magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

My landlord came knocking on my door this afternoon with a potential buyer of the house. This is the first that I had heard of my house being on the market. And it doesn't exactly bode well for the non lease-holding tenant. (That would be me.) While it's possible that a new owner would simply pick up accepting my monthly rent checks where the old owner left off, it's much more likely that they would want to draft a new lease, probably at a higher rate, or kick me out in order to renovate and/or move in a friend or relative. This building does feel more like the type of place that someone would want to buy as their own house, with one or two rental income units, than the sort of place that someone would buy purely as an investment property. Although, were it the latter, they would almost certainly want more rent than I could afford.

In my architect mode, I've occasionally fantasised about buying the house myself somewhere down the road, and basically gutting and modernising it. But one, I didn't expect my landlord would sell any time soon. And two, at the moment I've got about $45 in available cash, which wouldn't even cover 1/10 of 1% of the down payment. And three, if I did have the money to buy, I would veer much more in the direction an industrial/warehouse space with a view of the water. Or, as most of those in NYC are being torn down to build condos, a brownstone in a neighbourhood where it wasn't dwarfed by six storey apartment buildings.

Anyway.

Lately, when people have tried to convince me to move back to Brooklyn, I've been telling them, 'Unless I stumbled upon an amazing place, that cost about the same as what I'm paying now, or I get kicked out, I don't see myself leaving Inwood. I love my apartment.' The getting kicked out bit may be becoming more of a reality than I would have thought. But it's not as if I'm worrying about it yet.