TL;DR:

Hello friends, foes, followers, fans, fruity fairies, father figures, freethinkers and other alliterations with funds: The long and short of it is I am in a Very Bad apartment situation and need money to move to a much nicer apartment situation. 

Moving is expensive and even more so in New Yawrk Citay. Most of these funds will go towards covering a non-refundable, one time payment of 15% (FIFTEEN PERCENT) fifteen percent the yearly rent. This is called a broker's fee, and everyone is mad about them, but we don't have time to unpack all of that.

I am offering something like crowdfunded commissions in return: If you've ever want me to draw any of the proposed illustrations, but can't splurge in a personal commission, now is your chance >:)

THE LONGER STORY:

If you’ve been following my blog for the past six months you might already know some of the clusterfuck: An apartment that seemed amazing on paper has been made unliveable by the greed and indifference of a landlord and his nepo baby son, aka "management", straight out of a gilded era political cartoon. So, a regular landlord.

A SUMMARY OF GRIEVANCES:

• Upon moving during the coldest winter in NYC in years, I did not have functional heat for two and a half months.
  
  • I was busy dealing with the ever-present, overwhelming mountain of moving tasks and chores, and did not complain to management about it more than once or twice per month, so that is on me.( God forbid management is responsive enough that informing them of an issue once is enough to solve it. Lets have realistic expectations.)
  • It wasn’t until I was contacting them every single day that they finally, begrudgingly, sent a new heating unit, that, although functional, came with its own issues. This is foreshadowing.
    

• I have electric heat.
  • This should not have been more of an issue than running an air conditioner in the summer, bills-wise, except my apartment insulation is bad.
  • National-grid-guy-came-over-and-was-apalled bad. National grid offers free inspections if you qualify by having an outrageously high electricity bill. The lovely technician they sent told me, off the record, to get the f*ck out of here, Jordan Peele horror movie style.
  • He said that my building had all the signs of barely legal cost-cutting. My last electric bill was nearly $800, which I have yet to pay and would be funded via this move as well. And yes, I did cry when I opened it.

• I have not had enough hot water to take a shower longer than five minutes since moving in, mid-September.
  • I reported it to management once a month every month last year, but I was too busy trying to get my heat working, so again, my bad for not making it my part time job to insist maintenance is timely.
  • In the past two months, I have submitted multiple complaints to the housing authorities, which I can provide proof of upon request. This has only caused retaliation from my landlords and patch fixes that do not last more than a day or two. I had to withhold rent to finally get management to replace the water heater. This is also foreshadowing.
• Retaliation from my landlords.
  • I still do not have hot water, even after the (also electric, also on my electricity bill) water heater was replaced, so clearly there is something bigger going on structurally.
    • This is a condo building, and I am renting from the developer.
    • My neighbors, who own their condos, have told me plenty of horror stories about the shoddy construction of their apartments, and the thousands of dollars they have had to spend on maintenance, including gossip of insurance scams pulled by my landlord.
    • Great gossip, terrible news.
  • Not only has it been yellow-wallpaper difficult to convince a parade of dismissive, disgruntled, misogynistic handymen and contractors that I, indeed, do NOT have sufficient hot water, but my landlord is stiffing the plumber who installed the new water heater, and therefore when the plumber came back to check on the new water heater, he was pissed.
    • The plumber who, according to building gossip, is an asshole who nobody likes, blamed not getting paid on me withholding rent rent, therefore acting, ultimately, as an intimidation tactic and rent collector.
    • It was a very scary experience! I cried!
      

• In the span of the six months I have lived here, the fridge has also died and had to be replaced.
  • A petty note, but when management sent a new fridge I was not informed that there would be delivery men here at 8 am.
    • Delivery men who were clearly really, really irritated that nobody was answering the door. They said the guy on the phone was very rude to them.
    • I can excuse incompetent management, but I draw the line at being rude to blue collar workers >:(

• At the same time the fridge bit the dust, the dishwasher flooded my kitchen too. This was the response from management:

• Despite constant reminders, management has continuously failed to give me 24 hour notice for when handymen will come into my apartment, which is also a legal right.
• Last but not least: the apartment was not cleaned in between tenants and was filthy upon moving in.
  • The cheap ikea cabinets in the kitchen (the particleboard mentioned above) were so greasy I ended up taking the doors down and storing them away.
  • The bathtub is a health hazard. I thought it was really cool that it had jets. That was a stupid, naive baby thought. This is what it looks like every time you turn on the jets:

• Now, I'm no fancy city gal. I don't need jets. But the jets cannot be closed off, so this also means I cannot take a regular bath, and stepping into the shower itself is uneasy at best. I’ve seen silverfish come in and out of those open, filthy tubes ):

Needless to say this has made me very, very unhappy. I don’t feel clean in my own home. I don’t get enough sunlight, and I am cold because turning on the heat during the day is way too expensive. I am tired of dealing with men who treat me like I am hysterical and making problems up to avoid paying rent.

Finding a new apartment in this godforsaken city is hard enough as it is, but after months of looking at places I have found an apartment that I desperately want to move to that will, hopefully, be a much easier time to deal with.

At the very least, my rent will be lower, my windows sunnier, and my heat and hot water will be paid by the landlord.

Thank you so much for being in my corner, y’all. This situation sucks so bad, but I am also trying to see it as an opportunity to start a new chapter in my life, get out of years and years of existing for survival and maybe, with a little bit of grit and scrappiness, start thriving. I want to update my art accounts, I want to re-start my patreon, I want to draw for myself and recover the passion for art that I used to have years ago, before I started working for the knife.