Sometimes bitching works
Impossibly long story but last summer the lady across the airshaft caught her apartment, and the one above it, on fire. They evacuated the building and luckily John was working at the bookstore and I was at Polish lessons in Clifton, NJ, because we would’ve freaked out too much on what to take, and how to get the chinchillas out and all that.
Luckily, for whatever reasons, our apartment was untouched except for some light smoke. The guy upstairs from us had black walls.
Well, we’ve got funny landlords. And yes I mean ha-ha funny. The firemen came in and bashed in everyone’s doors (but not ours). So they decided to replace all the doors, which really sucks because the doors were parts of the reason I moved in. I have to look but I don’t even think I have a picture of the old cool doors. They had these really cool and great eyeholes with a glass front and a recessed art deco style apartment number behind the glass where it meets the person on the inside’s eye. The hingers were really cool and old, and they were just great.
Now we have these boring Motel 6 type doors that boring landlords put in all the new homogenized apartments.
Well, we all got these rent increase notices. $17 per room!!!! For new doors that had to be replaced anyway to be up to code, and because so many people had their door locks bashed in.
So, we fought it. We wrote letters to the rent increase department, and we mentioned the landlord had already received recompense through insurance. This was months ago.
And last week we got notices that the rent increase is only going up $5.99 per room. Still sucks that it’s going up at all for something the neighbor across the hall did, and something that took away our really cool personality-filled doors, but dang! writing letters and bitching appropriately can be a good thing!
Pat on the back, pat on the back.