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| This worked out pretty well |
ONE year ago, I was on the verge of losing something vital to my existence: my home. We had until the 10th of June to move out of our house. It had nothing to do with us. It had to do with a marital breakup among the owners and the fact that the house was worth about $4,000,000 on the open market, and we were being Ellis Acted into oblivion here in San Francisco.
The entirety of the Bay Area has suffered from a continual housing crisis since I first moved here in 2000, in that there is far too much demand, not nearly enough supply, and no real political or even societal will to do anything to resolve this issue. Having lived in the Mission District for 13 years, and had experiences that run the gamut from watching the tenement slum next door burn to the ground and kill people – there were probably 75 people living in that 11-unit building at a time, none of whom knew enough English to know to call 9-1-1 and alert the fire station two blocks away – to then seeing that building be rebuilt and its units rented out to techies and yuppies for $4,000. This actually simplifies most of my feelings about silly arguments related to gentrification and urban planning and most every other issue in San Francisco – in both the case of the deathtrap slum and the $4k a month reclamation project, it boiled down to the fact that the landlords are money grubbing scum, which is pretty much what most of the landlords are, and they are going to wind up benefitting either way, be the tenants rich and white or be they poor and Spanish speaking. Predators, either way. And clearly I made a mistake from renting a place from someone I thought was a friend for 13 years. That was naïve of me. Landlords are not your friends, not when the house that you live in can sell for $4,000,000. It’s always borrowed time. Amid this mess, which began in early April, my friend Amanda said to me, “I wish that I owned a place, so that I could rent it to you,” to which I responded, “but at that point, we couldn’t be friends any more.”
And let me tell you, having two months to move, with no idea where to go, in a market this tight, is a truly awful life experience that I don’t wish upon any of you. Every single minute of your day is stressful. You cannot enjoy anything. You feel guilty for taking the time to have fun and enjoy yourself for a few hours and do something like go to dinner, or go to a movie or a Giants game. “Shouldn’t I be looking for a house right now?” You chase leads, you look at terrible units and try to convince yourself that they would somehow be alright. You see random numbers in windows as you walk past and hurriedly call them, only to never hear back. Lots of that. Lots of unreturned messages. Lots of vague, evasive emails in response to your query. You set up appointments to look at places and the realtors never show. There were three of us on the search – we had decided to form a unified front, as all of us were needing a place by mid-June and we figured we’d have more luck looking for larger spaces than simply 1-bedroom units, which were and are so in demand – and between the three of us, we probably had 1/3 of our inquiries actually result in a response. Not being shown an apartment, mind you. That rate was even lower. I’m talking about just getting someone to pick up the damn phone and call me back. When it’s this sort of a market, and you’re looking for a place, and doing so from a place of urgency, to the majority of money grubbing scum landlords and their collection of mouthpieces and whores handling their business, you’re basically shit, and you’re reminded of it regularly. Seriously, kids, don’t try this at home.
And by the way, this is why I’m an active member of the Tenants Union here in San Francisco, and why I recommend that other people get similarly involved. Housing is not a privilege. It is a necessity. It is essential. But I’ve always likened the housing problem in a city such as this to the parking problem – there are way more cars than available places to put them here, but the city likes it that way, because of the many, many ways in which they can capitalize on it financially, be it through parking meters or the insufferable $500 worth of parking tickets you’re going to accrue in the course of the year no matter how much you try to avoid it. It’s that way with housing issues as well. Why would a zoning board composed of realtors want to drive down their future commissions from housing sales by making more of it available? So long as you’re making a shittonne on your investment (that $4,000,000 house that I was living in was originally purchased for $188,000) why would you give two shits about a goddamn renter? These people are trash, they’re money grubbing scum and need to be held in check.
Anyway, so a year ago today – May 25, 2017 – was probably the lowest point in the housing search. It was a foggy and cloudy and dismal morning and I was doing something that I’d always hoped I’d be spending my birthday doing: apartment hunting. Because god forbid that I enjoy anything, at this point. My boss was really helpful actually – “take the week off, get the hell out of the office and find a place to live” – and so The Official Spouse of In Play Lose and I were planning on spending my birthday doing more apartment hunting.
Oh joy. Seriously, this was the worst birthday ever.
We did have one solid lead, a place Doug had found in Alameda that we’d put an application in on sight unseen. We’d asked Doug what he thought of it and he said, “well, it’s a place,” which is something, I guess. Honestly, the three of us were growing pretty desperate. ANYTHING was looking like it was worth making the effort to land, including some places we'd seen which were godfuckingterrible. We had not even seen this place in Alameda, but we called over there on Friday morning to follow up on the application and also inquire about seeing the place, and the manager said she'd be happy to show it to us that day.
Getting from San Francisco to Alameda is something of a pain in the ass on public transportation. It took forever and we finally got there around 11:00 a.m. or so. It was at that point that the manager then said to us, “you didn’t get the apartment, but I'll be happy to show it to you if you like.”
What the actual fuck?
Honestly, she goddamn said that. That is one of the stupidest goddamn things that anyone has said to me in a long time. Seriously, you couldn't have just told us this ahead of time, and not wasted our time? How fucking callous do you have to be to not even show some courtesy? How fucking indifferent are you? Seriously, get bent, you fuck.
So at that point, I’m pissed. I’m really angry and I do well not to bite the property manager’s head off. At least it’s easy to sour grape in this situation and say “I didn’t want that place, anyway,” but quite honestly, I didn’t want that place, anyway, nor would I want someone as discourteous as that being an overlord for the place that I live.
I mean, seriously here, does real estate just turn you into a douchebag? My first apartment in San Francisco was in a building that was bought by a slumlord who was ultimately sued into bankruptcy and oblivion by the city, and they employed a whole bunch of lunkheads who doubled as security agents, wearing black fatigues and acting as if they were some paramilitary unit. One of them came up to me one night as I was smoking outside the building:
Andrew: Do you have any identification?
Lose: Aren’t you a little overdressed, Andrew?
Andrew: Have we met?
Lose: I was just in your office four days ago and you tried to pawn off a home loan on me, you dumb fuck.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? But I digress.
Where was I? Oh, right, I was standing there with my spouse for about 20 minutes on a street corner in Alameda, waiting for a fucking AC Transit, positively stewing. It took forever but we finally found a coughing, wheezing AC Transit and lumbered our way back to Oakland in order to catch the BART.
And by that point the sun was breaking through and it was actually starting to turn into a warm and bright day. And it was at that point that I said to KC, “you know what? Fuck these bitches. Fuck all of them. This is my birthday, goddamn it. They don’t get to ruin my birthday for me. Only I get to ruin my birthday for me! They can go on ruining my days again beginning on the 26th of May. So fuck it, let’s go to Swan’s.”
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| Eat here |
And KC liked the idea of going to Swan’s Oyster Depot for lunch, which is quite possibly my favorite place to eat in San Francisco, if not the world, and previously we'd gone to Swan's the day after I got laid off from my job at UC Berkeley in 2010, and doing so proved to be an act of both self-preservation and defiance, an act of "fuck it, life doesn't suck," which did wonders for my sanity, and we were there for like 2½ hours that day, during which time we ate approximately 1,000,000,000 oysters, and for 2½ hours, I didn't care that I no longer had a job.
This seemed like an act which was worth repeating, nearly 7 years later. We needed another reminder that life doesn’t suck.
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| I’ll take all the things, please. Yes, all of them. |
And as we were departing from Oakland's 12th St. station on the BART, intent upon feeding our faces with another 1,000,000,000 oysters in the afternoon and flipping the bird to our landlords, to the attorney threatening to sue us on the 10th of June and to every goddamn phony we’d dealt with in the previous couple of months, KC was scrolling through craigslist and perusing some apartment listings on her phone.
“Here’s a place we might want to go and have a look at,” she said to me. “A new listing, brand new, just a few minutes ago. The apartment is located in the Outer Richmond, out by the beach. It says here that they are showing the apartment at 5:00 p.m. tonight …”
We were the first people to see the place. The tenant himself was showing it, owing to the hasty nature of it all: his wife had just landed a new job in L.A., beginning mid-June, and they had to get out of town as soon as possible. He told us that the building is owned by a family trust, whose primary requirement for tenants is that they don’t burn the building down. They had zero interest in all of the nonsense you get involved in when you’re looking for a place to live in this city – no ridiculous jumping through hoops, no outrageous demands. The place was a flat located way out in the old Russian neighborhood of the western part of the city, and it was just a 10-minute walk from the beach:
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| Not bad for a backyard, eh? I like my backyard |
So, as I was saying before, May 25, 2017, was the high point of the housing search. Seriously, this was the best birthday ever.
I’m still sort of amazed how that came together, because we were truly growing desperate, and growing despondent, with mere days before we were going to find ourselves embroiled in what would likely be a long, ugly fight against being evicted, involving lawyers and courtrooms and judges saying to get the hell out of their courtroom and arbitrators and mediators, during which time we would still be living in the place, living in a situation where the owners wanted us gone and we would all hate each other so, really, who wants to be there at that point anyway?
But none of that came to pass because, out of nowhere, it just sort of worked out. I have no idea how. I’m not going to question it. Luck and timing is everything in this life. Sometimes, stuff actually works out.
I’m not sure yet how the birthday will go this year, but it will probably be less life-altering than the last one. And that’s a good thing. I would do well to avoid that level of stress again at any point in time in the next 10,000 years.
And I should probably also take this opportunity to wish my sister Kimberly a happy birthday as well. We’re not twins. I’m a year older but we share the same birthday – one of those oddities in life that ultimately comes to make you unique. Happy birthday, sis. I hope your birthday is, well, less dramatic.
