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View From The Middle
I recently received a few phone calls from local landlords who complained about the "horror" their tenants have been putting them through. They say that, once primary negotiations are finished — and everything is bright and beautiful, with handshakes all around — things change, and the tenants seem to think they own the place. Now, Canarsie is, generally speaking, a residential community of private homes. No big industry here, just hard workers. Quiet, communal, by all accounts, with only a few apartment complexes; nice, comfortable houses; desirable by all means, whether by owner or renter. It doesn’t matter that the owners may be breaking their backs to pay the mortgage, the community looks good; looks like the pleasant place it should. It’s something we’re obviously proud of. Our residents, old and new, are striving to attain the American Dream of owning a home. In many cases, the houses in Canarsie are two-family and three-family affairs, and the owners go by the title of "landlord." With this title, they rent apartments in their houses, running ads in the Canarsie Courier and hoping to be able, thus, to help pay their own mortgage. After all, owning your own digs and having tenants is all part of that Dream. You always read in the dailies about the owners — mostly "slumlords" who own apartment buildings — treating their tenants like dirt. What you don’t read about is how the tenants can mistreat the landlords of private homes. A number of cases revealed to me throughout the years cite instances where the tenants move in and immediately feel they have the run of the house and, when chastised by the owners for some infraction or other, feel that withholding the rent is their course of retribution. After all, if it goes as far as Housing Court, the tenant, it seems, has the advantage of being the "downtrodden, defenseless" individual. Take the case of the elderly homeowner who told me his story last week. He and his wife decided to put up a basement walk-in apartment in their house for rent. It would help to subsidize them, since they were both retired and living on Social Security and nothing else. The house was, essentially, paid for, but there were those rising electric and heating bills, etc. They screened a few would-be tenants and decided to rent to a nice, childless couple, both in their 30s. No less than a month after the couple moved in, the trouble started. Every Saturday night there was a party. Not your regular birthday or engagement thing, but a loud, raucous, pot-smoking affair lasting until the wee hours. Every once in awhile, the police would be called to break up a fight and, of course, there were always bleary-eyed stragglers who could be seen leaving the basement apartment by the back driveway at dawn. Not a nice thing for the neighbors to see, either. The owners complained and eventually got the tenants to court, but with a great deal of charm and cajoling, it didn’t take long for a compassionate judge to be lenient. Turned out the tenants told the judge they would be good — and they were — until they eventually moved out (but not before trashing the apartment). That’s beside the point, though, because the owners’ blood pressure went sky-high for too long a time. They didn’t need that in their lives. For the most part, It’s obvious that the harmony and quality of living in Canarsie far outweighs any negative side of landlording. Co-habitating with each other (and keeping out of each other’s hair) is the general watchword here, after all. We’re happy with the philosophy of the Golden Rule. But when things go wrong in that landlord-tenant partnership, it’s time the landlord, whether he’s a "charmer" or not, got a fair shake too.
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