It was a three-story yellow clapboard house in Park Slope, with blue French doors and southern exposures. There were three bedrooms—easily convertible to four—and amenities such as a dishwasher and a soaker hose for the back garden (herbs, rose of Sharon, a dwarf crab-apple tree). The rent was reasonable: four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars a month. And it was only a five-minute walk to the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A.
“It felt like a bit of a fixer-upper,” Julian Hornik, a twenty-five-year-old theatre composer, said. “But it was a whole house, and it was in our price range. We could clean it up and make it lovely.” Hornik and his roommates—Lauren Modiano, who also works in theatre, and Spencer Bokat-Lindell, an editor at the Times—were looking to move out of their six-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in the neighborhood. “There’s an upright piano in our living room that Julian uses for work,” Bokat-Lindell explained. “When both Lauren and I were working in offices, this wasn’t an issue. But, now that we’re all confined to the same workspace, it’s not really tenable, because my room, like, abuts the piano.”
When they saw the listing on StreetEasy for the yellow house, which had three times more space than their current place, Hornik e-mailed the broker, Trisha Webster, a former body-parts model. (Her hands have been used as stand-ins for Farrah Fawcett’s.) When Webster called, she had a lot of questions. “She asked, ‘Why are you moving?’ ” Hornik said. “ ‘Who are you moving with? How do you know your roommates? How long have you lived together? What do you do? How much do you make?’ ” She told him that he and his friends seemed like “decent candidates” for the house and offered to show it to them if they all signed nondisclosure agreements.
“Do you know who the landlord is?” she asked. They did not. She said, “Well, it’s the Mayor.”
“As soon as I found that out, I was like, O.K., I don’t think this is going to work,” Bokat-Lindell said. He contacted the standards editor at the Times and asked, “What is the policy about renting an apartment from the Mayor?” (The gist of the response: If you can avoid taking the place, that’d be great.)
Bill de Blasio bought the yellow house on Eleventh Street in 2000, for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (It’s now worth more than $1.5 million.) It was his family’s primary residence before they moved into Gracie Mansion, in 2014. It is not the only property that de Blasio rents out; he also owns a two-family house, down the block, where his late mother lived, and where he now has two sets of tenants. The upstairs one-bedroom unit (dressing alcove, subway-tiled bathroom) goes for eighteen hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, and the ground-floor apartment (E.I.K., three ceiling fans, no pets) goes for two thousand nine hundred and fifty. Webster was the rental agent for both.
Bokat-Lindell was surprised to hear that the Mayor had a side gig as a landlord. The notion of signing an N.D.A. just to look at the place made him uneasy. He wondered, he said, if there was also “going to be a clause in the lease saying that you can’t talk about your landlord.” But his roommates were excited about the house—the back yard!—so they submitted their paperwork to Webster, planning to sign the confidentiality agreement in person.
The next morning, Webster sent them an e-mail. “I’ve spoken to the Landlord about your inquiry to see the house,” she wrote. “Your combined income would need a guarantor and they said they are not comfortable with that rental situation.” The friends were puzzled: their combined incomes were more than forty times the monthly rent, a typical threshold for New York City landlords. Hornik, looking through public records, found that de Blasio’s pre-mayoral salary was comparable to what he and his roommates earned. On the other hand, the lease was for only one year: de Blasio will be out of office by the end of 2021, and even though he and his wife are empty nesters, perhaps they will move back into the yellow house.
The roommates found another place in Park Slope. It’s about the same square footage as de Blasio’s house, but there’s no back yard. It’s above Haenyeo, one of their favorite restaurants. The landlord is a lady named Janice. “As far as I know, she’s a normal person,” Bokat-Lindell said. “She’s at least not the mayor.” ♦
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