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As a Manhattan resident, I'm gutted by what certain landlords are doing, pushing folks who have lived in their apartments for decades out of their homes, as a greedy tactic to get more rent from newer tenants. It's one of the most disgusting, inhumane things I've ever witnessed in my beautiful city.
I don't like apartments - the idea of other people living, copulating and defecating above me - they make me feel as trapped as a slice of ham in a sandwich. When I was a student in Paris, I always rented attics right at the top of buildings, and as soon as I was making enough money, I bought houses.
Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father's company paid, in a Cadillac his father's company leased to 'scope out properties,' Donald's job description seems to have included lying about his 'accomplishments' and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to Black people.
The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.
When I first moved to L.A., I cleaned apartments after people moved out. When people move, they leave stuff behind and haven't cleaned for weeks. I like to clean - I have no problem with cleaning - but some apartments were filthy and disgusting. And there'd always be a random flip-flop left somewhere on its own.
There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.
The real story in housing will be a recovery in the economy that will drive a recovery in housing, When people are working, when there are more jobs, more households forming and people go back to buying cars, they're going to want their apartments and homes. And that's when you'll start to see a recovery in home prices.
I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.
New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.