Shouldn’t we all just be glad that new affordable units were built at all?
Anyone who has dealt with the world of New York City real estate knows that its business is conducted in a euphemistic language second only to Orwellian Newspeak in sheer terminological deceit. “True one bedroom,” “spacious,” “comfy,” “sexy,” “cool,” “amazing,” “super amazing,” even nouns as seemingly uncontestable as “closet” and “light”: all are ruthless attempts to manipulate a population in which the prospect of hardwood floors buffed to a high gloss inspires a degree of lust beyond that of mere human flesh. Just this past weekend, I visited a “studio apartment” for which the word “cell” would be a generous exaggeration. So it felt like a bit of citizen’s justice this week to see the local news buzzing with indignant reports of the “poor door,” a scrap of real-estate jargon coined, for once, in sympathy with the people.
Allow me to decode. In 2013 Extell Development Company received city approval to construct a limestone-and-glass tower on Riverside Boulevard, a residential strip stretching from Fifty-ninth to Seventy-second streets, on the edge of Manhattan’s West Side. The area had once been a rail yard; two decades ago, Donald Trump, whose job used to be limited to erecting hideous buildings, erected a cluster of hideous buildings at its northern end, establishing the aesthetic standard for the developers who took over to the south. Extell’s new building, at 50 Riverside Boulevard, on Sixty-second Street—One Riverside Park, if you want to call it by its invented prestige-address—was to contain two hundred and nineteen luxury condominiums ranging in price from 1.3 to nearly twenty-six million dollars, along with a gym, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a rock-climbing wall, an indoor playground, a squash court, a golf simulator, and—in order to qualify for 421-a, a tax abatement available to developers who throw a smattering of affordably priced units in with the glossy ones—fifty-five rent-stabilized apartments reserved for people earning no more than sixty per cent of the area’s median income. And here we come to the crux of the issue, because, like the Grimms’ wicked stepmother, who tells Cinderella that she can go to the ball at the palace only if she can pick up every last lentil from a bowl of them scattered into the hearth, there was a catch: a separate, lowlier entrance for the renters around the corner, labeled 40 Riverside Boulevard—a separate, lowlier address.
The “poor door” was hit with a lot of blowback when the plans first got out. A few days ago, the Post went to the building to talk to recently arrived renters, and the outrage started up again. To be restricted from the convenience of playing a round of simulated golf in your slippers in exchange for a nicely priced two-bedroom in a city where the advent of three-hundred-square-foot micro-apartments was greeted with the kind of jubilation last seen when the thirst-crazed peons of “Mad Max: Fury Road” got a little shower is no great hardship. To have entry buzzers that don’t work, as the 40 Riverside Boulevard tenants told the Post was the case, while One Riverside Park comes equipped with a fleet of responsive doormen; or to not have light fixtures at home while the lobby of One Riverside Park is artfully illuminated by a chandelier of hand-blown glass; or to gaze out onto a courtyard accessible only to the owners at One Riverside Park are minor, par-for-the-course annoyances in New York. The tenants of 40 Riverside Boulevard quite literally won the lottery to be able to walk through the poor door; the building received more than eighty-eight thousand applications for its fifty-five spots. The average rent for a Manhattan two-bedroom apartment is more than six thousand dollars a month, while one at 40 Riverside Boulevard goes for about a thousand. Shouldn’t we all just be glad that new affordable units were built at all?