When Cathy, the buyer's representative, told us that we wouldn't be buying the first house we saw — and that it was important to get a few out of the way to get an idea for what's out there — we didn't think that we'd have to see that many places before we found something that would work. Which is to say, we spent the summer checking out all manner of places that didn't work. We scoured the multiple listings for stuff for sale and would email her MLS numbers. Every so often she'd hear about a house that was going on the market.
Sometimes the houses we looked at "worked," in the sense that a house fit our basic requirements of habitability, but then they'd be too far away from the subway or too expensive, which is to say, they didn't really work. A house Cathy encouraged us to look at was great — it had a gigantic lot and a garage (Astoria brokers love garages on the theory that they increase a home's value and potentially provide rental income if you didn't own a car) and it was on a very desirable street — it was also a mile from the subway. Others had a pleasant primary unit, which worked for me and Jen, but a terrible secondary unit, which did not work for Michael. Michael, understandably, did not want to live in a low-ceilinged basement with no natural light to speak of — he's a tall guy, with tall friends — wouldn't work. One really nice two-family had a recalcitrant tenant who refused to open the door to the listing agent. Another house was small but OK — if you overlooked the facts that 1) its main bathroom was in the basement (the second time we'd seen this) and 2) its backyard abutted the 100-foot-high (I could be exaggerating, but not by much) rail viaduct on the main line connecting Boston and points north with Penn Station; the real estate photo, understandably, omitted this perspective. A nice place on 34th Street south of Broadway was a former (or current!) SRO. A house that Michael and I liked looked out onto the back of a middle school. Other houses were wonderful but they weren't anywhere near the ballpark figure.
So about the "ballpark" figure . . . Ballparks are funny like that. Occasionally a team will move in the fences in order to increase offensive output. The Mets are doing that this year, for example. But in real estate, fences always seem to go out, never in.
At some point I started to get down on the whole venture. Cathy encouraged us to have 20 percent down on hand in order to be more attractive candidates to sellers. It took me a while to figure out why this would be, but what I eventually gleaned was that sellers would prefer to have a dude come by with 50 percent cash in a suitcase than they would deal with three first-time buyers with ten percent and an FHA loan on the theory that the 50 percent dude was less hassle. Sellers shouldn't care how they get the money — they'll get the money from the bank once you get your mortgage — they just want a sure thing. Which is why in a strong housing market people think they need to have 20 percent on hand.
That wasn't going to happen. We weren't going to ever have 20 percent on hand for a down payment. Cathy off-handedly mentioned inquiring at "The Bank of Mom and Dad." Nothing is more disconcerting to an adult child than hearing the words "The Bank of Mom and Dad." That made me start to question what we were doing. Maybe we weren't suited to buying real estate in New York. Maybe renting wasn't such a terrible idea. Maybe we should move somewhere where it made more sense. I heard homes in Pittsburgh and Detroit were cheap. They can't even give away houses in Youngstown. Michael and Jen convinced me I was overreacting.
Summer dragged on and we were no closer to finding a house. Cathy told us that by August no one was showing houses anyway on the assumption that no one was in town to look, so we should resume our search after Labor Day. Labor Day came and went. Jen emailed Cathy. Jen left messages for Cathy. But I think Cathy was done with us. I don't blame her, but it felt like getting blown off by someone you went on a few dates with. Was it something I said? Am I too gossipy? Did you meet someone else?
On the upside, it felt a little like the absurdly long opening to the 1970s television show Kung Fu with David Carradine. You might remember seeing it in syndication. The opening went like this:
I have to admit that I never watched the show — that sleepy pace of the opening and dissonant music made me want to turn the channel — but I loved the lines the monk said to the young Kwai Chang Caine:
As quickly as you can, snatch the pebble from my hand. When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave. Please excuse me.
And then it goes through all the training David Carradine gets — and you're hanging over the front of the TV ready to switch the VHF knob because this was long before remote controls and because Kung Fu looks like it's going to be the most boring show in the world — when Kwai Chang Caine finally snatches the pebble from the monk's hand, the monk says to him:
Time for you to leave.
Now, like I said, and as you can see, this opening sequence stuck with me for some time. For many years, I didn't really understand what it meant. I think martial arts are stupid; in high school I tried to read Tao Te Ching and understood about .4 percent of it. I just didn't get pebbles and what bearing they might have on when David Carradine could go.
Then as an adult I worked for bosses who were terrible communicators and it hit me: The pebble was a form of hazing that people in power use to lord over subordinates. They never clearly tell you what they want and then lash out or be snippy when they don't have what they need and you're somehow supposed to figure that out from what exactly? Pebble, hand. That smug fucking monk. I still won't watch that show.
Anyway, which is to say, I think we learned everything we needed to know from Cathy: Negotiating points, damp basements, party walls, legal and de facto two-families, when roofs were redone, when the electricity was updated (if it was — sometimes listing agents didn't know this, which is a bad sign) — all of it. In the end we wouldn't need Cathy. We snatched pebbles (read: She never called us back). It was time for us to leave.
So given that Brooklyn was proving too expensive, and given that we were faced with the prospect of living in an uninhabitable place in an OK neighborhood or a passable place in a marginal neighborhood, we decided to reset and focus on Queens.
Not that it would be so simple. At some point I realized that we would be very lucky to live in any neighborhood west of the BQE, no matter how far away from the subway it was. I held out hope that there would be some really convenient, really wonderful, really remarkable, woefully underappreciated, criminally overlooked street that folks would visit and think, "Wow, what a nifty, remarkable, wonderful place they found on such a conveniently located, criminally overlooked street!"
Jen and I took a long walk from Long Island City up to the northern reaches of Astoria. Nothing jumped out at us in terms of really remarkable, criminally underappreciated blocks or streets, but we did meet Cathy.
Cathy was a buyer's representative, meaning that she would do all the heavy lifting of making appointments, negotiating a contract and taking half the real estate commission from a sale.
We met Cathy when we happened upon her office and began looking at the fliers in the window. She immediately popped out of the front door and asked us what we were looking for. I supposed business had been slow. She invited us inside her office.
What followed was an extended treatise on all aspects of Astoria real estate, from the low-lying blocks (damp basements) to the "desirable" streets, the wisdom of buying north of the Grand Central (rezoning that preserves the three-story maximum character of most of the streets north of the Grand Central) and the lack thereof in purchasing south of 37th Avenue (an agreement with the federal government to build thousands of new hotel rooms) (Cathy told us this last part several times, especially when we said we were interested in places closer to Queens Plaza, thinking they might be cheaper and "up and coming"; I can't find anything online that would confirm this, but the federal government has been especially interested in this part of Queens).
She seemed excited to help us and we were excited to have her on our side. With Cathy, we would get the best deal possible. She would anticipate every issue with a house, from the electric to the plumbing to the structural integrity. She would look at that asking price and effortlessly back the seller into the perfect price for us. And the best thing is that she was confident it could happen. With Cathy, our ballpark would be as spacious the Polo Grounds.
Cathy's philosophy was that you never buy the first house you see, so she took us to see some places that we definitely wouldn't put an offer on, not necessarily because they were bad but rather because they were neither in our price range nor in a neighborhood we would ever consider buying in.
"It's important just to get a sense of what is out there," she explained.
This was back when looking in people's houses was still a novelty. The young man's basement apartment and his stereo equipment. The older couple's family pictures in the top apartment. The expanding foam sealant puffing out of where the carpet met the baseboard in a three-family building. As much fun as it was to spy on people's lives, it was tiring to travel back and forth in Astoria viewing houses that we were never going to live in.
We got our hopes up when Cathy told us about this "fixer-upper" in a convenient location just off of Ditmars Boulevard, the three of us excited about the first house that might be something we actually might have wanted to live in. The price was right in the ballpark, it was on a very "desirable" street just off of Ditmars and it needed some cosmetic work. This last detail was perfect for us — early on, we decided that we would be happy to trade cosmetics for price.
The house had just gone on the market and while it wasn't technically a two-family, inasmuch as the Department of Buildings was concerned, it was set up as a two-family house. As Cathy explained, that was good for us, since we were a single family looking for a two-family setup. This particular house was in the same family for many years and the siblings it had been passed down to were ready to unload it.
Now you might think, as I did, that houses that were protected by loving families for years were preferable to houses that were rented out to callous tenants who came and went and had no reason to want to maintain the residence. This first house proved to us that this logic didn't always hold.
Sometimes the problem with a house that stays in one family for many years is that no one thinks to fix it, and over time it starts looking like a piece of shit. Was it Tolstoy who said that every shitty house is shitty in its own way? In this case, the bottom unit was almost entirely dark, and when we walked through it, there was a lone man watching the 2010 Mets (a terrible team) on one of those ancient floor-unit console televisions with all the shades drawn (although I see they actually beat the Orioles that day, 3-1, though the Orioles were also a terrible team in 2010). Meanwhile, the top unit was packed in about as packed with stuff as you could possibly pack it. Oh, and the entire house reeked — reeked! — of cat piss.
"How easy is it to get the smell of cat urine out of a house?" Jen asked.
"I've been meaning to look that up," Cathy said.
The answer, by the way, is that it is rather difficult if not impossible, at least judging by this thread, which includes talk about removing the subfloor or this primer, which includes talk of "demo":
In short, not something you want to undertake lightly . . .
Funny thing is that if it weren't for the fact that the bottom unit's main bathroom was in the basement, I would have suggested we put down an offer on it. Suffice it to say, that didn't happen.
Who was it who said that you can only live in a tiny studio apartment for so long? Oh right, that was Jen, probably starting about three or four years ago before we finally bought our own place last April.
It's not as hard as you think to make yourself believe that a tiny studio apartment is a viable option in perpetuity. How much space do you need anyway? Think about how good the rent is, especially after six years! And besides, there's no way we could find something this close to the subway. Do you really need a sink in the bathroom? Of course you could put a baby in the living room. It goes on and on.
I was hesitant to buy something. We'd be on the hook for water, heat, property taxes and whatever other costs came with home ownership. Cooperative or condominium living sounded miserable, and the idea of paying maintenance fees that easily surpassed our monthly rent sounded absurd.
But then Goober and Jen started talking. Goober's lease was coming due and he was tired of living in a studio apartment with no natural light to speak of in a building managed by one of the worst real estate mega corporations, one known for harassing rent-stabilized tenants and generally fucking people over. Which is to say, the idea was formed to buy a two-family house. Neither of us could afford our own place and a two-family house was sort of like a co-op, except without the maintenance fees. Jen argued that a mortgage was kind of like permanent rent control. This could work.
So where to live? Where would be in our price range? We were flexible, but for our price range, online prospects looked hairy: "Interesting but it's in a very remote corner of Ridgewood," "This one doesn't look like the picture, though if we had an accurate view, I'd look at it," "This is too close to the elevated tracks," "I'd consider this one but I want to see that it actually exists," "I'm skeptical of stuff north of Myrtle Avenue — too far from the subway and too sketchy," "This is being very generous calling this 'Clinton Hill' — it's .4 miles from the subway," "I'm skeptical of this but I'd look at it — a little more Bed-Stuy than Clinton Hill, I'd say," and "This is more 'Prospect Heights' than 'Lefferts Gardens' — it's a house we already knew about, the infamous men-on-bicycles street view."
That last one was wedged between some auto parts places and when you plugged in the address on Google Street View, you saw a bunch of guys riding around on dirt bikes. Now it could be just an accident that these guys happened to be hanging out on the street at the particular moment when the Google Street View car zoomed by, but in a way I kind of don't think so. We scratched that off the list.
A friend of Goober's recommended a broker. He was sympathetic to our admittedly constricted price range and pointed us toward a few open houses. We were thinking "Yay, the outer reaches of Williamsburg!" or "Exciting, the up-and-coming areas around Bushwick and Ridgewood!" or "A real-life brownstone!"
The two places we saw in Bed-Stuy were OK. One was a third of a mile from the C train and the other was a half-mile from the J. It's funny — open houses, probably by necessity, are done early in the afternoon on a Saturday or Sunday, which is probably the very best time to see a neighborhood. People are coming home from church. The neighborhood is quiet. It's as close to an ideal time as possible and even then I wasn't excited about living in a remote neighborhood with no foot traffic to speak of a half-mile from the J train. On our way to the train we passed what looked to be a NYPD stop-and-frisk.
A week or two later, the broker sent two more open house listings: The first property in Bed-Stuy was in our price range and only a block or so from the subway but the broker thought it was probably too cheap to be habitable. A second in Crown Heights had bars on the windows and was a half-mile from the subway. But there was a Chinese restaurant just across the street . . . we decided that none of us had spent enough time in Bed-Stuy to feel like we should be buying property there.
And just when we were getting ready to write off Brooklyn altogether, we found a house in our price range only a quarter-mile from the Grand Street stop on the L, just four stops into Brooklyn. We had an appointment for 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday. We got there early and checked out the street. Sure, there was an active meat supplier right across the street, and yes, this wasn't exactly a "residential" block, but come on, it was four stops from Manhattan!
The owner lived next door with several large dogs. She had been renting it out to some post-collegiate kids who the realtor had to rouse out of bed. There was a laundry hookup in the basement. There was large backyard. There was a front door! There was an apparent roof! In short, it was perfect.
We decamped to a very popular pizza establishment just eight-tenths of a mile from our new house to discuss it. We were going to put down an offer. We were definitely going to put down an offer. This was going to be fantastic. We went to our respective homes and settled in for the evening.
"So about that house," Jen said sometime later after she had been clicking around on her computer.
Yes?
"I'm not so sure about it."
But why? I am stubbornly oriented toward the status quo, and sometimes once I settle on an idea I tend to cling to it.
"I don't know that I'd feel safe walking home from the subway."
But it was less than a quarter-mile from the subway! If you can't feel safe walking a quarter-mile, then . . .
"Did you see those dogs that lady had?"
But there is that lovely hipster art space just down the block! Did you see the events they have there?
We went back and forth like this for a while. Eventually I called Goober and we talked about it.
Which is to say, after thinking about it some, here are some immutable facts about the house that emerged:
1) It was one block from a very large housing project. Then again, it was buttressed from said housing project by a large public high school.
2) It was a half a block from a high school. No one wants to live half a block from a high school.
3) It was in an Industrial Business Zone, the City's attempt to preserve its dwindling manufacturing base, which basically ensures that you will have no new neighbors, no high-end condos, no cute streets, etc. But there will be a meat supplier right across the street.
5) Last but not least, the two stories in the 22-by-26 foot building footprint meant that we'd have two units of approximately 572 square feet each, excluding the basement. 572 square feet is not something to grow into, you know? The studio apartment was roughly 21-by-22, or about 462 square feet. A mortgage for 110 more square feet? I guess there's that backyard, but jeez . . .
An axiom developed: Sometimes you can either get a crappy place in a nice neighborhood or a great place in a less-nice neighborhood. And thus ended our abbreviated search for places in Brooklyn.
