(From January 31)
In Weatherwood, there are a few big brick apartment buildings. Most are grouped along a single street, but there's one all by itself across the train tracks. Early sixties, brick, full of white boxy rooms. Very post-war. That's where my grandparents got a one-bedroom apartment after they lost their house. And then a two-bedroom, after the custody verdict required that I be given my own room.
It's not a large apartment. One of the bedrooms is reasonably sized and still holds both my grandparents' twin beds. The other, which was mine, and has since been occupied by Annajane, my uncle Ricky, and now Ricky and Marina, is only about 8 by 10. The furniture has stayed the same—even the same twin long mattress set (I got Ricky and Marina a set of correctly-sized sheets as a wedding present). Two of the walls are exterior, and one of those has a poorly-sealed door to the terrace. The other two walls have doors to the kitchen and the living room, respectively. The radiator is too powerful for the space, but doesn't run between midnight and 6:00 a.m. The room careens between temperature extremes.
Otherwise, there's one small bathroom, a galley kitchen, and a dining/living room, the last two open to each other but delineated by contours in the walls. The only phone is on the wall in the kitchen, right across the hall from the bathroom, at the central crossroads of the apartment. As a teenager, I spent hours and hours on that phone, sitting on the floor in everybody's way. And everybody else got to listen to my calls, of course.
While I was in junior high school, there were five people living in the apartment: my grandparents, Annajane, Ricky, and me. Annajane slept in the living room on a sofabed. Ricky slept on a twin bed, also in the living room, and left his music equipment in what's supposed to be the "eat-in" area of the kitchen. Ricky smoked a lot of pot, usually in the kitchen right outside one of the doors to my room. By the time I was in high school, Ricky was mostly gone, so it was just four people there. But Annajane, who still slept on the sofabed, never got any privacy. Nor did she ever speak to, or acknowledge, my grandfather, who mostly reciprocated in kind.
The apartment is, by now, decrepit. Sometimes it's hard for me to see the decay, although Beaker is always appalled. I don't think these apartments are meant to go without renovation for over 20 years. The paint is filthy. The plaster is cracking, especially around the windows and radiators. The kitchen walls and cupboards are encrusted with old brown grease. Both sinks have big chips in the enamel.
The biggest problem, though, is probably the carpet. When my grandparents first moved into the building, they got nice burgundy wool wall-to-wall for their living room. When they moved to the current apartment, they brought down that carpet, which covered about half the living/dining area, and bought more to cover the entire room. It's matted down a bit over the years, but has really worn pretty well. What's wrong with it?
My mother's dogs, over the years, that's what's wrong with it. Still. Some of them pissed in corners in the middle of the night. Others just had control problems. When she was feeling hostile enough, she wouldn't clean anything up until someone else noticed it. No serious effort was ever made to remove all the waste: no chemical neutralizers, no professional cleaning.
My uncle did get the carpet steam cleaned when he first came back, a couple of years ago. He was disappointed by the results. I suspect they just left the carpet wet, so it smelled quite a bit until it dried. But really, it's been much better since then. Not the same swampy horror.
Why doesn't the management fix things? Some combination of my grandmother's unwillingness to let workers in (especially painters) and their own hope that she'll die and they'll be able to gut the place and triple the rent. Also, anything they do replace gets them a permanent rent increase. My grandmother's paying $40 more per month forever because her oven broke—the replacement is the lowest-quality appliance I've ever seen. Couldn't have cost more than $200. After that, she's quite reasonably even more reluctant to let them in.
UPDATE Marina has done a lot for the apartment. Cleaning nasty corners. Putting up contact paper on many of the worst kitchen walls (it looks good, actually, as implausible as that must sound). Buying new knives. Shifting furniture so it's easier for Nanna to get around.
What is the worst about rent increases for repairs is that once the increase has paid off that repair the increase stays on permanently!
Posted by: rent increase | Wednesday, March 10, 2004 at 06:31 PM