I thought your post was grossly insensitive and offensive, given my past comment on this topic. Why do you care about what might happen to some landlords while ignoring what has happened to me? I have been homeless for over three years! It’s no conceit at all for me to say I am better than them and deserve better. Your and your generation’s amour-propre is not something that I and later generations feel obliged to subsidize.
To summarize, despite
brief brag
being one of the most polymathic of the polymaths here, (certainly I know of no one anywhere today with more diverse and potentially valuable inventions), having read the equivalent of over a kilometer of shelf space in a wide range of fields, surpassed most college professors in raw scores on intelligence tests by the age of 9, and coming from an exceptionally distinguished heritage, with extraordinary connections
lengthy oppression
I have been ruthlessly suppressed my whole life. No decent job will reply to an application from me. In the past 20 years, I haven’t made $150,000. In 2020-21, I was disabled for over a year by heatstroke indoors from being worked too hard in an unventilated sweatshop, wasn’t even allowed to see a doctor under worker’s compensation, couldn’t get a lawyer, never was allowed to see or even speak to the opposing attorney or the WC judge, yet still managed to get nearly a year’s pay in settlement within seven months while representing myself.
My landlord then, a New York / Israeli investment company that prefers to rent to illegal immigrants, tried to force me into re-signing a lease on a 3rd-floor, moldy apartment while I was disabled, knowing I couldn’t rent anywhere else, demanded more than rent specified on the lease, would not refund the overpayments, filed for eviction within two weeks, despite the eviction moratorium and despite being unwilling to accept the amount owed, were forced to dismiss their own case, then tried to get me to sign a liability waiver in exchange for nothing.
They promised me a choice of suitable apartments, but reneged. I was forced to live in the unsuitable apartment for another year, paying all rent, but before the end of the year, they filed again for eviction anyway, not because I didn’t pay, but becaused I wouldn’t sign the lease on the unsuitable and defective apartment. To get a hearing, I had to continue to pay all rent. The judge later acknowledged that the property manager perjured herself, acknowledged that I had never received a move-out notice (but said since it had been returned to sender, she said that constituted service), intentionally wasted my time in the hearing until 4:45pm, then refused to admit the emails she’d had for months into evidence.
When I fell out of my chair and started having convulsions she just started ruling on things without a pause, including things that weren’t before her, things over which she had no jurisdiction, and things on which she had no evidence. A year I later had the satisfaction of “eldering” her in Quaker meeting for nearly two hours, but that doesn’t get me an apartment. I can’t afford the rent anywhere, my most recent abusive job would need to pay more than 50% more to afford an apartment.
That’s leaving out lots of malfeasance and fraud and malicious conduct, some of which I covered in the post I linked to above.
But one thing I didn’t mention was my aunt Beth. She lived in the same house in College Park, MD for nearly my first three years, while she was going to law school. I was her paralegal and office manger in the mid-'90s for her family law practice in the early-1800s building at 34 S. Market St. Frederick. Maryland. (I lived on the top floor, the family development / contracting business was on the second floor, and Beth had most of the ground floor.) Beth largely specialized in representing fathers in custody disputes. I won’t try to describe in such a short space what a wonderful, wise and sensible lady she was. In 2007, not much older than I am now, she got cancer and I moved back up to Maryland to help take care of her in her final months. Now she was well liked by all the family, there were many family gatherings, the community loved her, even shut down the courthouse serving a quarter-million people for her funeral.
But one of my aunts felt I had insulted her, really a minor and brief flaring of temper for which she had a good deal of fault. She tried to get me thrown out in the snow shortly after Beth’s death, despite there being ample room in several houses, arranged for my wealthy parents to lock me out of what had been my condo in Atlanta, and caused me to have to sleep in my minivan for a couple of months in early 2008. It seems to me that sort of high-handed viciousness lurks just below the surface of many women, even, maybe especially, the ones for whom social status is most important.
Your generation owes me more than I owe them. My sort of man and your sort of woman are not the same.