Maintenance, Not Rent Poem by gershon hepner

Maintenance, not rent, is what you pay
once you have bought a co-op. It’s ordained
that you can’t rent a wife, and must obey
her rules and keep her well maintained.
I’d rather have a co-op than a wife,
since if I want I can sublet,
if there’s a crisis in my life,
a co-op and won’t need a get.

Get is Hebrew for divorce.

Susan Dominus writes about an aspiring noveslist Matthew Thomas, towhom the City of New York awarded a Mitchell Lama co-op in the Upper East Side (“An Upper East Side Co-op for a Pittance, ” NY Times, February 14,2008) :
Like so many other single New Yorkers who stubbornly persist in pursuing fulfilling but decidedly nonlucrative careers, Matthew Thomas, a 32-year-old aspiring novelist, endured a housing history defined by transience and tests of endurance. It’s a familiar loop to the New York-based artist, the restless move from the share to the sublet to the house-sit to the disastrous rental, always in the hope of making that incremental step up into something approaching livability. The closest thing Mr. Thomas had to something he’d call home was his mother’s house in Bronxville, where his 50 boxes of books stayed in his high school bedroom, along with him, when he wasn’t out of town in graduate school or crashing at a girlfriend’s place or sleeping on a cot someplace or shelling out more money than he could afford for a rental in Inwood. He went so far as to redecorate his old bedroom, tossing the Mickey Mantle poster in favor of artwork from friends. “That’s a purification, ” he said. If you’re just starting to feel a little sorry for Mr. Thomas, don’t. You will surely regret it once the story of the flimsy envelope from Maxwell-Kates unfolds. Fortunately for Mr. Thomas, his mother was flipping through his mail last August and noticed the envelope, which could easily have been mistaken for junk. It contained an equally flimsy letter, possibly mimeographed, informing Mr. Thomas that he was the proud winner of a relatively obscure government-subsidized housing lottery to which he had applied four years earlier. The letter from Maxwell-Kates, which manages the building, didn’t exactly sound like Ed McMahon celebrating the sweepstakes — it warned him he’d have to be approved, file forms and so on — but Mr. Thomas knew he was on the brink of victory. Sure enough, by December, he was the proud owner of a studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. With a little help from family, Mr. Thomas, who’s been working as a teacher in a Manhattan private school, had saved just enough to buy it outright: $14,000 cash. His monthly maintenance is a whopping $295.For Virginia Woolf, creative freedom arrived when her aunt, out for some fresh air in Bombay, fell off a horse and left her niece an annual income “forever, ” as Woolf writes with gratitude in “A Room of One’s Own.” For Matthew Thomas, that precious freedom arrived when the faceless bureaucracy of New York’s Mitchell-Lama Housing Program churned out his name, guaranteeing him not just any room of his own, but a miraculously inexpensive room he could have, if he liked, forever. What some of his Upper East Side neighbors might pay for a two-week rental in Southampton, he paid for a lifetime’s worth of liberation. “I feel less whipped by the demon of fear that I have to get my novel done overnight in order to make life possible, ” said Mr. Thomas, surrounded by the last of the boxes of the books he’d brought to the studio on 88th Street between Second and Third Avenues. His new building — institutional brown brick, but around the corner from Elaine’s — is one of the 24 Mitchell-Lama co-op buildings in Manhattan, rare commodities every one, throwbacks to a time when aspiring writers (and teachers and young women who worked at Lord & Taylor) could still afford to settle into a small, cozy place on a Manhattan street with a Laundromat nearby. Now that crowd could wait a long time for a boon like the one Mr. Thomas currently enjoys — a typical wait in Manhattan for co-ops in Mitchell-Lama lasts 10 years, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Mr. Thomas, a superstitious Irish-Catholic by his own description, refrained from broadcasting his good fortune until he actually owned the apartment, having christened it with a celebratory plastic foam cup of wine. “I’m persisting in this weird feeling that this will all be taken away from me by some Kafkaesque bureaucratic oversight, ” he said, sitting at the desk in the 350-square-foot studio, which came with a full bath but no stove. IT’S easy to feel a touch of nagging resentment toward the neighbors upstairs who netted $30,000 more for their apartment simply because they installed that bewitching Wolf stove, or the friend who brags about the steal in Cobble Hill that her real estate agent, her mom’s roommate at Smith, threw her way. Mr. Thomas’s good fortune, however, seems wholly outside the zero sum game that is the New York City housing market. Yes, his bargain is the ultimate swag, but it’s not the kind that goes to the people who could probably afford it on their own, the usual recipients. It’s the kind that goes to people whose income falls below $49,625, as the program requires, the kind of people increasingly fleeing Manhattan, taking with them the workaday concerns and artistic ambitions that bear less and less on the island’s cultural temperament. Mr. Thomas reports that his writing has been going exceptionally well. “Definitely inspiration comes from peace of mind, ” he said. (Or, as Woolf put it, it’s remarkable “what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.”) “I find the rent really inspiring, ” Mr. Thomas said. A homeowner now, he caught himself with a slow, sweet smile. “I mean, the maintenance.”
E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com


2/14/08