The canary report Pleasant-enough white guy goes apartment hunting and smells something noxious
Feuerherd, Peter
Peter Feuerherd THE CANARY REPORT Racial poison in New York I am, not surprisingly for someone with an unpronounceable German name, a white male. Yet when it comes to racial issues in New York...
...I was told to come downtown to file the papers, which would mean taking a full day off work to pursue my complaint...
...That's the perception...
...As I strolled through the neatly appointed apartment, pleased that finally I had landed a place for my family, a black woman came to the door...
...And then there is the race issue...
...For the most basic of three-bedroom apartments, we would be happy to pay $1,200 a month (for those reading in Toledo, that's not a misprint...
...We have been turned away because we have children, seen places that were unlivable, and yes, encountered the racial feelings that seethe beneath the surface of New York's neighborhoods...
...When we first moved back to New York five years ago, I was escorted around Queens by a real-estate broker who told me that his job depended on landlords relying on him to screen out blacks and Hispanics...
...Of course all that discrimination is illegal...
...Through that broker I eventually landed an apartment, feeling the need to go through the indignity of showing pictures of my family to our new Chinese landlord...
...And the political leaders in this city, both white and black, see segregated neighborhoods as a kind of natural selection which shall remain undisturbed, an arrangement with which elites in both communities have grown comfortable...
...He was told to come on down and take a look...
...We have learned that if we are to get anywhere in the apartment-hunting game my pallid complexion will work much better than my wife's darker shade...
...It isn't likely to happen...
...Meanwhile, I find myself distrustful of white brokers and landlords, knowing that many do not want my children or my wife around...
...But just ask any "person of color" seeking an apartment in central Queens what they might think of that assertion...
...But as a family we are poison to the scores of landlords and rental agents we have dealt with...
...It is a tempting proposal...
...We are frequently ruled out because most apartments, despite laws against the practice, are routinely not rented to families with children (Paging the Christian Coalition: here's a family-values issue we hear precious little about...
...So we began an apartment hunt which has now lasted nearly three years without success...
...but I don't see politicians such as New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the champion of small home owners and landlords, standing still while the elderly Queens landlady I dealt with is carted off to Rikers Island...
...But, my wife asks me, do we really want to live upstairs from that lady...
...My energies, I figure, are best spent seeking out a decent apartment, not engaging in litigation...
...That one is that traditional racial discrimination is something out of a bygone past, the only scar on Newt's, Rush's, and Ozzie and Hariett's idyllic fifties...
...On paper, my wife and I would seem to be perfect tenants...
...She is a librarian, I am a Catholic newspaper editor, professions not exactly conjuring up images of lewd and rowdy lifestyles...
...Yet we soon began to feel cramped in what seemed to be an increasingly smaller space as our children grew into adolescence...
...A recent Newsday story detailed how a Hispanic family, living just a mile or so from where we now reside, was offered a housewarming present of a dead rabbit tied to their door...
...One landlady in Hushing told us her apartment was not available...
...But the best apartment I saw was with a broker...
...I've even called the city's Civil Rights Commission...
...She was a potential tenant...
...We still may rent the place-the broker, to his credit, was chagrined by the comment...
...Get over it," black Americans are told...
...Think what you want about affirmative action, but my experience shows that one of the arguments raised against it is entirely bogus...
...I frequently get to smell the poison thaf s out there, all incognito, as a pleasant-enough white guy to whom the melanin-impaired bigots in this city can offer their views in seeming confidence...
...He was a Romanian immigrant, and had long figured out his function in the New York real-estate hierarchy...
...I was suspicious and had a white male friend call her...
...We are likely to continue in what the psychobabblists call denial, even if, on the housing front in Queens in 1995, the racial poison is still there for anyone who wants to sniff it...
...The landlady, a woman in her seventies, had an indecipherable European accent...
...She was turned away by the landlady, who looked at the broker and loudly proclaimed, "no coloreds...
...What they don't know is that, because of circumstances, I'm rooting for the other side...
...Sharing the space with roaches and mice didn't help either...
...He spoke candidly, maybe too much so...
...The neoconservatives' favorite black writer, Shelby Steele, recently wrote in a New York Times piece that he is opposed to affirmative action but would like to see criminal sanctions imposed on those who discriminate on racial grounds...
...He spoke about the need for brotherhood and international harmony in a way which would make the most fevered academic multi-culturalist proud...
...Because my wife of sixteen years is black and our two teenage children are biracial brown, I take the stings personally, yet quietly, hoping in a way to gauge what racial attitudes really are like in what is often perceived to be the nation's most liberal and tolerant city...
...Yet when it comes to racial issues in New York City, I am somewhat like the canary they used to send into mines...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 19
