As Ed points out, New York is the current hot-spot in power usage in the US. While our neighborhood hasn’t had power issues yet, our building has the last few days. Tuesday night our entire building (a circa 1900 5 story tenament structure; 14 apartments) lost power for over an hour. Yesterday I came home and lighting in all the common areas was out, but power elsewhere was fine — except for intermittent outages as the super attempted repairs. As of this AM, the common area lighting is still dead.

One of our fellow tenants moved in his girlfriend last night through the dark hallways. The landlord is looking for another quick fix. He acknowledged the building wiring needs to be redone, but suggested that if he did that “he’d have to raise everyone’s rent” and doesn’t want to bother. That seems to have been the approach to maintenance over the life of our building and I’m surprised it’s still standing.

I’ve begun to think whether organizing the building tenants would be worthwhile. This building is the landlord’s only property, which he inherited. Many of the long-term tenants have very low rents (some around $300/month) and a few of us, while still rent stabilized, pay close to market rate. Those of us that are paying more would probably be willing to pay a slightly higher rent for things like repair of the electrtical wiring, installation of intercoms (we have no doorbell!), addressing hot water issues, and at least an assurance that the building is structurally sound, if not pretty. The long term tenants seem to take and attitude of “if something’s broken, I’ll fix it myself; I don’t want to rock the boat.” And if the landlord does these fixes, and uses them as a justification to raise rents (which he can do legally in at least some cases), it’ll be a much bigger hit percentage-wise to the low rent tenants. But given the shoestring the landlord runs the building on (I get the impression he basically just lives off the margin he squeezes out of the building revenues), he’s not likely to make any repairs not legally mandated — and he might even gain the support of his low-rent tenants.

Lizz finally snapped last night and decided maybe moving soon isn’t such a bad idea…

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