the protest at 125th Street between Lenox and Park avenues that was attended by about 40 mostly elderly, African-American residents of the area. A HTC co-founder, Nellie Bailey, said the primary goal of the protest was to draw attention to what she calls a “housing crisis in Harlem,” due in part to displacement because of price increases by landlords and evictions.

“We’re hoping to have a dialogue with a president of enormous influence,” Ms. Bailey said, “so he can understand the concerns of Harlem tenants,” including the lack of a comprehensive, beneficial housing policy and legal services. A Clinton Foundation spokesman, Jay Carson, declined to comment on the protest.

If You Lived Here You’d Be Laid By Now

Debate rages over whether using sex to sell condos is “fun” or if it just reveals that the market for high-end real estate has, er, shot its wad:

A woman with tousled hair straddles a grinning, shirtless man on a bed alongside the words: “Try This at Home.” This was not an advertisement for beer, perfume or instructional Kama Sutra DVD’s. It was an advertisement for the Herald Towers condominiums in Midtown Manhattan.

In a print advertisement for the Link condominiums, also in Midtown, a red-lipped topless woman (only a sliver of one breast was visible) is shown sitting in an apartment while a tattoo is applied to her exposed back.

A glossy advertisement for the Altair 20 in Chelsea has lush greenery framing a shower stall and a svelte, wet, naked woman with a strategically positioned banner that reads “To the Altair 20 Rainforest.”

Some of the advertisements for new condominiums this year look more like ads for condoms, and that has caused more than a few eyes to linger on traditionally staid real estate listings. These provocative advertisements have also raised eyebrows among real estate and advertising professionals who say sex has never been germane to real estate marketing the way it is, say, to music and underwear.

. . .

Lizzie Grubman Public Relations has increasingly been sought by real estate companies in the last year, including Corcoran, which calls itself the city’s largest residential real estate company. “Companies have come to our agency because they want to go beyond the tradition,” said Sabrina Levine, Ms. Grubman’s partner. “Now it’s all about making their building buzz-worthy.”

. . .

Mr. [Neil] Binder of Bellmarc and [NYU Stern Business School] Professor [Sam] Craig suggested that when marketers play the sex card, it is an indication of trouble, though no marketing executive would admit to such a thing.

Still, Mr. Binder said, “I can’t deny the legitimacy of the strategy.”

I’m A Goin’ To Stay Where You Sleep All Day Where They Hung The Jerk That Invented Work In An Illegal Conversion Unfit For Any Person . . .

The good news is you can get out of paying rent. The bad news is, uh, you get a cash settlement when you’re finally kicked out . . . sounds like a plan:

Two musicians and a yogi have lived rent-free for two years in a Brooklyn loft. No, they’re not living with their exasperated parents or beleaguered girlfriends. They are among the masses of New Yorkers living in illegal apartment buildings, and they stumbled onto the big advantage of residing outside the law: You don’t have to pay rent.

Like a lot of young people, they moved into a place they could barely afford and lived together in a one-room loft. After a couple of years and a little research, they realized that landlords like theirs who rent out apartments in buildings not meant to be residences cannot legally collect rent, sue for back rent, or evict someone for nonpayment of rent. Thus began a long, free ride.

. . .

In 2002, brothers Jamal and Puge Ruhe and their friend Kevin Courtney moved into a lumbering, boxy building at 170 Tillary Street in DUMBO. Although their landlord offered them residential space, the old building was registered and taxed as a factory, and officially their lease was commercial. Other artists and musicians had accepted similar arrangements over the years and subsequently transformed their austere lofts into cozy apartments. But included in their bohemian existence was the daily drama of a poorly maintained building that was never intended to house people.

“When it rains, it pisses in over here,” says Puge Ruhe as he motions to a corner of their loft. “We have clumps of stuff falling from the ceiling. . . . There are no fire escapes in here. We would die if there was a fire.”

After a year of leaking roofs, soaked furniture, and a locked freight elevator that was only occasionally available for use, the landlord raised their monthly rent from $1,850 to $1,890. “As musicians living on the fourth floor, we need the elevator [to move our equipment],” says Jamal Ruhe. “So that was a primary instigator in our being pissed enough to risk getting thrown out of our apartment.” The roommates balked at the thought of paying even more for their crumbling space and decided that they would neither sign the new lease nor acknowledge the rent increase. They waited for the building manager to say something, but as Jamal Ruhe recalls, “Nothing happened, and by nothing I mean nothing at all. Not a tenuous nothing, no word from anyone. And that went on for the better part of the year.”

Meanwhile, rumors that at least four other tenants had stopped paying rent made their way around the building. A resident from another illegal loft building told the Ruhe brothers that she lived rent-free for seven years without incident. Inspired by that knowledge, the roommates stopped paying rent altogether in 2004. Again, they were met with silence.

Cool — just make sure the landlord doesn’t burn down the thing . . .

I’m A Goin’ To Stay Where You Sleep All Day Where They Hung The Jerk That Invented Work In A Bat Cave Hive Under Riverside Drive . . .

Mayor Bloomberg announced that the City will attempt to get homeless people living in encampments off the streets:

Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City’s streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday.

. . .

The Department of Homeless Services, under its new commissioner, Robert Hess, has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in Manhattan, to which roughly 350 homeless men and women — of a total homeless population of about 3,800, according to the city’s last count — return nightly.

Most of the encampments are little more than collections of cardboard boxes, or tarpaulins hung over a beam, officials said.

. . .

Officials stopped short of saying that they would force people off the streets, but they do plan to clear the makeshift dwellings and make them inaccessible for others to return.

“We’re going to let them know that their days on the streets must come to an end,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an address to the annual conference of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “And we’ll secure and clean up the places where they’ve been bedding down, to make sure that they won’t be occupied again.”

Over the past four years, officials said, the administration has worked to shift its focus from improving and expanding shelters toward more permanent solutions. That effort has included the use of supportive housing — or housing that affords a range of on-site social services — and a program called HomeBase, which offers flexible subsidies or other support for people at risk of homelessness.

Mr. Hess would not give the precise locations of the sleeping areas — most of them out of sight of the public — that the city plans to target, out of respect for the people who stay in them, he said.

But officials said that some of the sites are already familiar to the department’s teams of outreach workers and that they will coordinate with the Police and Sanitation Departments and with transit officials to identify other sites, both outdoors and in vacant buildings.

One site, near Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, is known to homeless workers as the Bat Cave. Lately, it has been home to at least four people, including Gladys Anderson, 44, who sleeps on a discarded bed propped on milk crates. Monday afternoon, sitting on a red velveteen bedspread, she said she would gladly accept the mayor’s offer of more permanent housing.

She said it was “time to be out” of the cave.

“I will drop it like it’s hot,” she said. “This is not no life adventure for me. We’re just passing through.”

City outreach workers stopped by a few days earlier, she said, and had the people in the encampment fill out paperwork needed to get apartments.

Her boyfriend, who would give his name only as Country, was more skeptical of the offer.

“This is America,” he said as he loaded 12 garbage bags full of cans and bottles onto a large rolling cart. “This is living off the land. That’s how we built this thing.”

If I were to guess, Country will be living indoors soon.

Old School

The economics of housing leads to the further infantilizing of young urban professionals:

Ms. [Kelly Frances] Cook, age 24 and from Ohio, at first could afford only a rented room in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., for $650 a month. Then she embarked on the archetypal, hair-raising New York City apartment search: feckless would-be roommates, outlandish financial demands, an offer of a room in a building with a bullet-pocked lobby.

Then she saw an ad on Craigslist for space in a 60-unit building in Harlem described as full of young professionals. The price was right; the woman on the phone was friendly. Back in Ohio, Ms. Cook’s mother had begun to think like a New Yorker: “Yeah, right, Kelly. She’s probably some mass murderer. I don’t trust her. She’s too nice.”

This month, Ms. Cook is moving in. The woman on the phone, Karen Falcon (not a mass murderer), calls the building “a dorm for adults.” It is a community of the overeducated and underpaid.

There is nothing new about having roommates in New York City. What Ms. Falcon has invented is a full-service dorm, full of strangers she has brought together to share big apartments as a way to keep housing costs down. Her approach is a homegrown response to the soaring rents bedeviling desirable cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Ms. Falcon, an informal agent for the building’s owner, says she has placed nearly 150 young people there and in two other buildings in the neighborhood in recent years. A gregarious Californian with rainbow-colored braids, she pieces together roommate groups like puzzles. Each tenant ends up paying $700 to $1,200 a month.

. . .

Wil Fenn, a 29-year-old program officer for a foundation, has been trying since college to save money to buy a home. He lived in Westchester County for six years, in order to pay less rent. Then, last year, he became bored and decided to move into Manhattan. He, too, happened upon one of Ms. Falcon’s ads.

Now Mr. Fenn pays $850 a month for a large room in a four-bedroom apartment in what he describes as a beautiful building with exposed brick walls, mosaic tiles in the lobby and a garden on the roof. His roommates include a New York City teaching fellow, a chef and a German student studying in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship.

. . .

“Everyone talks about free-market solutions,” he said, speaking of the city’s shortage of lower-priced housing. “But the solution now is the rich get richer and for everyone else it’s the equivalent of being a sharecropper in the city. I’ve been working five or six years now, trying to save up and buy something. Every time I get closer, the goal moves farther away.”

Asked how adult-dorm life differed from college-dorm life, Mr. Fenn said: “You’re not really at the same place where you were psychologically. Now, for me, I’m kind of wondering: When does this end? When do I get to be able to buy a place and settle down?”