Got th po' woman blues,
And I can't be satisfied.
Said I got the po' woman blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got a full-time job
and still need daddy to get by.
For the past few weeks Raina and I have been looking for an apartment...preferably an apartment that doesn't have a broker's fee. I have a degree, and a fairly decent job as a public school teacher; I shouldn't need to have a roommate, but I do. The cost of living up here is so ridiculous that all I have enough money for is rent, bills, and a few drinks here and there. Now it's bad enough that I'm26 years old and I need a roommate in order to save some of the change that I make on a monthly basis, but today a little more shit was dumped on my impoverished state. We found the perfect apartment on 145th...right outside of Harlem. The rent is only$1300, so that's $650 each. We had an appointment to meet with the realtor today. We had to bring in 3 consecutive paystubs, tax returns for the last two years, our last 6 bank statements (yes i said 6), 3 phone bills, 3 electric bills, a copy of our current lease, and a letter verifying employment (i guess the paystubs weren't enough to prove that we were fulltime teachers). All of that to pay $650 in rent. So everything is going smoothly. The realtor even tells us that we make more than enough to secure the apartment. Then she started going through all our other shit and tells us that we will need a guarantor that makes 70 times the monthly rent, because our bank statement showed that we did not have an average of two months rent saved over the past 6 months!!!!!! What the motherfuckin fuck?? We are not trying to live on the lower east side; we're not trying to live anywhere where a person with "real" money would even want to live. We're not even trying to live alone. We just want to live in the neighborhood where we teach so that we can cut back on some expenses, and enjoy a little company. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. It's bad enough that we are educating the youth of America for basically no pay, and now we find out that we can't even secure an apartment on our own. Where the fuck are teachers suppose to live? In a cardboard box in front of the school or would they prefer that we lived in our lockers? And if we (and when i say we, i mean college educated professionals) can't even afford to live here, I can imagine how hard it is for people who are from the community to live there. I recently did a demographic survey of the kids at our school for a class I was taking. I was shocked to see that some of the students were living in an apartment with 8, 9, 10, and even 11 other people. But now it's not so shocking. You need to live with that many people just to get approved to live in a small ass apartment in this city. What if I didn't have any parents? What if my parents were just as poor as I am (which they are, but at least they have a little savings). Am I missing something, or is it too much to ask that I can afford to have a place to live on my own? I can't afford to live here much longer...literally. I'm not trying to buy a home...I just want to share an apartment with another college educated professional. I would think that wouldn't be asking too much, but I guess I'm wrong. How do people live up here?
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1 comment:
that is ridiculous toya. i know they say it is expensive to live in the NY, but DAMN! is that 70X thing real? that seems almost outlandish. well, if you want to stay out there maybe you need to pull what your kids are doing...grab not just one other teacher, 3, 4, or 5 of ya'll to get that apt. you are reminding me of how it is in cali when i was in school. people HAD to come together in groups just to have a place to go to sleep. and the thing is, people still need to do the same now that most of us are out making some kind of money. cali, NY, and a few other places are just like that. i understand how frustrating it is, but don't forget about your kids and the position they are in. the place wasn 't for you anyways! :)
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