Mayor Bloomberg has to be messing with our heads.
Our Nanny in Chief is telling us not just to reduce what we eat and drink, but also how big we live. The mayor wants to cram people, like air-breathing sardines, into apartments barely fit to store a pair of shoes.
Like a mad scientist experimenting with human flesh, Bloomberg is pushing a change in zoning laws that now require flats to measure a minuscule 400 square feet. He wants to wedge young and childless singles and couples (who’ve hopefully slimmed down by avoiding Big Gulps) into microscopic flats measuring just 275 to 300 square feet.
That’s about the size of a large walk-in closet, a medium-sized animal cage or the vestibule of an ATM.
It’s also not much more spacious than a prison cell, where couples will end up after cabin fever makes them kill one other. Then again, that would solve the city’s housing shortage nicely.
Bloomberg unveiled plans for teeny-weeny Manhattan “micro-units” last week to great fanfare before heading back home to his lavish townhouse. He plans to put some 60 pint-sized apartments in a city-owned building before taking the movement viral.
But, at perhaps as much as $2,000 a month for a modified hat box, renters should be required to undergo psychological examinations before moving in.
While touting expensive torture as the solution to homelessness, the mayor failed to address the elephant stuffed into the room. The answer to more and cheaper housing isn’t micro-units. It’s ending rent regulation.
Rent controls artificially lower the price of more than a million Manhattan apartments, while boosting rents in all other available spaces to make up for the shortfall. Landlords have to make a living, too.
But who gets a regulated flat is not determined by need. So when a couple I know tried to find a cut-rate Manhattan apartment, they were laughed out of the city. Like A-list parties, only the connected get in.
New Yorkers’ interest in scarce housing borders on obsession. We read about it. Talk about it. I’ve run into Americans in Cairo and, within minutes, we’re talking bedrooms, baths and closet space. Our preoccupation with real estate is the new porn.
Yet the micro-unit folly won’t help people such as Ann, who badly wants a piece. She’s 26, college educated, employed — and sleeps on a Queens couch in a house owned by Mommy and Daddy. They’re a nice, older couple who are quickly driving Ann to drink.
Ann lives like a loser — try dating with Mom rapping her nails on the living-room door — because she can’t find an affordable apartment.
“And I’ve got a job!” she tells me. It pays in the vicinity of $40,000 a year.
But with student loans to pay, taxi rates rising, a cup of Starbucks weighing in at two bucks, cocktails $12 to $14 a pop, and Manhattan rents climbing faster than mercury in July, Ann has joined the couch-surfing army.
Well, she was offered a $1,000 share in a brownstone uptown, and nearly moved in. Until she realized her roommate smelled like a sewer, had no visible means of support and, creepily, wore a designer wardrobe.
It seems no accident that Bloomberg unveiled his loopy solution to lack of space just ahead of a Prudential Douglas Elliman report revealing something all New Yorkers know: The rent is too damn high.
The average rent in Manhattan has climbed 9 percent in this recessionary year, to $3,778. Studio apartments have gone up 18.8 percent, to $2,569. Two-bedrooms average $4,686, and three-bedrooms, you don’t want to know about ($6,940).
The Manhattan-centric mayor also mentioned another solution: The outer boroughs.
But why live in Brooklyn when you can squash into crawl space in Chelsea? This is nuts.
He’s an (alleged) attorney
Enough!
A 3-year-old Brooklyn boy was shot in the leg, a victim of too many guns, too much official apathy, and a justice system unwilling to crack down on even the fiercest criminals. But Matthew Cohen, the lawyer for Stanley Williams, 20, a man accused in the tot’s shooting, tried to top them all.
“This is not a homicide,” the heartless mouthpiece scoffed in court about the child’s wound. “Even the alleged injury is not that severe.”
Would he say that if his own son were caught in crossfire?
Fortunately, Judge Kevin McGrath saw through the nonsense. Saying Williams “has a total disregard for society,” he set his bail at $1 million, and another million for accused shooter Antonio McCloud.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has railed against community leaders in high-crime precincts who do nothing to staunch the flow of guns.
In the past three weeks, appellate judges have freed two armed and dangerous hoodlums, saying the police practice of stop-and-frisk violated the thugs’ rights.
It’s a war out there. Fortunately, some judges get it.
Make cabbies play fare
This happens — a lot.
A taxi slows to a crawl so the driver can ask where a potential passenger is going. You tell him. Not liking the answer (even if it’s not Brooklyn), the cabby says abruptly, “I’m off-duty,” and speeds away.
Taxi fares are about to rise 17 percent, but no one has said boo about the notorious practice of fare shopping. A cabby caught in the act should have his license suspended — or be sentenced to troll the streets of The Bronx.
Beret it ain’t so!
Uniforms to be worn by America’s Olympic athletes during opening ceremonies in London have been revealed — and no one is happy.
Pricey, effeminate and decidedly weird, the Ralph Lauren-designed duds include blazers adorned with Ralph’s signature horse logos. Each is topped by a Frenchified beret, more appropriate for flight attendants attending a Hamptons regatta than supermen and women competing on the world stage.
And they’re made in China — an outsourcing outrage that prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to demand that the US Olympic Committee “put them in big pile and burn them.”
A new book by a former British athlete reveals that Olympic games worldwide are hotbeds of drunken sex and debauchery. This time, apparently not among offensively dressed Team USA.
Perhaps wrong anchor away
Maybe it’s a case of Ann’s revenge.
“Today” threw Ann Curry under the bus, blaming the co-anchor for declining ratings before kicking her off the show.
But since Savannah Guthrie took Curry’s place on the “Today” couch on June 29, it’s been beaten nearly every day by arch rival “Good Morning America.”
Maybe it’s time to take a serious look at dumping Matt Lauer.