My Corona Diary (Take XXXVII): Welcome To The Boardwalk (They're Jacking Up Your Rent)

 

<"Under The Boardwalk...

Take I"/The Reckoner>

<i.>

Only a couple months ago, the Squawker and I were pondering what the impact of new management on our apartment complex might mean next year. Well, we need not wonder anymore. Management's happy to re-up, but they're also jacking up our rent by roughly $130, in fact. Fifteen-odd years of $25 and $50 increases will now become a distant memory, as we prepare for the reality of paying $992 a month, starting in May.

On one hand, the situation is workable, thanks in part to a year-long contact job that I started last December. I'm making about $600 more per month than usual, ensuring that some of our money sticks around in the bank -- instead of whizzing through the front door, and out the back, to pay somebody-or-other with their hand held out. 

That's the pattern we experienced before the pandemic. Let's face it, most people's accounts are just pass-throughs to pay bills. It's a slightly different pass-through than someone like Senator Ron Johnson is used to seeing, with the $30 million or so in wealth that the Wisconsin Wingnut married into. But I digress.

But I might manage to soften the blow, I assured Squawker. At the moment, I make $100-odd per month, filling out surveys -- money I could set aside, presumably. There's also the $1,800 cherry dangling at me, if I finish out my current contract successfully. We could set that money aside, too.

Still, we're left wondering where the future will take us. When I asked the manager, "Why is it so steep," she responded that market rates will guide the new ownership. In other words, if our rapidly gentrifying little town continues to support what the greedheads already charge, we'll get slammed, right along with them. For that reason, she admitted, a similar $100-plus increase is possible next year, too. Fast buck, feral capitalism at its finest. Ain't it grand?

I don't blame the manager, who's only the messenger in these situations. Others had voiced similar concerns, she acknowledged, which is hardly surprising, given the preponderance of seniors and people with disabilities living here. It's worlds apart from announcing more upbeat news (like the upgraded laundry we got several months ago).

<"A Matter Of Perspective":

The Reckoner>

<ii.>

In another sense, though, I'm not surprised. One of the new management's first moves was to offer reserved parking, for $50 per month. Squawker and I found this development something of a surprise, since neither of us recalls seeing any one percenters picketing the place, until they got their precious reserved pieces of real estate.

Honestly, though, who needs a reserved space, other than people with disabilities? I've seen how it twists people, like the publisher at one of my previous media jobs. One day, Blowdried Bobbie dropped in for lunch, only to flip out, on seeing a delivery driver parked in her privileged spot. 

Bobbie scoured the building, presumably to surprise the unwary driver, and send him moving (or packing). Thankfully, she didn't find him. By the time she'd finished her pirate raid through the building, the driver had taken his bundles, and left. Nobody gave him up, and the whole episode was quickly forgotten. If that's the kind of customer our new owners want, they're welcome to it.

So what's all this have to do with the price of rice, to lift a phrase from one of Howard Beale's soliloquies in Network (1975)?  Well, on the surface, it's not a huge move. I'm certainly not adding $50 per month more to my rent, just so I don't have to walk a few more yards. Yet it's also the kind of gesture that signals, "You're a walking dollar sign. Get used to it."

<"Under the Boardwalk..."

Take II/The Reckoner>

<iii.>

The Squawker and I have girded a long time for this day. From time to time, we've done a classic tabletop exercise. It's an emergency management term for a scenario that the participants discuss, to work out how they might react, and then, develop a plan along those lines.

You might start off such an exercise by asking, "An armed gunman shows up near ABC School, off XYZ Street. What would we do, and how would we respond?" In our case, the Squawker asked, "Can you find an apartment in the county at, or only slightly above, the $900 per month we pay now?"

Our current hometown offers no obvious solutions. The cheapest places start at around $1,200 per month, and rapidly escalate to $1,500 to $2,00, whether you're renting an apartment or a house, another option that we've discussed. If we want relief, we'll have to look elsewhere, apparently. 

So far, the returns aren't terribly encouraging. We've found two smaller towns, 15 to 25 miles away, where rents average around $700-800 per month. The downside? Their apartments are quire a bit smaller, in more isolated areas, with fewer of the supports that we're currently accustomed to having (like our visiting home doctor, for example). But until we take a recon trip or two out there, we can't be sure.

Nor is it much better elsewhere, as my sister informed me, during our weekly phone chat. Apartments in her neck of the woods (Metro Big City Ohio), start around $1,800 per month, and rocket upward from there. One sign is her former workspace, which her agency's leaving for a smaller building, "because we're all going to be working remotely from now on," she said. 

I remember that old building well. I interviewed for a job there once, hoping I'd get the government gig of a lifetime. What's happening to that structure, you ask? That's destined for condo-hood, apparently, she reckons. "It's all about what they can crank out of people."

As for me? I think John Lennon said it best: "“I’m warming to the idea of having it in an asylum.” He was referring to potential touring plans that morphed into the Beatles' celebrated rooftop concert of 1969, but the way things are going around here, we'll all be sleeping in front of the asylum, next to John's ghost. 

This is where the Rental Arms Race leaves us, trapped in the usual mindless binary non-choices (Aetna or Cigna? Chocolate or vanilla?), with nothing in between. Have no fear, though. Long before then, the Squawker and I will know if our quest is a real possibility, or only a pure pipe dream.--The Reckoner

<Coda>

Update (3/28/22): For some reason that management has yet to explain, one of the newly-minted reserved spaces has now migrated -- across from it, where people with disabilities park. So, for now, at least, that spot is open to all comers again. Our "pole position" (one of them, anyway) is back on track.

The Squawker and I spent part of our weekend going through old housing files, including applications and waiting lists. So far, the returns haven't been terribly encouraging. We've even contemplated moving back to Highlandville, one of our former ports of call, but one brief glance at the rental prices has prompted us to think twice.

Rents at our former crackerbox palace, we've found, now range from $630 to $900. Yes, Virginia, an area often derided as the place as that time forgot has now caught up with the other greedheads fighting for profit in the Rental Arms Race. "It's a truly rich irony," I tell Squawker, "but one that's perfect for us." We'll see how the search goes....stay tuned. Time will tell, I guess.

My Corona Diary (Take XXXVI): Our County Feels Like A Giant Monopoly Board (Should We Move To Finland?)

<"Coming Soon...":

The Reckoner>

Wherever you lay your hats, you're home
Is that true?

Wherever you lay your hats, you're home
If that's true, why are so many people confused?

<Fun Boy Three, "Going Home">

<i.>

Not too long ago, the Squawker and myself had one of our periodic conversations about whether it's time to bid our current complex goodbye, and look at renting a house. Lots of positives, we figured, when we started discussing the issue again. 

A bigger area to roam around, without some nosy neighbor, nor their dog, shadowing your every move. A chance to strike a better deal for less than what we pay now ($900 a month, which includes $35 or so for water, sewer and trash). A single owner is more flexible (theoretically) than a management company, which typically charges the highest rents.

A shot at getting some decent garden space, which Squawker capitalized on last summer, when our church built a large wooden box for that purpose. The array of cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini that we grew helped our food budget, and then some. Small steps like that make a big difference in helping you control your destiny.

So I delegated the Squawker to have a look at rents around here, and guess what? Our search gave us a severe case of sticker shock. It didn't take long to figure out that everything starts at $1,200 per month, and rapidly escalates from there. With one exception, that is: a neighboring town, 10 miles away, dominated by Seventh Day Adventists. Rents over there average $700 per month. Who knows? Maybe the David Koresh image keeps the landlords in check.

Complex or duplex, rental house or townhouse, it doesn't really matter. Across the board, you're looking at paying $1,200, and in some cases, $1,300, even $1,750 per month, in some cases. Just before I started on this point, I asked the Squawker to look once more, this time on craigslist. Maybe only greedy capitalists hung out at the likes of rental.com, or zillow.com, right?

"After all," Squawker told me, "we might as well try to be fair. Maybe we've overlooked something here."

"Maybe," I ventured. "Though it seems like we'd have run across the deal of the century already."

It didn't take long for the few photos we saw to dash our hopes. "Look at this house," Squawker said. "Three-bedroom, $1,250 per month, and all the fixtures look pretty old. They've got clawfoot bathtubs! I see so many of them." Squawker sucked in a breath. "Listen to this: 'Must have $4,000 income per month to qualify.'"

"Well, even at that price," I pointed out, "you're still coughing up a hefty chunk of that income to them. Hence, the condition. So much for that, I guess."

We agree to keep the door ajar, if only a crack, for the future. Still, the news is pretty unsettling, since I grew up around these parts. If I wanted to realize some nostalgic wish of coming back here, I'd need some awfully deep pockets, or I couldn't do it. Simple as that.

<"Coming Soon"/Take II:

The Reckoner>

Is this my home? This is my home
This is where I'm from
Is this home? This must be home
But is this where I belong?

Fun Boy Three, "Going Home"

<ii.>

Absurd as this whole situation sounds, I could console myself with certain bromides, like this old chestnut: As bad as you have it, there's always someone else worse off. Right? Fair enough, but that bromide only goes so far. If the best result in life is barely avoiding the race to the bottom, well...It's not a recipe for a rich and rewarding one, is it?

Or this one: Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as many of the unfortunates left destitute by COVID-19 have discovered, who made the mistake of counting on rent relief that took too long to arrive, never materialized, or simply didn't help them, because the landlords refused to accept it. If you don't own anything substantial, the law doesn't apply, so it doesn't help you, apparently. Simple as that.

Or look at the West Coast, whose manicured liberal facade hides some ghastly social ills underneath it all. In San Francisco, where studio apartments average $3,000 a month, the city is girding itself to sweep away the "anchor-outs," as they're derisively called -- residents living rent-free, if illegally, on the water -- by 2026. 

City officials tick off the usual abstract concerns -- aesthetic, environmental, and legal, not to mention grousing from deeper-pocketed residents -- as reason enough to finally force the issue, though how much success they'll have remains to be seen (see the link below). Left unsaid is where the "anchor-outs" go, once their boats end up crushed, or confiscated. No answer is coming, because city officials don't have one, or aren't interested, nor organized enough, to provide it.

Or you could try something bolder, as Finland has done, as Juha Kaakinen suggests in this commentary in the September 2016 commentary of the Guardian, which -- along with the bare fruits of our recent search -- inspired me to finish off this post. Kaakinen is the chief executive of the Y-Foundation, which aims to end homelessness in Finland "by increasing the amount of affordable rental housing made available to homeless people."

Now, there's a concept, right? Too simple by half, but one that often eludes urban planners, who often focus too closely on the nuts and bolts of their proposed solutions -- rather than what people need. Like housing, for instance. As you'll read in Kaakinen's commentary, Finland opted to buy flats and convert them into rental apartments for homeless people, as well as creating new housing for them.

For example, one of the key steps involved renovating and rehabbing a 250-bed hostel run by the Salvation Army into an 80-unit apartment building, with on-site staff. Such moves become their own building blocks, so to speak, of a long term, systematic approach, instead of the usual "catch as catch can" approach that planners often take, as Kaakinen writes:

"To get the most out of housing first in terms of social and economic benefits it needs to be mainstream homelessness policy, not just individual pilot projects. Housing first needs housing stock and there is no real homeless policy without the housing supply to implement it. The cornerstone of any decent housing policy is the sufficient supply of affordable social housing. 

"To say that the scarcity of funding in any western European country is the reason for lack of affordable social housing is either an understatement or a conscious misunderstanding. It is simply a question of political will."

A question of political will -- I couldn't have said it better. That's exactly what's lacking, especially in my neck of the woods, where the City Commission has focused on building condos and luxury housing developments for seasonal, summer and weekend residents who don't live here year round -- unlike the Squawker and myself. 

Yes, long term solutions to social ills like homelessness take money and time, not to mention setting aside the resources to tackle them. But Kaakinen's point is well taken. If you don't start, you'll never reach the finish line, let alone the 50-yard line.

It'll be interesting to see how Finland's homeless policy is faring now. Maybe I'll update that for a future post. Meanwhile, the Squawker and myself will keep the door open, if only a crack. And if the political will doesn't materialize? The answer is simple: move to Finland. --The Reckoner

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,

Before They Buy Your Land From You)

The Guardian:
Lessons From Finland:
Helping Homeless People

Starts With Giving Them Homes:
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/sep/14/lessons-from-finland-helping-homeless-housing-model-homes

The L.A. Times:
They Live Rent-Free On San Francisco Bay.

But Now Their "Floating Homeless Encampment" Faces Extinction:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-09/they-live-rent-free-on-san-francisco-bay-but-now-their-floating-homeless-encampment-faces-extinction

The Y-Foundation:

https://world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/y-foundation/

Any Port In A Storm? Not If You're Trans, Apparently

<www.theadvocate.com>

<Who, Me? I'm Not Nappin'...>

<i.>

You can tell something about an administration by its hit lists. For Nixon, it was the press. For Reagan, it was the Sandinistas. For Bush the Elder, it was the Iraqis. For Bush the Younger, it was anyone Middle Eastern, and Social Security. For Trump, it's anyone with the T-word -- not T for Texas, but T as in Transgender. He's not keen on having them serve their country, he's not willing to give them equal access to healthcare, and now, apparently, he's not ready to accept them in homeless shelters.

That's the word from "U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary" Ben Carson, who's championing a rule change that would roll back the 2012 Equal Access Rule that prohibits homeless shelters and programs from discriminating "on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity." The proposed change, if it sticks, would allow providers to consider either of those factors "for the purposes of determining accommodation within such shelters and for purposes of determining sex for admission to any facility." What's more, they can also evaluate "privacy, safety, practical concerns, [and] religious beliefs" in making a determination about a person's sex. 

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. If you don't meet Baron Bozo von Combover's hetero measuring stick, you'll just have to spend another night on the streets. And you can roam them, knowing that the decision-maker who put you there did so, because God whispered in their ears. Nothing personal, but their faith was strong, right? Such thinking would hardly raise an eyebrow in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia. There's just one small matter, though. That's not how our democracy, as fractured and broken as it appears, is supposed to work, exactly. But I digress.

<I'm Just Busy Makin' Life...>

<ii.>

The only silver lining here, if we can call it that, is that this proposal -- like so many that this noxious regime belches up, and spews out -- is likely headed for some type of legal challenge. it's hard to imagine trans folks, or their allies, simply winking at this latest blast of legalese, one that's designed to make their lives significantly worse.

As in many cases, statistics tell their own story. According to transequality.org, one in five trans people experiences homelessness at some point in their lives, or about 20 to 40 percent at any given time. Stated another way, that's roughly 1.6 million people, a staggering number for a modern developed nation. Then again, we've lived with ever-spiraling numbers of homeless since the Reagan Eighties, so what's a million more? These facts, inconvenient as they seem, count for little in the brutish world of Trumpism, where money and power are prized above human life. (Never mind the last words of Bob Marley, who told his sons on his deathbed: "Money can't buy life.")

There's no question that young trans people would feel especially hard hit, since family rejection -- coupled with eviction from their homes -- is a common trigger of homelessness, which often coincides with violence, and other types of discrimination. Like housing, where Carson has never worked, and knows nothing about. But that doesn't stop him from plowing ahead with a measure that, again, will make life worse for millions. Because, when God whispers in your ear, anybody who gets in the way is fair game.

<...Miserable For Millions>

<iii.>

Two other aspects are worth mentioning. First, why it should surprise anyone that the announcement doesn't square with Carson's assurances to a Congressional committee that no plans existed to roll back the 2012 language? Trump can't keep his story straight, so why would any of his minions? If I were sitting on any of those bodies, I'd start with the notion that I'm not getting the whole truth, let alone a half, or even a sliver. In other words, if they told me the sun was shining, I'd go outside to check. And take my umbrella. Just in case.

From my perspective, it's hard to overstate the contempt that the Carsons of the world feel for rules and procedures. (I can't say "the Trumps," since I don't hang out in those circles, not have I interviewed any of them.) At best, they are nuisances to be gamed, or gotten around; at worst, they are obstacles to subvert, by any means necessary. If that means ducking FOIA requests, so be it. if that means lying to a committee, so be it. if that means telling a different story as each new contradictory fact emerges, so be it. Take your pick of the relevant quote here, whether it's William Henry Vanderbilt ("The public be damned"), or Abraham Lincoln ("Public sentiment is everything").

What's all the more galling, as I've already mentioned, is that the decision-maker here has no housing experience (so, in keeping with our house style, we put his title in quotes). in all fairness to Carson, he's certainly not the only know nothing cluttering up Trump's Cabinet. "Education Secretary" Betsy DeVos has never worked in a school; "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau" head Kathy Kraninger has no experience in consumer affairs, financial services or regulation, the very areas that she's tasked with overseeing. 

This same ignorance, as my sister pointed out in our weekly phone call, looms large over the rush to ban abortion in Ohio, where State Senator John Becker seriously suggested that an ectopic pregnancy can somehow be reimplanted into the uterus, or in Alabama, where State Senator Clyde Chambliss freely admitted his lack of scientific knowledge over the area he couldn't wait to impose his views. But it didn't matter, he asserted, because "from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know that a woman is pregnant… It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that." 

Such mangled reasonings put them on par with geniuses like the late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), who earned raspberries all around for describing the Internet as "a series of tubes," and email technology as "an Internet," as he clumsily waded into the net neutrality debate. Even so, such gaffes didn't prompt his colleagues to yank his leadership of the committee charged with regulating the technology. Failure falls upwards, as we've seen. Especially in politics.

Multiply this confederacy of dunces by hundreds, or thousands, and you begin to realize the enormity of the damage that Carson and his kind may dish out. Such matters often end up as late night comedy fodder, but let's not allow our laughter to push the consequences out of our minds. Will we recover? Time will tell. But in the short run -- or, at least until this policy is overturned -- millions will suffer for who they are, or who they love. Nobody deserves that. --The Reckoner