Slumlords . . . I Hate Those Guys

The only thing worse than a slumlord is . . . nothing because I’ve read enough Post articles by now to know that slumlords are total scum of the earth:

A notorious Queens slumlord was blasted yesterday for racking up a staggering number of violations at his filthy, rundown buildings — while he gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax abatements.

Nicholas Haros “very definitely is a slumlord. We don’t want slumlords in our community,” fumed City Councilman Hiram Monserrate, who represents Corona. “He is clearly showing insensitivity to his tenants, insensitivity to the city of New York.”

One of those rental tenants, Elena Nuñez, 74, showed reporters a massive hole in her Corona apartment shower stall that she says Haros has refused to fix for the past two years. She also displayed a hole in the ceiling he has ignored for three years.

“He’s bad,” Nuñez said of Haros, 58, who refused to speak to The Post at his Flushing office. “He’s not a good landlord. He doesn’t do anything.”

Other Haros tenants pointed out collapsed ceilings, peeling paint, rotted walls, vermin-ridden kitchens, wall mold and a leak that has persisted for 16 years.

City officials said Haros-controlled corporations own 81 apartment buildings in the city, mostly in Queens and The Bronx. The buildings contain 3,247 units, largely occupied by immigrants and elderly tenants whose rent totals tens of millions of dollars annually.

City inspectors have found 16,696 violations — more than five per apartment. A total of 13,548 of them are considered “hazardous,” or worse, “immediately hazardous,” officials said.

And it gets worse — Haros is sucking at the City teat:

Haros owes the city more than $411,000 in emergency repairs that it had to make on apartments because he failed to do so, and he has paid more than $303,450 in fines related to his shoddy maintenance.

But Haros continues each year to get massive amounts of city tax abatements related to affordable housing programs, and the city’s Finance Department said that situation is likely to continue without a change in the law governing such tax credits.

If he’s not careful, the phrase “Haros-controlled” might become shorthand for, say, the ninth circle of hell . . .

Sub-Sub-Sub Sublet

Converted dining rooms, converted living rooms, a sheet or shower curtain for a door . . . now the Times reports on a $35-per-month hole in the wall, which literally is a hole in the wall:

One night recently, a group of architecture students staying up late in a loft in Brooklyn took to amusing themselves by stuffing a mattress into a hole cut into the wall above a bedroom door. Then they tried the mattress out for comfort. Not half bad! It occurred to one of them, Nick Freeman, that people might pay money to call that elevated mattress home.

So Mr. Freeman posted an ad on the Web site Craigslist: “$35 — elevated mattress-sized space between rooms.” He used a minimalist pitch. “Opening between hall and room available for long/short-term use, accessible by ladder, sheets and pillows not provided.” The ad went up around noon, and by the end of that day, Mr. Freeman had a dozen potential takers.

“I was actually surprised with the amount of places that fall into that category — kind of like ‘I’ll rent a corner,’ ” said Drew Hart, who answered the ad. “I went to look at a place recently in Queens; I wasn’t aware until I got there that it was a cloth shower curtain separating part of the living room.”

. . .

The mattress episode began sometime before dawn on Jan. 16. John Ivanoff, a 22-year-old architecture student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, who shares the 1,500-square-foot apartment on Taaffe Place with five others — the person with the only room with a real window pays an extra $50 in rent — said he and his roommates and Mr. Freeman, a friend, had stayed up drinking and suddenly decided to stuff a spare mattress into the rectangular hole cut into the wall above one bedroom door.

“There were three of us up there at one time,” Mr. Freeman recalled. “All three of us hung out there. After the night was done, I said it would be funny if I put this on a room-share thing on Craigslist and see if anyone responds.”

One who did was Adam Kriney, a 29-year-old experimental jazz drummer “looking for living spaces for under $200, if possible,” as he put it later. He had given up his share in an apartment in Williamsburg and had been staying on various couches of friends.

“Look, I’m looking to live in a crawl space,” said Mr. Kriney, who said he spent his money on rehearsal space. “What do I really need besides my laptop, a sleeping bag and a suitcase?”

The mattress ad caught his eye.

“I kind of thought it was like a cubby cubbyhole where I could hang out,” Mr. Kriney said in an interview. “I didn’t realize it was suspended. Which isn’t a problem. That wouldn’t be a strange thing. It’s just where I lay my head. I’m only here to do my music.”

. . .

An open house for the mattress was scheduled for that Saturday, Jan. 21, between 6 and 9 p.m. Mr. Hart arrived, checked out the real estate and was willing to give it a shot. But, according to Mr. Freeman, the existing inhabitant of the bedroom in question was unenthusiastic. “Pretty much that was the point where it fizzled out,” Mr. Freeman said.

How Long Do You Suppose This Will Last?

The economics of New York City dictate that full-fledged, non-related adults live together, sometimes four to an apartment, regardless of one’s budget. The Times looks at one such living situation [emphasis on unavoidable red flags added throughout]:

Being a sociable kind of guy, Otis Hart formed a group of four friends who would all live together.

Finding a four-bedroom apartment was easy. Mr. Hart put a $100 cash deposit on the third place he set foot in – a sunny, soaring duplex that was truly magnificent, as long as you looked beyond the filth, the dog waste and the general vagrant feel. A bad omen?

“It was not an easy place to show because there were dirty clothes and garbage everywhere, and not all the lights were working,” said Annie Santiago, an agent at Kline Realty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who showed Mr. Hart the place, which rented for $3,500.

. . .

He needed roommates who would commit to a two-year lease, tolerate an uncertain move-in date and fork over three extra months’ rent (for the security deposit and broker’s fee).

Mr. Hart avoided the obvious channel, the Web site Craigslist, the real estate resource of first and last resort. “I don’t like dealing with unknown commodities,” he said. “I have so many friends, why not exhaust that before dealing with Craigslist?”

. . .

He dispatched a mass e-mail message to 83 of his contacts plus a list of 428 people in the music field.

His note extolled the features of the apartment, including his “60-inch TV, a super stereo and all the free music you could ever want.”

Hart assembled a volatile group of desperate urbanites, including the underemployed college graduate itching to move out of his parents’ home:

More than 20 people replied, but only one was really eager to move in. That was Mark Davis, 23, who had worked at the Middlebury College radio station, as Mr. Hart had a few years prior.

Mr. Davis was staying with a college friend and his family on the Upper East Side. “I needed to get out of their hair and start my own life,” he said. He got a job at the Strand bookstore and saved some money. Before he even saw the place, he told Mr. Hart he would move in.

Mr. Hart was encouraged. “Mark was a sort of a life preserver,” he said.

The overextended and overpaying:

The next recruit was Jeff Seelbach, 25, a Northwestern University graduate from Short Hills, N.J., who wrote for dustedmagazine.com. Mr. Seelbach and a roommate were living nearby, paying around $900 each for a ground-floor apartment. Their door opened onto the sidewalk, storefront-style, which he hated.

And rounding out the group, the lone female at her wit’s end, buckling under external pressures:

Rosemary Simon was more concerned about having three male roommates. Ms. Simon, 23, from Skokie, Ill., had graduated from DePaul University. She stayed first in a sublet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, then at an uncle’s house in the Bronx.

She tried to find something permanent on Craigslist, checking out prospective roommates via the online sites Google and Friendster. All seemed to be drug addicts or control freaks, she said.

A friend of a friend, who had an internship at a music magazine, sent her Mr. Hart’s e-mail plea. By now, Ms. Simon, an administrative assistant who plans to go to graduate school, was living on East 117th Street with two friends of friends. Her $500 a month bought her hot water that vanished for days at a time. In her closet, a message was scrawled: “R.I.P. Miguel, 2004.”

. . .

Then, one of her roommates on East 117 Street quit her job. She couldn’t desert the penniless group in its hour of need. “Otis sent me a bunch of gentle reminders,” she said. “He had to court me into living here.” Then, “I was baking cookies one night and the lights flashed.” It could be only one thing: “the ghost of Miguel.” She had to get out. She e-mailed Mr. Hart. The place was still available.

And now the four are living (together) happily ever after:

The four congregated as a group for the first time at the lease signing, and became fast friends. Now, they listen for hours to each other’s music. Everyone they know gathers there, watching sports on the huge TV.

“I still wake up wondering how it all happened,” Mr. Hart said. “The situation I have now is so great only because my other roommates dropped me.”

As for Ms. Simon, who likened the group to “pound puppies,” finally happy at home, “my fears about living with the guys were unwarranted and ridiculous,” she said. “It worked out almost too well, like we are a really strange musical cult/family. It’s like I’ve got three annoying older brothers.”

I give it six to nine months . . .

This Just In: It’s Expensive To Buy Here

Confirming what you assumed to be true, it is nearly impossible to buy a home anywhere near the national median home price, and when you can, it tends to be a studio or some such thing:

The question sounded laughable: Given that the national median home price recently calculated by the National Association of Realtors is $220,000, is it possible to buy something for that price in New York City?

Or even, just to provide some wiggle room, up to $250,000?

The initial reactions of real estate brokers in all five boroughs included: “Hah,” “C’mon” and “Yeah, right!”

But then they searched Web sites, peering, virtually, down the avenues, streets and cul-de-sacs of communities beyond the neighborhoods they normally serve. And sprinkled here and there in every borough – even in mind-rattling Manhattan, where the current median price is $750,000 and the average price is $1.15 million – they found what Willie Kathryn Suggs, a broker in Harlem, called “hidden gems.”

To be sure, those gems were rare, usually small and sometimes very much in need of a lot of polishing. And, in large part, they were limited to co-ops and condominiums. Only a few single-family homes below $220,000, or even $250,000, could be found, and only in the far reaches or still-struggling enclaves of the boroughs outside Manhattan.

In the Wakefield section of the Bronx, for example, a two-story wood-frame house on a 25-by-100-foot lot sold for $249,000 last month. It was, however, described as a “handyman special,” requiring a lot of work. And in the Rockaways – that 11-mile sliver of south Queens once known as “the poor man’s Riviera” – five bungalows are currently listed for $209,000 to $243,000.

Rent Not Own

In cities like New York, renting is more cost efficient than owning. The Times explains why:

After five years in which rents have barely budged while house prices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere have doubled, renting has become a surprisingly smart option for many people who never would have considered it before.

Owning a home often ties up hundreds of thousands of dollars that might be invested more safely and more lucratively elsewhere over the next decade. And while real estate brokers may hate to acknowledge it, home ownership involves its own versions of throwing money away, like property taxes and the costs of borrowing.

Add it all up – which The New York Times did, in an analysis of the major costs and benefits of owning and renting, including tax breaks – and owning a home today is more expensive than renting in much of the Northeast, Florida and California. Only if prices rise well above their already lofty levels will home ownership turn out to be the good deal that it is widely assumed to be.

Rootless renters unite! Home ownership is overrated!