As a lifelong renter, I have had access to on-premises laundry equipment exactly twice. To most landlords, “amenities” don’t mean a washer and dryer, a dishwasher, or central air conditioning; they think of running water and flush toilets as amenities. Maybe they’re just realistic: they figure that once I’ve paid my rent every month, I probably don’t have enough money left to buy clothes, so what do I need laundry equipment for?
Presently I’m living in a nice place in an upscale neighborhood. It’s a safe bet that Eric and I are the only residents on our block who don’t have laundry equipment.
A couple of weeks ago it seemed as if that was about to change. John mentioned that his business partner Bob Ball was moving to a house he’d just bought and that there was a new washer and dryer there. Bob didn’t need them, since he had bought brand new appliances. Would we want to take them for free?
Of course we would. The nearest laundromat is several miles away, and our schedules make it very difficult for us to get there more than once a month at the oftenest. I also suffer from an allergy to laundry detergents. Although I use hypoallergenic detergent when I wash my clothes, most laundromat patrons do not. There is inevitably a great deal of suds left in laundromat washers from other patrons’ previous loads of wash, and the runoff always finds its way into my clothes. For the first few days after I do my laundry at the laundromat, I usually have a painful rash from the detergent residue...usually in unmentionable places. It sounds humorous, but believe me, it’s not.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t object to doing my wash at a laundromat if it wasn’t such a miserable experience for me. I suffer from chronic back pain, the result of a serious car accident more than twenty years ago. After schlepping heavy loads of wash back and forth to and from the laundromat, my back kills me for at least 24 hours, sometimes longer.
So when Bob offered us his washer and dryer, the idea of finally being able to do laundry at home seemed positively liberating. But first we had to check with Joe, our landlord. We figured out where the washer and dryer would fit -- in the back of the garage -- and Eric explained the idea to Joe. At first Joe said it would be all right as long as we took care of the necessary plumbing. Then he must have thought it over and realized that if he let us have laundry equipment in the garage, he’d be spitting in the face of the American Way. The following day he e-mailed Eric at work and curtly informed him that he didn’t want us installing laundry equipment in the garage, even at our expense, even if we left the washer and dryer behind for the next tenants when we eventually moved. He simply didn’t want to rent the place with “those amenities” (even though he could charge a couple hundred dollars more a month for the place if they were included).
What it all boiled down to was that even though it was no skin off his nose to let us do it, he didn’t feel we deserved to use the space in the garage for our laundry equipment. We were “merely” tenants, after all. Apart from having the grand opportunity to live here among the swells in beautiful Setauket (for which we’re fabulously fortunate), paying him rent every month evidently affords us no other rights. His message was loud and clear: Laundry faciilties are for people who own their own homes. Like him.
At first I was almost amused by the absurdity of the situation. Then I started to see the bigger picture. I’m resigned to paying rent every month, probably for the rest of my life. My parents’ generation may have been able to afford homes of their own on blue-collar salaries, but my generation, and the others that have followed it, have effectively been deprived of home ownership because of real estate speculation and astronomical price increases that make buying a house an unattainable dream for most of us. I’ve made what peace I can with this reality, even though I’d love a home of my own as much as the next homebody.
But there’s a vicious aspect to being a renter. Quite simply, in America today, if you’re a renter you’re a second, even a third class citizen, as Joe made so clear...in the same camp as wetbacks, trailer trash, and students. Now mind you, Joe isn’t a bad sort of guy. He’s well meaning, if somewhat clueless. As the sports coordinator at an area high school, he earns $125,000 a year, and is very lucky there’s a patronage system here on Long Island that enables him to have such a well-paying position. No, he’s affable enough. I reckon I’d be affable too, if somebody else was paying my mortgage payment for me every month. But as landlords go, I’ve definitely had worse ones.
There is, however, an invisible dividing line between Joe, the landlord, and us, his tenants. He never refers to it directly. It’s unspoken, unwritten, almost unconscious. But we are always acutely aware of it nonetheless. His message is: Eric and I, as people who for whatever reason don’t earn as much as he does and can’t afford to buy our own home, are somehow suspect. Because of that fact -- whether it’s the result of choice or accident -- we must settle for whatever he and others of the land-owning class choose to dole out to us, and we shouldn’t complain. At least we have a roof over our heads. If we wind up paying for his house in the long run, that just proves that he was smart enough to take advantage of the market in buying it and renting it to us...more proof that our society is a meritocracy where the smart get rich and the poor get what they deserve.
After all, if we deserved to live reasonable lives in comfortable places with “amenities”, we’d be living there now, wouldn’t we?
In a better world, I’d rather not have to think about laundry. In a “civilized” society, it’s something that shouldn’t require much thought, or effort. Everybody should have ready access to such labor-saving devices as washers and dryers without having to drive long distances, spend significant amounts of money, and squander hours of time that could be better spent doing something remunerative, constructive, or better yet, uplifting.
But laundry equipment requires space and plumbing, two things landlords can be very arbitrary about. As Joe made it plain to us, it’s his space and his plumbing, not ours. Sure, he was trying to tell us, we may have somehow managed to scam a new washer and dryer, but that doesn’t mean we have the right to hook them up in his garage, even if we are paying his mortgage every month. That would be living above our station, insisting on something to which we are simply not entitled as renters.
Welcome to America.
