In May 2, 2009 I moved into the coop townhouse on 87th street.
A day later a neighbor told me "I don't know how long you are going to live here. Don't buy new furniture, don't put anything on the floor. This building is infested with bed bugs and its the people who live here."
I had already informed the real estate agent that their written statements that no second hand smoke issues existed in the apartment or building were false. That indeed there were people smoking in the elevator, my movers told me that. There was smoke in the hallway and there was smoke in my apartment.
The agent from that agency came to threaten me the next day. When he could not get into my apartment he stood outside on a cell phone and said he had a client's mother with him and they could not smell cigarette smoke. That client's mother smoked by the way and so did her son. The agent stated that if someone was smoking the carbon monoxide alert monitors would go off. That statement is false of course, first there are no batteries in the monitors that may be in any hall and no such monitors in my hallway. Most importantly:
"The alarm points on carbon monoxide detectors are not a simple alarm level (as in smoke detectors) but are a concentration-time function. At lower concentrations (eg 100 parts per million) the detector will not sound an alarm for many tens of minutes. At 400 parts per million (PPM), the alarm will sound within a few minutes. This concentration-time function is intended to mimic the uptake of carbon monoxide in the body while also preventing false alarms due to relatively common sources of carbon monoxide such as cigarette smoke./"--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_detector
Apparently the real estate agent claimed that they had given me the coop owner's lease to sign and that now I had to sign another lease for renters.
I had told the real estate agent there was no way that I could sign another lease until the pre-existing issues, issues whose status had changed since the last signing of the lease and the one they now proposed were cured.
Those issues were 1) bedbugs 2) cigarette smoke coming into the apartment 3) holes in the floor and no caulking and basically an unfinished wall that had been taken down in the apartment's bathroom during the time when they made the apartment unavailable 4) the toilet did not work (by the way they fixed that two weeks ago when I hussled down the super who had been away most of this time and I was told to contact the managing agent) 5) apartment left incredibly filthy/unsanitary and they had to reimburse me for cleaning it, I am not their maid and 6) It cost me $975 to move into this apartment because they changed my move dates on the busiest three days of the moving year. I was left with the costs of demand and no supply. I also had to pay my past landlord to stay a few more days in their unfit apartment.
When I called Townhouse Management about the first issue of the above list they asked "Do you have bedbugs? If you don't like our building then move out in 24 hours or suffer the penalty."
I asked, "Penalty?" They replied you will owe us two years rent immediately.
I said I think we will be talking in court. They in return said I did not have a lease there. They asked do you have a signed lease? I said I signed one two weeks ago and gave $3850 to them. They said you don't have that lease signed by us. Their policy is to take your signed lease and sign it and return within two weeks. They did not want to sign the coop lease.
They said because I did not have a signed lease they were calling the police on me to remove me. They said I was a squatter. I said I have received mail here and I have the receipts for the money I wrote to them and that have been cancelled. They said then I was a professional squatter.
So please when you see the video above know that extremely competent, intelligent, talented and educated people are victims of Mr. Bloomberg's ideologies. I am not middle class by the way I used to make $150,000 as a high ranking software development consultant.
