Author: Chris Bodenner

by Chris Bodenner

A reader quotes Josh Barro:

“The only real outrage is that Extell had to build affordable units at all.” Pardon me, but fuck that. A legitimate goal for a city is to make provision for housing to its low-income residents. In the not-so distant-past, that goal was met by housing projects in the ghetto. It only took a generation or two to quickly realize that wasn’t the best way to go.

The new way is to lavish massive subsidies on developers in exchange for a certain number of the total housing units in a development to remain affordable for a period of time. It works like a mortgage, only no repayment is required. The subsidy could be direct cash in the project or more lucrative low-income housing tax credit deals.

Here Extell is being allowed to boost its square footage and have their development subsidized. The city is able to meet its goals. Extell could jog on and find another project, but they didn’t because there is more money to be made. Outrage? Excuse me again when I say fuck that.

Another:

As a New Yorker who lives in a similar “80/20” building on the Upper West Side, I strongly support John Barro’s position. I pay $5200 a month for a 1050 square foot apartment with two beds and two baths on a high floor of our building that has Hudson River views.

I know to 99% of the country, that figure is ridiculous, but in New York, it is what it is. Over the past few months, our management company has been jacking rents on both vacancies and renewals by at least 20%, meaning that if I want to stay in my apartment I have to pay $6200 or more. So my wife and I have decided to move.

Meanwhile, 12 floors below us are “low-income tenants” living in basically the same apartment without the view of the Hudson River – for less than $1,000 a month. Do you know how much more disposable income I would have if I could pay $1,000 a month? Of course, the 20% of the units that are rent-controlled/rent-stablized will not be faced with the same level of rent increases.

Look, I don’t have the answers to the affordability of Manhattan, but my wife and I work our asses off to afford the life we live. So it’s unfair, unnecessary and unreasonable for folks who can’t afford it to be afforded the right to live in the same building, in basically the same apartment, for $5,000 less per month than me.

Another New Yorker:

This “new” development does not sound all that new to me. What I am about to describe are events of 15 years ago.  After ten years on the Section 8 waiting list, my mother moved from a slum on E. 103rd Street to a new building on 95th Street.  This building had two wings: one of five or six stories of Section 8 housing connected to a high-rise tower of luxury condos, separated by the spa and fitness facility.  Along with a separate elevator bank, there was a separate entrance for the Section 8 wing to the street, but one could use the avenue entrance door at any time.  At first blush, the “separateness” seemed to be appalling.

Then a reality check.  My mother’s apartment was very nice and nicely equipped, the common areas were well-maintained, there was 24-hour building security, the building staff – from management to cleaning staff – treated my mother as they treated every other resident: with respect and dignity.  And when my mother died, there was no trouble gaining access to her apartment, we received a very nice condolence card from the building management, and every staff person we came into contact had something nice to say about Mom.

Bottom line: For the last few years of my mother’s life she lived in a safe, clean building, and she was treated with dignity in the place she called home.  Compared to where she lived before that, this was a dream come true.  The separate “entrance” was – and is – a non-issue.

Update from a reader:

I am not familiar with the details of the proposed project in Manhattan, or of the building in which your reader lives who complained about the cheap rents offered to low-income families; however, I am in the commercial real estate industry and familiar with the issues and incentives and how it plays out here in the DC suburbs.

As in Manhattan, the extremely affluent DC area has a problem trying to provide affordable workforce housing.  Programs providing developers with increased density or tax relief to incentivize construction of such housing, leveraging tax revenues by having the major capital outlays be made by the developers.

I would be careful about assumptions that the subsidized apartments are essentially the same other than not having river views.  A couple of years ago, a local GOP politician and a conservative think tank with dubious credentials stirred up our community with talk about how recipients of public housing were getting luxury amenities and implied that subsidized housing residents were living in $1,000,000 homes.  A review of tax assessment information for one of the developments, however, showed that there were MANY differences between the market-priced housing and the subsidized town-home units.  The subsidized units not only were much smaller, but had basic finishes (the market units had granite and other high-end finishes) and no garages, fireplaces or decks (all of which were present in the market-priced homes).  Nobody who was living in the market-priced housing would want to trade places with the subsidized residents.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader joins the previous ones:

Recently my husband and I have been dealing with the decline and loss of our two beloved cats, Noot and Echo, who had been our “babies” long before we had human children. Noot entered our lives as a blue-eyed handful of white fluff in 1996.  In 2000, Echo joined us as a tiny grey kitten.  Noot was very avuncular (even motherly?) toward little Echo, gently playing with him, bathing him, sleeping with him.  As the years passed, they remained buddies, and seemed to grow closer to each other, and further from us, after our first baby arrived in 2006.  They went from being major lap cats and sleeping with us before we had kids (Echo slept cheek to cheek with me), to cozying up together in more remote areas of the house, such as the bathroom cabinet, to escape the little hands and frequent shrieks of our three children.  I always felt a bit guilty that our cats had been a bit displaced by the kids.  After all, they were here first.  But at least they had each other.

In his last few years, Noot had a number of health problems, including diabetes.  But with proper treatment and TLC, he made it to the respectable age of 16.  Then, one night last December at 3AM, my husband heard a strange meowing sound and found Noot having a major seizure.  He looked so afraid.  I brought him to the emergency vet, still seizing, but they were unable to determine the cause of the seizures and he continued to have them throughout the next day. He had likely experienced major brain damage, and after 24 hours of the vet trying every drug he could think of, we decided we did not want him to have another seizure and we were ready to let him go.  I went to visit him at the veterinary hospital late at night while my husband stayed home with the sleeping kids, and even though he was unconscious I stroked him and lay my head against him and told him how much we loved him.  Then I stayed with him while the doctor gave him the drugs that brought his suffering to an end.

After Noot was gone, we were thrown off by our grief and by the huge hole his death left in our family. Eight months later, we still think of him all the time. Echo was very confused by Noot’s absence and went through a huge change in behavior.

Usually quiet, he meowed loudly all over the house for months, especially at night, presumably looking for Noot.  Without his “older brother” cat to keep him company, he suddenly inserted himself into the daily life of our family, came out and sought affection from the kids during the day, and started sleeping in our bed again after six years of hiding out with Noot.  I was delighted to have my little gray buddy sleeping in the crook of my arm with his cheek against mine again after so many years.  We think of cats as being more solitary animals, but Echo clearly noticed his companion was gone and grieved deeply for him.

Last fall, Echo had been diagnosed at age 12 with chronic renal failure, after the vet had noticed an unexpected weight loss since his last visit.  Other than slimming down a bit (which was not entirely unwelcome, as he had been a bit pear-shaped for quite some time), he exhibited no other outward symptoms and retained enough kidney function to carry on with his usual activities.  We changed to prescription food and gave him daily meds and were happy to see him still jumping up on the counter to drink out of the faucet and generally looking well.

This spring, we had to add at-home subcutaneous fluid infusions a few times a week, to help flush the toxins out of his body, but he still appeared largely well.  He also started eating less, and keeping weight on him became more of a challenge. About a month ago, he stopped eating entirely and started his final decline.  He was hospitalized to get IV fluids for a few days, to see if they could give him enough of a boost to start eating again. They released him hoping we could get him to eat at home.  In addition to new meds and daily subcutaneous fluid infusions, I tried everything to get him to eat something – regular food, treats, super-rich food, high-calorie nutritional gel, liquid food, and sometimes he would give me some hope by eating a little, but never a significant amount.  He continued to get weaker but did not look like he was in pain.  We tried to give him as much love as possible. (I’ve attached a photo of Echo in better days.)

While Andrew was working through deciding “when it was time” for Dusty, I was struggling with making the same decision for my Echo. We wanted to keep him with us as long as possible, and yet we knew that his kidneys could not be fixed and so he had a limited amount of time left.  I had read that the very end of kidney failure can be excruciatingly painful.  We did not want to wait too long and have him reach the point where he was in pain and afraid.  But it was so hard to let him go.

This weekend he took another turn for the worse and it appeared that he was no longer drinking.  I left the kids with good friends Sunday night for a sleepover, and my husband and I had a difficult discussion about Echo over dinner.  We agreed that it was time to help him have a good death.  When we got home, we picked up Echo is his cozy bed, put his blankie over him, and he rode on my lap in the passenger seat. No scary cat cage/carrier for this trip.

In the exam room, he lay wrapped in his blanket on his warm bed, in my lap, with my husband and I both softly petting him and talking to him, while the drugs were administered.  He died totally relaxed and purring loudly, which is the best possible death we could have given him.  We have to remind each other we did the best we could, that we did everything possible to keep him alive, and that helping him die well was what he really needed from us in the end.  But it is still so hard, isn’t it?

Another reader:

I know this is piling on because everyone has a story to tell about their pets passing away. I’ve always had my other animals present when one of my dogs was euthanized.  It was a comfort to me as well as to the dying pet – until the last one.  My beautiful Golden Retriever had a hemangiosarcoma of the spleen (also labeled the “silent killer”) and within two hours was literally bleeding to death.  At the time I didn’t know the diagnosis, only that she needed immediate care at the emergency clinic.  She was put to sleep there.  I was so traumatized and desolate that I couldn’t even think.

I always thought that our younger dog, Chloe, a reactive rescue, was the Alpha in our family.  After Abby died, Chloe at first relished the extra attention. But she eventually took up the same habits as many others have described – eating very little, acting depressed, etc.  The most amazing thing to me was the fact that Chloe had never learned to tell us she needed to go potty; Abby always did it.  She never had to let us know it was time to eat; Abby did it for her.  She was lost without Abby’s guidance and all along we had it backwards.  Chloe was loud, pushy, and unpredictable, and yet it was Abby who was quietly in control the whole time.

Chloe eventually got another sibling, and her attitude changed after first letting the puppy know who was boss.  She is a much happier having another dog in her pack.  My best to Eddy, Andrew and Aaron.  It does get better, but not without the wistful smile on your face when you remember your four-legged buddy.

Another zooms out a little:

I have been loosely following your long-running thread on the decline and death of sweet Dusty and other readers’ pets. I’ve been navigating similar waters now for a year. My wife, son and I had a beautiful black lab, Manny. And like so many of your readers, I have an endless supply of stories that would make us laugh and cry – often at the same time. As a parent, I was so appreciative of how loyal, trustworthy and tolerant he was of my son who – as a toddler – harassed him endlessly. But mostly I think of Manny’s greatest gift was his love that he gave me ceaselessly as I mourned the death of my mom last September.

I was estranged from her – as with the rest of my immediate family – and I was forbidden from seeing her at the end. I could have flown or driven from the Bay Area to LA in time to make it, but I honored their ostracism so not to cause a scene at the hospital. Turns out I could have gone because the rest of them decided to let her die alone at the hospital that night. So my mourning was, and continues to be, soul wrenching.

Manny was my loyal companion through it all. As I neared the holidays, I dreaded having to participate in festivities and spend time with my in-laws – who I dearly love but have struggled with because they have implored me to reconnect with my surviving family despite years of physical, psychological and emotional abuse directed at all three of us. The holidays at the in-laws were indeed hellish. But I was so thankful to come home on January 1st and be back with just the four of us (my loving spouse, beautiful boy and loving lab). Manny died the next morning of heart failure. He was 13 and half – quite long for a lab.

While I do consider myself spiritual and one who has his believes (but not religious), I have never bought into concepts of “meant to be” or spirits visiting us or even animals having some human-like intuition. Not any more. I don’t believe in “coincidence” very much now. As I reflected back on Manny’s life, I could not help but keep coming back to the timing of us death: 24 hours after our return from what I knew would be a hellish 10-day trip with in-laws that would test my last nerve. This was a trip that I had been dreading since Halloween. He stayed with me even then. Had he died prior to then, I would have absolutely lost it. Manny knew. He KNEW. He took his very last ounce of loving energy to stay with me and get me through it all.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I’d like to comment on the “controversial” lip-kiss shared between two Russian athletes earlier in the week. It’s important to remember that other cultures have not eroticized same-sex kisses as Americans have. Here is a link about the history/culture of Russian lip-locking. And of course we can’t forget the iconic (fraternal) kiss of Eastern Bloc history, seen here [and a graffiti reproduction seen above].

We’re dealing with societies that, while deeply homophobic, still have a deep sense of same-sex friendship. I studied abroad in Moscow and Greece – both conservative Orthodox Christian countries – and was shocked to have a good Russian guy-friend, my age, put his head on my shoulder to take a nap during a long train ride. In Greece, men will drape their arms over each other in public and display physical affection that, unfortunately, will never fly among heterosexual men in this country and in much of the West. As the American media eroticizes this behavior, we run the risk of unintentionally unleashing a homophobia on same-sex (especially male) friendship that we in America experienced in the mid-20th century.

Another reader shares his first-hand perspective on Russian culture and homophobia:

As a gay man who lived in Moscow for 18 years (1989-2007), I consider myself and my dear Russian gay friends and lovers to be rather quite a bit more knowledgeable on the subject of gay life in that country than the usual parade of Cold War-trained “experts.”  I was there last September, and I’m in constant contact with a broad circle of Russian gay friends on Facebook. I would venture to say Russia has been in many ways less homophobic than the US, until very recently.  Russia has become suddenly more closed, and the US has become almost as suddenly more open.

People were absolutely fine with you being gay in Russia, with one big caveat:

like so many other things in Soviet society, you were not to speak of it. I lived with one of my lovers six blocks from the home he grew up in, we slept in one bed that his family helped us set up, and I was a constant guest at their city and country homes for any occasion, large or small.  But no one spoke of the nature of our relationship, keeping up the appearance that we were “just good friends.” He came out after we broke up, and their family is still as close as ever.  No religiously-motivated banishments, no condemnations, only a bit of mourning over the grandchild-not-to-be.  With other lovers we were out from the start, and I was treated with respect and usually with affection.

The current rise in homophobia is completely artificial, as evidenced by the unanimous vote in parliament, which included the gay clique in the clownish right-wing Liberal Democratic party, headed by the notorious bisexual Zhirinovsky (who was a habitué of some of the wildest Moscow sex clubs in the ’90s and whom I have personally seen make speeches about tolerance in a gay bar two blocks from my home there), and his deputy, the closeted gay (and up to now high profile gay-rights supporter) Mitrofanov.

The current campaign is part of intimidating the young professional class that began to rebel last year, and gays were very active participants in that movement. The rise of a money-driven brand of Orthodoxy has also fueled the fire, but it is a ridiculous farce.  It is being marketed to the broader public not as anti-gay, but as anti-pedophile, and while many are fooled for the time being, it is not the sort of thing that will hold up over the long term. Russians generally have a very healthy, sometimes even extreme mistrust of their government, and Putin’s chickens will come home to roost sooner rather than later.  Most Russian (and Russian gays) probably just say “just be quiet and everything will be OK,” which is exactly what Putin wants.

Moscow’s enormous gay bars and numerous others throughout the country are still partying all night long, the elaborate bath houses are still open 24/7. This campaign has more to do with crushing any issue-politics groups and providing an “us” vs. “them” cover for Putin’s dysfunctional structure and failings than it is about a national homophobic bias.

Previous Dish on gay-ish campy culture in Russia here. Update from a reader who sees things getting better in the US:

I’d like to provide an anecdotal rebuttal to this comment: “In Greece, men will drape their arms over each other in public and display physical affection that, unfortunately, will never fly among heterosexual men in this country and in much of the West.” It might please this reader to know that I do not believe that male/male affectionate behavior shall “never fly among heterosexual men in” the US.

My 19-year-old son played soccer for many years, and most of it on a “premier” travel team. One of the most interesting and amazing aspects of this all-male team’s group behavior was their: a) totally comfort with the concept of homosexuality; b) their often pretending to be in some way homosexual towards one another – and I’m not talking in an ugly and minimizing way but instead in a fun and I would dare say team-bonding manner; c) their complete immodesty with each other; and finally and most importantly to this discussion, d) their very affectionate behavior towards and among themselves. They would sit on each other’s laps, often drape arms around the guy next to them during relaxation periods; sit and lay very close to one another without any concern for appearances; lay around in beds together during team trips and generally have incredibly affectionate behaviors towards their team-mates.

These behaviors – and their apparent total lack of concern in terms of appearing gay – was often a topic of discussion amongst their Gen X (or older) parents. We all recognized that something has irrevocably changed in our sons’ generation.