I’ve lived in New York for 13 years and earn $64,000. Why am I being evicted now?
O ne day this past summer, I came home from work to find a letter wedged in the crack of the heavy steel door that I have lived behind for the past six years. Like so many that bear bad news, it was folded neatly into thirds.
The letter informed me that I was a month and a half late on my rent, and if I didn’t pay my balance in 30 days, the property company that owns my 100-plus-unit building would begin eviction proceedings.
I’d known this was coming, in some ways for a very long time. In the past eight years, my salary, which had nominally increased from $55,000 to $64,000, had, when adjusted for inflation, in fact been decreasing, just as rents continued to rise.
There is nothing particularly tragic or unique about my circumstances: I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, a marker of a middle-class lifestyle I had hoped but failed to attain by now, at age 36. I’d noticed, in the past couple of years, friends and acquaintances finding themselves at a similar juncture: one, at 35, moved back in with a roommate. Another told me the rent increase on their apartment meant, without a better salary, they would run out of money within the year.
The pandemic, which caused a citywide rent increase of 33%, might have played a role in this outcome. As might my choice to work in the media industry. “You can’t eat prestige,” my friend in similar circumstances likes to joke. And it is true that I could have spent more wisely, freelanced more often, and saved more judiciously. But, with things on their current course, addressing these factors would only have delayed the inevitable arrival of this piece of paper in my door. In the long term, the math just wasn’t there.
Though I hadn’t seen it at the time, somewhere in the 15 years
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