The NY Times Real Estate section just keeps on giving (us bile), documenting everything from rich bloggers braving the exotic wilds of Williamsburg to tiny rich children who choose their parents' multimillion dollar apartments. Today, the Gray Lady delved into the lives of parents who purchase lavish apartments in Manhattan for their adult children, then charge them reduced rent to live there.
In this piece, there is the 23-year-old man who found "it a bit challenging" to pay timely rent on the two-bedroom apartment in the East 20s that his parents bought him. "We wanted to teach him a sense of responsibility," his mother told the Times, and you can't help but think that an adult male who can't figure out how to write a rent check on the first of the month might be better served facing down eviction from a stranger than suffer a scolding from Mom & Dad.
Then, there's the father who was so horrified his post-grad daughter was looking at apartments on 10th Avenue, he purchased her a one-bedroom apartment in a doorman building in Midtown East, charging her below-market rent that he never raised. "She grew up in a nice house. She hadn’t experienced life that way," he said of the "sketchy" apartments and neighborhoods in which she was initially looking.
And a graphic designer who was able to shell out $2,150 for a "crummy" one-bed on the Upper East Side is now only paying $1,021-a-month for a much nicer apartment in a co-op that his parents purchased for him in Kips Bay. "I think, psychologically, it’s better that I don’t pay my parents directly; I pay the managing agent. If I were paying them, it wouldn’t feel like my place," he told the Times, conveniently forgetting that it sort of isn't his own place BECAUSE MOMMY AND DADDY PAID FOR IT.
Look, if you're lucky enough to have parents with the means and desire to help you, and you are willing to take that help, fine. Enjoy your new digs, have friends over for lavish dinner parties, joke about the Poors who brought you a bottle of Sutter Home as a housewarming gift. Remember to tip your doorman come Christmastime. Donate to charity, recycle, call your grandmother, be a good person. Or don't. Live your fucking life.
But what you should not do, in my humble and enraged opinion, is provide a NY Times reporter with a series of tone-deaf sound bites about this stellar deal you've been offered by your parents or given to your children. It doesn't matter how hard you work, or how difficult it is for your parents to afford a place, or whether you and your roommates split the bills, or that you were bullied as a teenager and still have unresolved issues regarding your thighs. "Real estate nepotism" is not a good look, the Times is not looking to inject any nuance into their columns, and your narcissism is doing nothing but leaving the reader with a sense of seething rage.
Two points: Millennials like myself are besieged with articles calling our generation lazy, entitled and coddled, and it's hard fighting that stigma when the Paper of Record reports that parents are handpicking their precious babies' neighborhoods because the idea of letting their grown-up child live in a walk-up with a rickety staircase is too frightening. Aside from the fact that these familial landlord situations feel far too controlling on the parents' side, living in a shithole that you pay for yourself is part of becoming a fully-formed person. "Struggling is how you build coping skills," one psychologist, the lone voice of reason in the Times' piece, said. "Even when you’re living in a hole, it’s your hole that you paid for, and there’s a feeling of accomplishment and growth and ‘Wow, I’m doing this.'"
Secondly, people are getting priced out of New York by the second, which is something that we repeat so often it's beginning to enter our REM cycles. The fact that the Times still feels the need to rub everyone else's good real estate fortune in our faces is frustrating, but you, lucky rich people with nice apartments, can stop this madness from making us pluck our eyeballs out. Do not contact Times editors with your apartment hunt fairy tales. Say no to the reporter who wants to know about the pied-à-terre you bought for your beloved rabbit Jimmy. Back away from the computer. Hang up the phone. Kill the rental trend piece. Live in your lovely home and shut the fuck up about it. It will be terribly sad when Ben Yakas's brunch hate reads series is forced to die, but humanity will be better for it.
