This sounds impossible but it’s not. This also sounds like the person, is profiting but they aren’t. Anything associated to Welfare, the State, in your life is a form of prison.
My cousin got an apartment this way, the above pic close to the niceness of the living room. $300 a month in maintenance a month. The initial deal, she was on Welfare with two small children, was to get the two bedrooms if she could come up with a down-payment of $300 and a maintenance of $300. So she gathered $600 and bought a co-op 2 bdr, lower east side, 2nd Avenue.
Now from The Housing/Welfare side——they’d tired of the drama and lack of profit of housing Welfare recipients in apartments and paying landlords. Most times it worked out fine but in an overall context, the city, state, federal costs were a pipeline for private landlords. It was essentially bankrupting the City system as there was no profit to Welfare.
Step 1. But now there was a profit to Welfare—-what if Welfare purchased the buildings?
Step 2—what if there were a way to put the property into a person’s name, long-term but control the payments, the form, and the outcome. You already control the form as you’re giving them the $300 a month as say part of their $450 a month cash allotment.
Step 3-Form. There are three forms of residential, personal, real estate. Rent, Own and a Co-op which is a unique form of Ownership. When you outright Own a property, a house, a building, a condo, you own the whole property, materials, matter, land, 100%; when you rent the lease specifies how much of the material, matter, you are paying for only a monthly basis. But a Co-op as a hybrid was designed to allow for people to get in, the building/property was to retain ownership but to spread the risk by assessing the value and like a publicly traded company, selling shares.
So say there are 10 apartments in a building, each apartment could be said to be worth 10% of the total building valuation. Say the building was worth $2 million, then each apartment would be worth $200,000. The value to this creation is that it’s a long-term way of bringing together renters for a longer period of time, it gives the owners—shareholder status and ownership (which means they can sell the equity/property—-though a co-op generally has a Board made up of the building owner and all of the other unit owners that vote on the goings on of the co-op building—-who gets in, valuation, maintenance, etc. ) It’s a form of collective ownership but the true ownership never leaves the Prime Owners hands, he’s renting out divided percentage interests, not ownership in the truest, real estate term.
Step 3-Welfare says what if we become the Prime Owner of buildings? What if we buy buildings? We buy the Buildings then we turn to our recipients and give them “ownership” as co-op shareholders. The way that we do this is we design it exactly like a co-op where they purchase in with a down payment and continue having a payment and maintenance payment.
Step 4—-the magic of ownership as the Prime Owner is that you can designate the value of the apartments. So back to our $2 million dollar building. Instead of saying it’s worth now, you make it worth later. You say to the recipients that you get that $1200, $600 down-payment, $600 maintenance and you own a co-op in NYC, which we will be able to sell to you/transfer to you as complete a done deal in 20 years. The person moves in and the Prime Owner, Welfare, owns the building, puts in the tenants AND provides the payment for the monthly maintenance. It’s a perfect business model cycle where the Owner gets paid because it is paying recipients and the real estate is increasing in value exponentially over time.
Step 5—-Welfare turns to the recipients and says we will award you ownership after a period of time. Now here’s where we get into Social Class and Education. Some of us reading this knew the distinction between a house/condominium and co-op ownership being matter vs shareholder status. ( How many Welfare recipients do you think, like me, we pressed by their real estate mortgage brokering mother on a Spring Break to go to real estate school? I got off the bus, she took me to the school she’d arranged my free class with. Suffice to say, I understand the difference. My cousin did not.)
Step 6—My cousin figures at the end of 20 years she’ll cash out the co-op for the value of the apartment relative to the rising real estate rates in lower Manhattan. Her apartment would be worth upwards of $1-$2 million at the close of the 20-year cycle where Welfare promised ownership.
Step 7—-How My Cousin Fucked Up, Several Times—-she decides Year 16 that she wants to move down South to where more and more of my family have moved from NY. She has her older sister offer to me, to sublet her massive 2 bdr apartment because I’m the only relative up here making $80k a year to be able to afford it easily and I live on the isle of Manhattan and have for years. It took her older sister, her, my mother, a pastor and several friends a year to talk me into it. The basic theme was my cousin needed a fresh life start, she’d put her children into permanent foster care, having given up parental rights to them—-they grew up from 4/5 years old on an orphanage farm in upstate NY. Again, this is how we advance her, get her employed, give her a small income to start out on and the bosom of the family will receive, help, train and uplift her when she gets down South. It was a nice apartment. I relent.
Step 8—my cousin had been in arrears and therefore in Housing Court. The gap in the Welfare Housing system being that older recipients would get the check of $450 themselves and be responsible for transferring the $300 maintenance/rent to the Housing Dept. What could go wrong there? So she’s one of the hundreds, I even had adult students who were bad money managers, behind and Housing takes them to court to take back the unit. She’s able to pull together the cash through the City One Shot Deal—-every 11 months they’ll pay off your arrears. They pay off hers.
Step 9—-I move in. She suddenly decides not to move out a month later, because I’m paying her $650 a month—-she’d misunderstood my 1st low ball offer. I was offering to pay $650 PLUS the $300 maintenance, $950. I was willing to go up to $1200-$1400 a month. Because of Welfare recipients, Social Class and Financial Education point here, tend to lack higher-end math capabilities, she greedily leaps at $650. Which confuses me, until I move in and she decides not to move out. Now it makes sense. She’s getting $650 from me and $300 from Welfare—-to her she’s on easy street. When I handed her the rent and security and she came back several hours later with shopping bags from several cheap stores, I sensed how this would end. By Month 3, I moved out.
She had decided not to move and that she was going to rent out her bedroom space to a lesbian couple and they could “decide” what to do with me. Also, her two criminal sons, teenage drug addicts, were free and she wanted them to live in the living room so that she could be a mother. My replies included: “Mother? They’re 18 and 19?! It’s over. You were never a mother. Look at them.” And to Ellen and Portia deciding my fate?: “Fuck you. Fuck them Sappho's. Fuck your lesbianism. Fuck this bullshit, I told my entire family that you were as dumb as dirt and couldn’t handle this.” Her laughing reply was that she was just going to sell it for $2 million in a couple of years anyway.
I was like she couldn’t reach the second shelf of a bookcase if you gave her four dictionaries and a chair to stand on—-her plan would fall apart. Trust. I moved and threatened to cut off anyone who brought up that 3-month madness.
Step 10—-she ends up in arrears again. But recall One Shot is 11 months, she was now in arrears for two months, $1200 plus charges, $18. (NO she hadn’t been paying with my cash to them either.) She turns to Housing and says it’s Year 17, how about we discount the apartment from my Year 20 ability to sell? They say sure. It’s all agreed and signed. She gets to court. And they ask for the $618. What $618?
17 years ago they valuation was only $600. So it’s a static shareholder value imposed by the Prime Owner…..of $600 on the apartment——an apartment across the street worth $2 million yes, but not these.
Does she have the $618? No? She can then assign the additional $600 nonpayment from her initial $1200. And now she owes them $18 to be square but they’re taking back ownership because she was a shareholder….sort of, at a limited value…and the Board, tenancy issues controlled by the Head of the Board, Welfare, not the other residents, have voted her out.
So who’s in the right and wrong with our Wealthy Owner? Well, the occupant of this Housing co-op does not own the co-op in a true legal way. There are caveats in the initial sale/shareholder documents so that the property can’t be willed or sold beyond the Prime Owners, Welfare’s discretion. Now the one superseding caveat would be children of the initial tenant/owner/recipient—-Parents children lived with them and the children retain the apartment under the original deal. But does it matter? No one living in the apartment can reap the value of the apartment in a refinancing loan, sell it or transfer it to anyone else.
Which is why this person of 38 years has been there for 38 years—-they can’t get out of it other than to leave it. It’s probably a nice size, in an okay part of the city so they keep paying the maintenance (not it’s not called a mortgage payment because the entire set value was paid upfront Year 1) and they have to maintain occupancy there.) Across the street are luxury coops and condos I’m sure worth northwards of $3–5 million so it’s Catch 22 and the building you’re in is treated basically well, but you’re treated like Welfare Recipients, not million dollar property owners. Everything around the person goes up in relative costs, which might not matter but the current occupant of the apartment is generally poor in comparison to where they live. The occupant also can’t flaunt relative wealth because then they could be challenged by Welfare that a certain level of income is supposed to live there. My cousin pushed for the subletting deal with me because she was living on about $200 a month in cash and food stamps for years, working off the books intermittently and tired of it.
Then Welfare realized it could broker it’s Welfare recipients out to the City. They have since divided up what a Welfare’s recipients monthly income is into an hourly wage and have “assignments” that the person is sent out on. Working in City offices, janitorial work, parking cleaning and get this, what my cousin did, home visits to check the tenancy, property and material stuff in a Welfare recipients apartment/co-op. They’ve got them diming on each other!
It looks like a person would be getting over on the System but the System is so bureaucratic that the occupant is in a form of a prison where they have to be careful in ways renters, true co-op owners-shareholders and property owners don’t have to be. Imagine your neighbor feels a certain way about your big screen TV being delivered or Fresh Direct food delivery or that coat they saw you in——they dime on you and a boob like my cousin shows up with paperwork and a digital camera random day to record your stuff—-because your apartment isn’t legally yours—-therefore your civil rights are suspended, like in jail, to have a designated employee catalogue your apartment contents.
Welfare in your life is like being in a form of prison.
Now, I know allllllllllllllllll of this because a few years later, I got got again but this time the apartment tenant-shareholder masqueraded as a real estate broker. I send in my rent on a nice Manhattan 2 bdr, she never pays Welfare, eventually, I get hold of the real rent invoice and see it’s years behind. We all end up in court. The judge rules it a scam but rules that the building Board members were aware of what she was doing and they pro-rate my rent, I’d stopped paying. So I was there for 3 years, never in arrears on my name and given 10 months “free rent” as the payments I’d madewase divided by the original maintenance cost. The only reason this happened was because I held a minor political position, I had a local TV show, I had a quiet lifestyle and professional job and I was willing to blow this all the fuck up on TV and in the Mayor’s face and at Community Board meetings, street corners and across the internet. And it was during the mortgage crisis. Ad the City-Welfare did not want this on the front page how normal people were being kicked out because of such chicanery. I made too much to apply to the building to live there so I opted to move.
And since I was such a calm normal tenant, the only one who spoke English, I wasn’t a problem to the neighbors. Though when I would rent cars and one time pulled up in a brand new Audi with bags and bags from a variety of stores—-I now understand the stares from my neighbors on the stoops. But NYers are such a social class, financial blending and low ball and high shot that it’s hard to really know whose doing what financially, so I didn’t think anything of it.
But now there’s a whole process involved with Welfare checking the residents because so many of their tenants were pulling this subletting scheme, particularly in Manhattan.
Again, meshuggas. My cousin. Bitch ended up leaving with 6 Hefty bags of her stuff, homeless down South, finally validating her crazy to my relatives who didn’t believe me, then back up here and eventually in prison for transporting cocaine in the back of a car to Massachusetts with her lesbian wife-husband, as my mother called it. Oh, how I laughed and cheered. Then I offered to my family to send her a Ziploc bag, full of syrup and $18 with a note that would say—-You know you gonna wash it off. HA!
But wait for it…..Several years later I get off at the wrong stop for a meeting for work and it’s a nice day so I’m walking along in my Emporio Armani suit, Ferragamo shoes and this really, really tall African guy asks me for directions as I’m standing on the corner across from my cousin’s former apartment. I’m giving them to him when this lady barges past us and I briefly thought, she looked like my cousin, same hookerish outfit, crispy fried hair.
A month later her older sister tells me it probably was. After prison she and her wife-husband moved to a shelter—-wait for it—-4 blocks away from her incredible apartment on 2nd Avenue. Yes, I was on a public bus with her sister and yes, I did “cream my knickers”.
Revenge, especially when it’s just by Fate, is orgasmic.
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