The Housing Crisis
By Grant Munroe

After Mikhail Zoshchenko, 1895—1958

There’s a housing crisis in New York. Too many people, too little space. Even with the economic trouble the country’s in now. It’s true. I’m supposedly a casualty of this crisis, but for months I never felt victimized. I thought I was doing fine – getting the better of the city, saving money. Living well, even. I was renting a fairly luxurious room in a three-bedroom apartment in the Upper East Side.

In a brownstone—just a block from Central Park. 67th street. Rubbing shoulders with all the big players: Donald Trump, Paul Iglacias. You know they have places up there. Just a few blocks from the Carlyle. Not too shabby. And the building itself? A gem from the Gilded Age. A model New York row house. Original brick. Nice marble steps up to the hardwood door. Even the iron fence – painted a beautiful lusterless black. You’d never notice the rust unless you took time to spot it. All in all, a beauty. A lucky find.

I had to leave, though. I couldn’t stay there after a friend ran me down while I was walking the park with Becky. He was laughing, he could hardly catch his breath. It wasn’t my situation, he said, that was so funny. (Of that he was envious.) It was the irony of it all, he said. He stuffed a book under my nose and told me to read.

But let’s get back to the room for the second. Let me tell you about the room.

First, though the brownstone itself had five floors (six if you count the root cellar, home to a pleasant Columbia pre-med student, his Indian wife and two children), I lived on the second floor. It was just a skip and a jump up to our floor. When I say “our”, of course, I mean my roommates. There was Tracy. She lived in the front room with Brett, who was either an accountant or a sound mixer, or both. Eric had run of the futon in the living room. I never saw him out of bed, though I was told he worked as a media planner for MTV. Preston and his two dogs (Ollie and Paulie) lived in a lofted bunk over the kitchen sink. Rachel, Hannah and Rebecca – three young, hyper-observant Jewish women, all in PR – shared the two bedrooms in the back of the apartment, where they enforced the apartment’s strict ban against the mixing of meats and cheeses—most often with a highly refined deterrent of guilt, occasionally with threats of internecine violence. Then there was Hector, the deputy city attorney, who lived on a cot in the hallway. And, finally, me. Who lived in the palatial marble bathroom.

That’s right. Marble. Rich marble, the color of buttermilk. Not too cracked, either. I slept in the colossal, claw-footed tub. So you can see why I didn’t have any complaints. I was happy to have it.

Soon enough I called my girlfriend back home in Pennsylvania. She came and we shared the bathroom. The rest of the house took her in with open arms—she offset the rent by $50 for each, which is no small shrift, believe me. (That’s brunch for two at a nice luncheonette on Lexington, mimosas not included.)

So we were all living happily until my friend ran me down with his book. Turns out a Soviet writer wrote a two-page satire on the same thing in 1926. On living in a communal bathroom in post-Revolutionary Leningrad. The Bolsheviks had housing crisises, too, evidently.

Well, I was fine with it. I know I’m no unskilled proletarian rube from the country. I have a job as assistant to the former executive producer of M.A.S.H., and I’ve met Paul Anka. But my girlfriend thought otherwise. She grew indignant over the story, embarrassed that we were living like communists. So there we were – back on Craigslist. Now we’re living in Harlem. Sure, we have a bit more space, and no one really cares if we mix meat and cheese. But we have to trudge up five stories, and the paint on the fence out front is flaking off in strips the size of dollar bills, no one famous lives nearby, my commute takes forever, and hell if I can’t find a place that serves a half decent croque-monsieur.

So fine, there’s a housing crisis. But the way I see it, you’re screwed either way. I wish I was back in the Upper East Side. I miss the place. And the lease was such a steal—just $1150 a month. A dream.

——

Grant Munroe lives in Brooklyn. He's currently at work on a collection of short stories.

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