Oh, 372 Saint John's Place, a.k.a the MGM Grand. Where the water runs like milk and honey, somebody always knows your name, and aunt Mae is ready to take all your troubles away with a homemade pie.
Hold up. Let's try and remember how we got from this... to this (see below).
Oh, that's right. As so much of the lovely posts on Craigslist, we must always remember, "Buyer Beware." As was the fun of finding out two months into staying at the Grand, the apartment was less than suitable. As my good roomie, Marni, once said, you come off the subway, see the park, the library, the museum, the plaza, the tree-lined Brownstone streets, and people walking their dogs and kids (we'll get to the kiddie leash in another post someday) and then you are smacked with the reality: you don't live on this street!
So when the bathroom starting falling apart, my bedroom (smaller than a jail cell) was being torn up, the heat in my room went out, the water was highly contaminated with lead, and to top it all of, we were robbed, I decided that I would no longer be able to stand it. That's when I got the really good news.
A friend from downstairs was telling me he had to move because his roommate, whom he was subletting from, was charging him $1000 and his other roommate a $1000 when the entire apartment was only $2000, hence getting rent-free. Funny thing was, his apartment was the EXACT same layout as mine, and our roommate had been their for 3 years without a rent increase. Do the math.
So I won't go on and on about how horrible she was while I was there but to find out that we were subsidizing her shopping sprees, etc., I found little tolerance for anything else. So I had to get out. She threatened a variety of things including sending me to small claims court for not paying her for more utilities when I had already paid her for two months before I even moved in, her accounting mistake, as well as saying I breached the lease for only giving her 28 days notice as opposed to 30. Anyway, after looking through the laws of NY, I found a number of issues with her legal claims, as well as a handful of counter claims I could bring should the situation arise. Luckily, it has not.
The moral of the story is apparently this is extremely common in NY, taking advantage of sub-letting and basically it is just too hard to find good protection for renters in this city. Landlords do very little in upkeep, on-site managers rarely get any repair work done, and roommates range from bizarre to demonic. I got lucky in Marni but I guess all things must even out. For this green New Yorker, lesson learned.
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