She lived in a New York hotel for more than 40 years, but her life was a mystery
npr.org
npr.org
"The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims."
> At one time, there were many affordable places where a single person like Hasegawa could live in New York City. Many hotels offered accommodations consisting of a single bed in a cubicle, or a private room with a shared kitchen and bathroom.
> In the mid-20th century there were close to 200,000 units designated as SROs — single room occupancy. But by the 1970s, they had gained a reputation as hotbeds for criminal activity and the city began to shut them down.
So it was common at that time for hotels to offer long-term apartment rentals, but no longer.
these measures are, on a long scale, what drove a lot of homeless and almost-homeless to the south and west. NYC winters will kill you, but it's not hard to scrounge up a bus ticket to SC
From NYC, you don’t need to pay for a ticket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...:
“For several decades, various cities and towns in the United States have adopted relocation programs offering homeless people one-way tickets to move elsewhere. Also referred to as "Greyhound therapy", "bus ticket therapy" and "homeless dumping", the practice was historically associated with small towns and rural counties, which had no shelters or other services, sending homeless individuals tickets to the nearest large city. More recently, a nationwide investigation by The Guardian in 2017 found that many homeless relocation programs are offered by cities with high median incomes, helping people move to places with cheaper housing and a lower cost of living, but also fewer economic opportunities. While some individuals welcome assistance to help them relocate, others say that they have felt "targeted" and forced to move, under the threat of arrest by police.”
That Guardian article says (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...):
“New York appears to have been the first major city to begin a relocation program for homeless people, back in 1987. After the current iteration of the program was relaunched during the tenure of mayor Michael Bloomberg, it ballooned, and its relocation scheme is now far larger than any other in the nation. The city homelessness department budgets $500,000 for it annually.
Almost half the approximately 34,000 journeys analyzed by the Guardian originate from New York. In contrast with other relocation initiatives, New York is notable for moving large numbers of families, like the Ortizes.”
There's someone who has been trying to claim ownership through this mechanism of the New Yorker hotel across from Penn Station, with surprising amounts of success:
https://viewfromthewing.com/new-york-city-transfers-hotel-de...
One son of the founder is the owner of Kahr Arms (the arms manufacturer), and cofounded with his brother the "Rod of Iron Ministries", a weird gun centered church where they do AR-15 rituals and stuff...
Both churches are involved in heavy lgtb hate, anti communism (although seems like they sent some money to North Korea in the 90s) and some other stuff...
Nikola Tesla famously died in his residential room at the New Yorker Hotel, and I recently learned that after his presidency, Herbert Hoover lived at the Waldolf Astoria for 30 years.
edit:
> Rent stabilization sets maximum rates for annual rent increases and, as with rent control, entitles tenants to receive required services from their landlords along with lease renewals. The rent guidelines board meets every year to determine how much the landlord can charge. Violations may cause a tenant's rent to be lowered.
Basically a cap on rent increases, looks like.
That's rent control, not rent stabilization. There is no cutoff date for rent stabilization. Different units became stabilized for a variety of different reasons over the years.
I know people who have been living in rent stabilized apartments in NYC for decades who will never let them go, even though they no longer like the neighborhood or the unit.
Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for someone living in a $1,200/mo 1-bedroom in a nice area in Manhattan.
The building was an old one in the center of Manhattan, but newly renovated. I moved in in 2021, and I think everybody had moved in within the last 5 years. There were a bunch of young professionals that had graduated from NYU and such.
But this guy was the only one without the iPhone electronic lock on his door -- and good for him, the iPhone locks are a reason why I moved out of the building! (Unsurprisingly, the locks once malfunctioned and we were locked out of the building. Computers make everything work very poorly these days.)
Anyway, I chatted with him in the elevator, and once asked when he moved in. I believe he said 1989 -- anyway, it was like 3 decades.
He didn't look to be more than 40, so I guess he must have lived there as a child, and inherited the apartment.
Also, whenever I talked to him, he would say something super political without prompting, like "Adams is fucking slob, under Giuliani we had law and order" or something.
(Also, he was black, which may break your mental image a bit.)
A bit of an aside because it sounds like he really did live there full-time, but another reason why people in RS units wouldn't want an phone-enabled lock on their door is it possibly gives the landlord information on how often they come and go.
Some people who have units like that live somewhere else but just can't bring themselves to let the things go, so they use them as storage and go by once a week to check the mail.
The landlord put giant holes in my floor to get access to some pipes and wouldn't fix them for over a year.
After leaving the landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards -- even though we'd been in there since 1970 and the landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way. 100% of the renovations and upgrades we did ourselves. The apartment was left in great condition.
I completely agree with you that it's a trap. The place made me completely miserable and even though at the end I finally earned decent money to leave, I chose to leave the city entirely.
Best decision of my life.
> landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards
> landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way
Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move.
It's my opinion that if we want rent control, there should be a cap on the amount of time that ends sooner than "on death", especially if you're not old. (For old people who are basically living in the last unit of their lives, it makes sense to me to rent-control those).
Sure and we also stayed and maintained the building and the landlord's property through the 70s and 80s when New York was a cess pit. My neighborhood was famous for petty crime and was full of pimps, street hookers, bums and scammers -- New York was half empty compared to now.
My landlord still had their property because of tenants like us who stayed when life in NY was grim. I was just around the corner from a building famous for the landlord trying to burn the tenants out (The Windermere).
Also what the landlord was doing by not completing the repair was illegal. Fineable. Slumlordish. Having a 2' round, 1' deep hole in the doorway of my bathroom floor is a massive safety issue. You're saying my landlord shouldn't be required to repair it because of incentive? If I fell in their hole and hit my head on the toilet and died, they would have a multi-million dollar liability on their hands.
I'm saying the landlord shouldn't be expected to lose money on a unit. That's really not a drastic thing to expect, unless you are an entitled child who simply expects things to be given to them.
You were living in a rent-controlled apartment and your non-rent-controlled neighbors were likely paying double, triple or more what you were paying. Your expectation of even more beyond the privilege of living in an area that you should have been paying many times more for, is astonishing to me. You have CLEARLY never owned any kind of property, either to live in or rent out. That means there's this entire segment of reality that you have zero exposure to which is tainting your worldview with falsities about what owning property is like.
This reminds me of a story a lawyer friend told me about one of her coworkers. They all work for a nonprofit but this one coworker demanded to be paid more, based on nothing. Complete unrealism. shrug.gif
One day you should try buying any property at all, and try renting it out at cost while also still doing all the paperwork and having to eat the bills that continue to flow (such as mortgage) even when it's vacant. Then, also spend tons of time going to court to attend to frivolous lawsuits made by slightly-crazy tenants.
“It has long been the most affluent neighborhood in New York City.”
“The Upper East Side maintains the highest pricing per square foot in the United States.”
“Four of the top five ZIP Codes in the nation for political contributions are in Manhattan. The top ZIP Code, 10021, is on the Upper East Side and generated the most money for the 2004 presidential campaigns of both George W. Bush and John Kerry.”
Yes. That's basically east of Central Park at the southern end of museum mile. So, generally, a very good (if somewhat sleepy) neighborhood.
It's what most people would consider so, yes. It's an upper-middle-class area, clean and safe, if more than a little stuffy and uptight.
That's an understatement. It's consistently one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest (depending on the year) locations in the entire country.
It is, depending on the year, how you measure it, and what you consider "Upper East Side". That last part is important: the UES has three main subneighborhoods with very different demographics and characteristics. It's also adjacent to East Harlem, which is historically not wealthy and brings the mean/median down for any measure that includes part of it.
For example, here the Upper East Side is listed as the wealthiest neighborhood in the entire city, all five boroughs: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/6/27/15881706/nyc-richest-neighbo.... This is using household income, which is one measure. Alternate measures include median rent (skewed due to rent regulations), net worth, property values, etc.
Point is: calling the upper east side an "upper middle class" area is an understatement. If it's not a wealthy neighborhood, then nowhere is.
Also it's a miserable part of the city to live in.
What does seem to happen often is that an owner who wants to move but doesn't want to lose their nice rate will move and then rent our their old place, or at least try to, it can be difficult to qualify for a new mortgage while carrying the old mortgage and not having a history of rent payments.
There's some exceptions, USDA, VA, and FHA loans. All government programs. But it's tied to the property so only transferable to the purchaser. Very rare here even now with rates changing so much.
ARM, 5/1 may be assumable depending on terms.
Typically people refix after the term. My 5 year recently ended and my monthly cost increased as I’m now fixed at a higher rate for another 5 years - at 4.5%, although it’s still less %age of my wage than it was 5 years ago.
During the fixed term you can’t repay it without a penalty, but if you move house you can port the mortgage so it’s secured against the new house instead.
We got blown away by the pandemic that locked up the housing stock. So I cheated and built my own house for like 1/4 the cost it is on the market as it's almost all markup from the opportunity cost of losing the 0% loan.
For those that have lost hope seriously consider a prefab for like 60k dropped on some vacant land. Where I live you don't even need inspections or license to do it yourself. But you need to develop the land yourself, and not hire out a GC, because developers will always be chasing high margin luxury builds rather than the low margin methods I've discovered for economical housing.
Basically the poor have worse access to credit than other groups so when interest goes negative in real terms the poor pay for it.
For those of us here, that’s probably well within reason in most of the country where you can buy a house for <$600k
Sure the price of the houses has gone down, but higher interest rates mean my monthlies are higher than they were, which means I can't afford a house!
About 1% of NYC apartments are rent controlled, about 50% are rent stabilized.
In controlled units you might see a minor increase over time, but generally you're paying what the unit was priced at 50 years ago. Leaving typically means an increase in rent of 500-700%, and these are practically impossible for new tenants to get.
In stablized units the rent can only be increased by a percentage determined by a board, typically 2-3% a year.
That's not true.
Stabilized units can increase something like 4% a year, up until they hit the threshold that takes them out of stabilization.
Controlled units can increase 2% every two years and historically did not do so from the 90s until a few years ago where increases have been happening and the housing board has advocated on behalf of landlords for additional/emergency increases.
Rent increases can happen completely separate from this process through building improvements and from the late 80s through to the early 2000s, my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements.
Growing up about 80% of the units in the building were rent-controlled and when I left there was was only 1 controlled unit left after mine. Nobody in my family, even though they all still live in NYC, wanted to take over the apartment.
Most controlled apartment renters die and have nobody eligible to take them over (an immediate family member has to cohabitate for like 2 years with the renter). The number remaining across all of NYC is exceedingly small, like under 15000. There are ~4 million housing units in NYC. Rent-controlled apartments are true unicorns. But close to 75% are stabilized.
They would do shit like slap a coat of primer on the hallways and add $50/mo in permanent rent to everyone's bill (90 unit building).
Rent Guidelines change every year. They've typically been 2% or lower. Due to high inflation, the latest increase is 3.0%. [1]
There is no longer High-rent or High-income rent decontrol since 2019. Individual Apartment Improvements and Major Capital Improvement now provide a much smaller basis for rent increases and/or are temporary. [2]
[1] https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uplo...
[2] https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/08/rent-laws-...
To have rent control you have to have been in your apartment since before 1970. Capital improvements are how rent-controlled apartments had their rents jacked up between then and now. The majority of decontrol happened before any changes made in 2019.
The suggestion made before was that rent-controlled apartments were locked into the prices people paid 50 years ago and that's not remotely true. Also the number of rent-controlled apartments remaining in NYC is practically insignificant.
It's at the very least remotely true, if exaggerated
> [The median monthly rent for unregulated units is] $1,845
> The median monthly rent is about $1,400 for rent-stabilized units
> [The median monthly rent for rent-controlled units is] around $858
The OP was unclear, controlled units are certainly not "locked into" any price. To your point:
> rent control operates under the Maximum Base Rent (MBR) system. A maximum base rent is established for each apartment and adjusted every two years to reflect changes in operating costs. Owners [...] are entitled to raise rents the [..] the average of the five most recent Rent Guidelines Board annual rent increases for one year renewal leases [...] until they reach the MBR
https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2022/09/fact-sheet...
Owners are so anxious to get tenants out (so they can start the gouging) that they offer tenants in controlled units buyouts to leave.
> In general, a buyout could range from $20,000 to $60,000
https://www.singhranilaw.com/post/understanding-and-negotiat...
> my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements
Ugh, your story is not uncommon sadly.
Right -- that's not a trap; it's a choice.
Harder than it used to be though.
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-ban-new-york-illegal-list...
On the bright side, it was a well-maintained building in a good neighborhood, so they had reasons to enjoy it being just the price.
I understand this may make the neighbours feel jealous, but hey, I'm jealous of my neighbour who bought his house for 1/3rd of what I paid for mine... Life's not fair.
This story becomes way less interesting, and way more common (NYC), once that info is understood.
Nope.
It is my understanding, especially in New York, that it was not uncommon for people to have residency in hotels in the early 1900s. I've always found that a bit interesting. Even today, I know there are some condos you can buy in upscale hotels, where you have access to the amenities, such as the restaurant, laundry, and cleaning services.
Nope. It's stuff like:
Lack of space. Think how much smaller your hotel room is compared to an apartment. You want to buy your own TV, with a sound system, and do an Arduino project? No space.
Poor sound proofing: Lots of noise from neighbors.
No kitchen: It's fine if you're gone for a few days, but if you're in one for a month, you likely will need to cook something. Most people can't afford to eat out all the time (and it's not healthy to do so).
I recall once while in school, there was a new fancy apartment complex being built that students had signed a lease for. Unfortunately, there were delays so the company set them up in a hotel for 2 months till the apartment was ready. These are all the complaints those students had about the hotel experience. Nice in the beginning, but not a good long term solution.
[1] https://www.extendedstayamerica.com/hotels/il/chicago/westmo...
[2] https://www.hilton.com/en/hotels/mspeihw-homewood-suites-edi...
[3] https://signaturemgmgrand.mgmresorts.com/en/hotel/one-bedroo...
Oh and of course the folks still had to pay their rent those months. It seems like a nice deal because the monthly rates for those rooms are a lot more than the rent they paid but in reality they're getting less than what they paid for.
When I visit the US I am always struck by how much stuff people own there, and a lot of that is kitchen stuff specifically. But most of the world -- including many other developed countries -- make do with less and don't necessarily even think about it.
You don't need a large variety of spices, and spices are compact as heck.
If you're going to cook, you can buy same-day or even a few days' worth of food.
It may surprise you to learn that most people want a quality of life exceeding that of a hobo.
Do you really think it's near impossible to endure hotel room or compact apartment living living unless you can absolutely have the tools and space of a full-blown suburban kitchen in there? Comments like these truly remind me of how removed a certain subset is from how billions of people can live comfortably for years on end by improvising modestly.
Similar to another example comment I saw by someone on this site who really thought that it was just impossible to make coffee at home unless he had a full-blown espresso/capuchino machine of the kind some commercial cafe might use.
It also helps if you know you'll be back in your house in a month or even two--and you're fine with just not doing some activities/hobbies while you travel.
My trips were always the Sunday night out, Thursday night home type, where probably the biggest issue is the disorientation. One Courtyard Marriott looks just like another, even across countries. Rental cars quickly lose any excitement. Stuck in some suburban office park with your choice of Chilibees or Ruby Garden? You can see where nutrition quickly drops to zero if you aren't really cognizant. And then there's the relationship part. If I'd been single it might have been awesome, but I had little kids at home and it was a tough few years for what in hindsight was limited financial and career gain. Glad we live in an era where more of the work can be done remotely.
It's not like these were a Holiday Inn or something!
The difference with modern hotel residences is that they tend to have a full kitchen etc, and be more of a condo building with a hotel at the bottom (usually).
i think it would be interesting to see more places lean into this. personally, I would gladly give up my apartment's kitchen in exchange for a staffed central building kitchen
the chefs there are probably better cooks than me anyway
I think some of the older ones had shared kitchens, more like a dorm setup.
I'd dare say most people are better off eating from such a cafeteria for 80-90% of their meals, so long as they have the option 10-20% of the time to go out and get something different to switch things up.
I’ve lived in apartment hotels for 1-2 months at a time for the past 6 month and it can be quite addictive coming home to a well made bed.
Not to mention self-cleaning bathroom.
Learning to make your own bed like that couldn't take more than a few hours... Treat yourself.
Time difference, doctor/dental visits, mail, family, and work life balance are brutal.
Getting a call when your partner totals a car, and ends up having one of their worst days, and just needs a physical person to see and comfort them really makes it seem pointless. Life happens and its hard enough when you're able to return home everyday.
Space considerations aside, the worst part is the noise. From hearing people next door due to thin walls, to people stomping around above you, to housekeepers letting each and every door they open slam shut, and more, the best takeaway I had was that if I rented an apartment and it was noisy, escaping to a hotel would not be the right solution.
However, I will 100% recommend booking a hotel over using a vacation rental website (I'm not going to name names to stem aby free advertising).
I do prefer to be home. But let’s not deny that going to a high end hotel in a top tier city is glamorous.
If the breakfast is expensive but you get it for free, it’s going to be a very nice experience
I avoid hotels and almost always rent an apartment.