I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
scorn liberal New Yorkers reserve for their intellectual and moral betters on the right - one lonely figure who takes the worst they can dish out and never breaks a sweat?
After some thought, I came up with a number of plausible candidates. Perhaps an activist with the Catholic League, that perennial target of local Catholic bashers. Maybe one of the good folks at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, whose paychecks are signed by Rupert Murdoch. How about one of the band of intrepid military recruiters stationed in Times Square?
Then it hit me: a landlord!
Talk about having it tough in New York! Even more so than other places, the very word instantly summons up “cold,” “heartless,” “greedy,” and worse. It is the landlord’s lot to experience 200-proof, self-righteous New York leftism on a daily basis - even from non-lefties! In this respect, even my beloved New York Post, for all the full-blooded conservative politics of its opinion pages, is right down there in the gutter with the Times. Just a handful of pertinent Post headlines of recent vintage:
• “SLUM BUM” JAILED - LANDLORD FROM HELL
• LEAD PAINT LOUSE - KIDS AWARDED $21M
• RENT-FREE FORTRESS - TENANTS LOCK OUT LANDLORD
• BRAIN-DAMAGE TOT FACES EVICTION FROM ICY HOME
• GET LOST, GRANNY - LANDLORD BOOTING SENIORS
• SCAMLORD CAUGHT IN OWN ’NET
• LANDLORD: I KILLED MY TENANT
I approached a number of landlords who seemed responsible, with well-maintained buildings and nary a murder or brain-damaged tot on their resumes. No luck getting them to talk. To a man (and, in one case, woman), they were as cagey and paranoid as mob hit men. Even offered the print equivalent of dark glasses and phony beard, they were convinced they’d somehow end up with a liberal shiv in the neck.
Then I came across someone even better: a lawyer, Brad Silverbush, who represents landlords exclusively. Silverbush had no hesitation. When I turned on the tape recorder, it was as if I’d simultaneously hit his start button.
Remember Nick Naylor, the protagonist of the novel and movie Thank You for Smoking - the brilliant lobbyist for Big Tobacco who breezily notes that he’s among the most despised people on the planet? Brad Silverbush is that guy, New York-style. Charming, plain-spoken, and, above all, thick-skinned, he knows he’s fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, so couldn’t care less that everyone he passes in the city’s streets believes he’s doing the devil’s work.
As the son of a Holocaust survivor, he grew up thanking the fates for the privilege of living in this country, under the free enterprise system, and has liberals and their moth-eaten dogma pegged for exactly what they are. Sure, he acknowledges, there are some rotten landlords out there. But he also knows that the overwhelming majority of building owners do their jobs honestly and well, and, moreover, that if under Obama, the rest of America ends up embracing New York’s entitlement mindset, we’re doomed to turn into Bulgaria, circa 1962.
“Listen,” he says, “you go out to Wyoming, or Virginia, or anywhere else where normal people live, and start telling stories about what goes on in New York, and they think you’re making it up. If anyone tried to pull that shit where they live, someone would pull out a gun and - bam! - they’d put a stop to it.” He laughs. “But in New York, it’s the way it is, it’s reality.”
What “shit,” exactly? “Say you’re an average guy,” he offers, “and you decide to buy a small building in New York City as an investment. Sounds good, right? Next thing you know, your tenants aren’t paying rent, the city’s treating you like garbage, and you’re getting dragged before the Human Rights Commission because someone called you a racist - and nobody cares, because they think you deserve it.”
Silverbush has lots of stories, full of horrifying particulars, and almost all of them in one way or another summon the same adjective: Kafkaesque.
But let him tell it:
The first thing anyone learns as a landlord is that in every situation he is presumed to be the bad guy. The evildoer. And everyone with whom he deals - his tenants, the city, the courts - is a potential enemy. I work with one guy, great guy, honest as they come, who runs a family business, a small company that owns and manages half a dozen buildings in Manhattan. I actually fear for him. Being a landlord in this city, putting up with the crap he has to, is literally driving him crazy. Not long ago he got a summons for a minor elevator violation in one of his buildings. It was a mistake - some bureaucrat had put down 2006 instead of 2007. So he’s charged with being a year overdue with making the repair, which is a criminal violation. He can go to jail for this. But he’s a trusting guy, so he goes down to Criminal Court, figuring he’ll explain the mistake and that’ll be that. Doesn’t even bring a lawyer. Right, fat chance. There he is, surrounded by hookers and drug dealers, “mother rapers and father rapers,” and they’re all getting off with twenty-five-dollar fines. When it’s his turn, the judge won’t even listen to his explanation, just assumes he’s a lying prick and starts threatening to throw him in jail! He ends up having to pay an $1800 fine - more than all the real criminals combined.
He pauses. “His crime was that he owned property in New York City.”
That’s how most of the Housing Court judges are - with only a couple of exceptions, maybe two out of twelve, just a real landlord-hating bunch. I had a case not long ago where we absolutely had the guy dead to rights. A dentist. He had an apartment on the East Side but was actually living across town with his girlfriend. I had testimony up the wazoo-I had the super, the managing agent, the doormen in both buildings, the mother of his child! But the judge, formerly a Legal Aid attorney, brushes it all aside with one sentence: ‘I find all the landlord’s witnesses not worthy of belief.’ Boom, it’s over. Even the tenant’s attorney couldn’t believe he won the case.
The former Legal Aid judges are the absolute worst. There’s one whose husband is the head of criminal Legal Aid in Manhattan. How’s that for a left-wing combo? Sometimes I just picture the two of them at dinner, sipping cheap wine and laughing at guys like me and my clients. I mean, these are people who never spent a day in the private sector in their lives, and just have real contempt for it. There’s not even any pretense: the rules, the regulations, the law, everything’s constantly open to reinterpretation.
I just had a case where the building had a firm “no pet” policy and this woman had a dog. The landlord wasn’t unreasonable. He would’ve allowed it, but the woman was incredibly nasty and the dog was even nastier; it kept scaring little kids in the elevator. So what happens? The woman argues that she’s entitled to “a reasonable accommodation,” which is basically a regulation put in for blind people with seeing eye dogs. She proceeds to produce affidavits from psychiatrists saying she’s depressed and needs a companion dog.
That’s another problem, by the way - you can get a New York psychiatrist to testify to anything. I have a friend who represents a guy who hacked up his girlfriend, boiled her in soup, and fed her to homeless people. Every year he applies for release because he’s gotten some psychiatrist to testify he’s no longer a threat to society. That’s a fun case. I go watch it whenever it comes up.
Anyway, the woman with the dog. Amazingly enough, in spite of everything, I win the case. But here’s the sick thing: Even when the landlord wins, he loses. Because what does she do now? She files a human rights complaint against the landlord for failing to provide the reasonable accommodation for her dog!
Oh, man, the Human Rights Commission! Their hearing officers are even worse than the Housing Court judges. The assumption is that the landlord’s done wrong - otherwise, why would you be there? So you walk in and all they want to talk about is how you’re gonna make it right by this tenant.
It goes without saying that in New York, everyone’s a protected class - blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, the elderly, the infirm. One woman went to the Human Rights Commission claiming that my client was discriminating against her because she was a young, single woman. I can’t tell you how many reams of documentation we had to file proving