let that tub-o-guts Rangle cough up one of his THREE!!!
Posted on 10/14/2008 6:22:13 PM PDT by andrew roman
Rent control, anyone?
A resident of Brooklyn, New York is facing eviction. It’s a fairly common, nondescript occurrence in a city of eight million residents. This particular resident, however - sixty-six year old Ella Taliercio - has been attracting some attention. She has been living in her place of residence - in a neighborhood called Park Slope - for half-a-century. She currently pays $147.08 a month – a rate that has remained steady for two decades or better – in a neighborhood where $2000-a-month rents for two-bedroom apartments are not unusual. (The rent was $33 a month when she first moved in, back in 1958).
According to the article, published in the New York Daily News:
The 66-year-old faces eviction because the Berkeley Carroll School - which owns Taliercio’s rent-controlled home - wants to renovate her building as part of a multimillion-dollar classroom expansion … Rent-controlled tenants are exempt from eviction unless the landlord is a nonprofit organization, like Berkeley Carroll.
Two decades ago, Taliercio was offered $50,000 to leave. She refused.
Two years ago, she was offered $20,000 to leave. She refused.
Now, she faces getting the boot after fifty years.
It is, indeed, an emotionally complex situation. Spending an entire lifetime (or close to it) in one place is something most Americans don’t experience. There is a Rockwellian splendidness in such longevity – a kind of storybook quality – that harkens to a different period, when mobility wasn’t so normal.
Taliercio says, “Besides the apartment holding all the memories, my whole life has been here. It's made a big turnaround. I remember the race riots - people left, but I stayed.”
Without question, the pain of vacating her home of fifty years - one that harbors so many of the memories that comprise her life - will be very real. Her sadness will be profound. Anyone with a heart will sympathize. However, significant policy decisions that affect a good number of people cannot be taken through a filter of micro-level emotion. While I genuinely feel for Ms. Taliercio on a personal level – and I mean that most sincerely – there are times when progress benefiting "the many" cannot be stifled to accommodate "the few" – or in this case, the one - especially when more-than-fair compensation has been offered.
Besides, it isn’t as if the Berkeley Carrol School is pulling this decision out of their hat and giving Ms. Taliercio thirty days to get out of their building – which, incidentally, every other resident of the building has already done. She is the only tenant remaining in the building. This has been ongoing for decades.
Did she reasonably expect to pay such a miniscule amount of rent forever? Will her memories be less poignant or significant if she leaves? Certainly she must have realized that she was living beyond her means for the better part of two decades, no?
The reality of life is that micro-level compassion cannot be an adequate barometer when handling macro-level issues. Nothing would ever get accomplished if it were.
I know to many of you I’ve probably spiked into the red on the “cold hearted bastard” meter, and I genuinely don’t mean to be ... but if Ms. Taliercio should live to be one-hundred years old – and I only wish her a long, prosperous and healthy life – is it fair for the rightful and legal owners of the building to wait until then before they are allowed to do what they want with their property?
i knew people in college who had relatives that passed rent controlled nyc apartments among each other.
While I think this lady should be happy with the deal she's had for all these years, this statement sounds like something right out of Obama’s playbook.
If Ms. Kelo had to leave her home, then this lady has to leave hers too.
It gauls me to be living next store to these a**holes in the exact same apartment paying $2,400 a month and a $7,200 broker’s fee plus first and last month security. In other words, she is paying $148/mo. and I had to pay $12,000 just to move into the building next door?
Rent control sucks and she probably got the apartment by getting hooked up by some family member or insider. I hate it and it makes the rest of us suffer. Throw her a** out in the street. For once in my life I’d like to be the black woman getting hooked up instead of the white guy (racist) who just pays and pays and pays and pays and pays...
It gauls me to be living next store to these a**holes in the exact same apartment paying $2,400 a month and a $7,200 broker’s fee plus first and last month security. In other words, she is paying $148/mo. and I had to pay $12,000 just to move into the building next door?
Rent control sucks and she probably got the apartment by getting hooked up by some family member or insider. I hate it and it makes the rest of us suffer. Throw her a** out in the street. For once in my life I’d like to be the black woman getting hooked up instead of the white guy (racist) who just pays and pays and pays and pays and pays...
let that tub-o-guts Rangle cough up one of his THREE!!!
Go take a cold shower. You are completely off the mark, as you suggest you might be. Jeeesh.
Or 'Star Trek III: The Search for Spock' 'Because the needs of the one... outweigh the needs of the many'.
Someone will appreciate those quotes, but the point in both movies was that they were voluntary choices made based on free will, not orders given by The One.
Relax. I meant no harm. I simply misunderstood you. I thought you were referring to my position. Indeed, I misinterpreted what you said. Forgive me. I meant no disrespect at all.
I was wrong.
:)
Andrew Roman
Brooklyn, NY
You said it!!!!!!!!
--do you disagree with this?
Before Bush revealed himself to be what he is it used to be ‘Bush Bots’ that would descend like a horde if something was ‘Out of place’. LOL.
I understand completely. I feel a bit of that “hair trigger,” as well - particularly in the past week or so.
“Bush Bots” ... LOL!
Andrew Roman
Brooklyn, NY
Actually, I was thinking Spock from Star Trek....
You are so ready to jump. I said the lady ought to be pleased she was able to play the scam of rent control for all of these years and should simply leave. The real point of my post was the applicability of the statement that the needs of the many should outweigh the rights of the few. Granted it is a reversal of what was meant and that was the irony of the statement.
—delighted that we are on the same page—I missed the irony.
Hey Andrew...
My grandmother owns a little house, about 3 blocks from mine,
She has owned it 50 years, and lives there.
Her annual property taxes exceed what she paid for the house, when she bought the house.
Where is her rent control?
call me a RINO on this one. She has not rented or swapped her apartment for a profit, she has only paid her rent done what the law has allowed. Tell the school to find her another apartment at the same price in the same area. 50 years in the same place, I think you have to let her stay.
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