2 June 2002

Facing an increasing need for solitude, respite, etc, I’ve spent a little time lately looking for an apartment of my own. We pay such regal sums at our current place, I figured I’d be able to find something decent without any significant change in the monthly rent rape. But as it turns out, the entire Boston housing market is like some kind of death-desperate vampirish lech clamping down hard on your neck and draining you dry.

The North End

I recently discovered that the four-unit building I currently call home, for which our landlord pulls in, collectively for all units, somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 a month in hard-earned tenant rent, has an on-the-books appraised value of only $600,000. This is absolutely fucking insane: I’ve seen single unit condos go for more than that next door. So our landlord pays taxes on a quarter of the total sellable building value — on a bad day. He probably covers his entire annual cost of property tax and maintenance fees in a couple months of tenant rent, a position incrementally improved for him by a near-total negligence toward basic building maintenance issues like, you know, heat.

Our kitchen.

And there’s something about the whole sick, sad affair that seems to me sexually perverse. I picture this big dirty den, the weekly meeting place of the Secret Society of Boston Landlords, where under the cover of darkness they gather to beat off to the current and rising rent rates. It’s a circle jerk of financial perversity — the one place in the city where supply meets demand — and when they’re done, spent and empty, a cadre of defaulting tenants is sent in to mop the spooge off the floor and drain it into gilded buckets of feudal excess.

Well fuck them. It’s time to find another way. I’m cutting out of the whole cruel game. Let someone else be a tenant for a while. I’m done.

I may be a little behind the curve, but I’m catching on.