Posted by
Andrew Roman on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 5:11:24 PM
Rent control, anyone?
A resident of Brooklyn, New York is facing eviction. It’s a fairly common, nondescript occurrence in a city of eight million residents. This particular resident, however - sixty-six year old Ella Taliercio - has been attracting some attention. She has been living in her place of residence - in a neighborhood called Park Slope - for half-a-century. She currently pays $147.08 a month – a rate that has remained steady for two decades or better – in a neighborhood where $2000-a-month rents for two-bedroom apartments are not unusual. (The rent was $33 a month when she first moved in, back in 1958).
According to the article, published in the New York Daily News:
The 66-year-old faces eviction because the Berkeley Carroll School - which owns Taliercio’s rent-controlled home - wants to renovate her building as part of a multimillion-dollar classroom expansion … Rent-controlled tenants are exempt from eviction unless the landlord is a nonprofit organization, like Berkeley Carroll.
Two decades ago, Taliercio was offered $50,000 to leave. She refused.
Two years ago, she was offered $20,000 to leave. She refused.
Now, she faces getting the boot after fifty years.
It is, indeed, an emotionally complex situation. Spending an entire lifetime (or close to it) in one place is something most Americans don’t experience. There is a Rockwellian splendor in such longevity – a kind of storybook quality – that harkens to a different period, when mobility wasn’t so ordinary.
Taliercio says, “Besides the apartment holding all the memories, my whole life has been here. It's made a big turnaround. I remember the race riots - people left, but I stayed.”
Without question, the pain of vacating her home of fifty years - one that harbors so many of the memories that comprise her life - will be very real. Her sadness will be profound. Anyone with a heart will sympathize. However, significant policy decisions that affect a good number of people cannot be taken through a filter of micro-level emotion. While I genuinely feel for Ms. Taliercio on a personal level – and I mean that most sincerely – there are times when progress benefiting "the many" cannot be stifled to accommodate "the few" – or in this case, the one - especially when more-than-fair compensation has been offered.
Besides, it isn’t as if the Berkeley Carrol School is pulling this decision out of their hat and giving Ms. Taliercio thirty days to get out of their building – which, incidentally, every other resident of the building has already done. She is the only tenant remaining in the building. This has been ongoing for decades.
Did she reasonably expect to pay such a miniscule amount of rent forever? Will her memories be less poignant or significant if she leaves? Certainly she must have realized that she was living beyond her means for the better part of two decades, no?
The reality of life is that micro-level compassion cannot be an adequate barometer when handling macro-level issues. Nothing would ever get accomplished if it were.
I know to many of you I’ve probably spiked into the red on the “cold hearted b*stard” meter, and I genuinely don’t mean to be ... but if Ms. Taliercio should live to be one-hundred years old – and I only wish her a long, prosperous and healthy life – is it fair for the rightful and legal owners of the building to wait until then before they are allowed to do what they want with their property?
Andrew Roman, Brooklyn, NY