If spiking rents, apartment shortages and violent crime on the rise are not enough to make you leave New York, nervy landlords who make insane demands on would-be tenants might do the trick.
Amazingly, Michael Arieh Lerner, the vegan landlord who made headlines earlier this week for leasing exclusively to non-carnivores, is far from being the only outrageously picky rent-collector.
Pity the would-be tenant who hoped to move into the building owned by a Park Slope landlord who has yet to see a no-smoking sign that she liked. “Her rule was that she would only rent to smokers,” Luis Martinez, principal broker with DWELL Residential told The Post.
“She was a very heavy smoker and she only wanted other smokers living there.
“The place smelled of cigarettes and her furniture had a nicotine patina. She did not want anyone who would complain about her smoking.
“She put real estate ads in Japanese-language newspapers because she believed that Japanese people were likelier to be cigarette smokers.”
During his one visit to the available unit, Martinez quickly confirmed that this was not a new requirement. “In the bedroom of the apartment for rent, you can see where the previous tenant slept.
“There were burn marks on the wooden floor where the headboard had been. Apparently, the person smoked while laying down in bed and sometimes dropped his cigarette.”
Another counterintuitive requirement came from a landlord who was picky about vaccinations – but not how you might think.
“She would only rent to people who were unvaccinated,” a Manhattan broker told The Post. “She was convinced that the Covid vaccine spread diseases and she did not want any vaccinated renters in her apartment.”
Though the landlord was unaware of the broker’s vaccination status, she took no chances: “Whenever I walked in, she washed down the doorknob with disinfectant. She kept sending me links to Q-Anon videos and it got to be too much. I had to drop her.”
Besides, the conspiracy-loving landlord’s distrust toward banks might have made it tricky for her to find an acceptable tenant. “She said that whoever rented from her had to pay in cash or, preferably, gold.”
Then there are the various brownstone owners who stipulate about not renting to lawyers – “They don’t want to get sued; but we turn them down because it is exactly the sort of thing you can get sued for doing,” said a broker in Brooklyn – or to Trump supporters or fur wearers.
“Those [last] two,” continued the Brooklyn broker. “would be tough to enforce. Tenants can avoid wearing fur in front of the landlord and make it a point to avoid discussing politics. It’s not like they are going to hang political posters in the window.”
In other instances, it’s more difficult to hide whether or not you are what the landlord wants.
A broker downtown recalled a middle-aged man who took over an apartment for his elderly mother who had been put into a nursing home.
He met with the broker and put in a request: “I want to rent it to a pretty girl. I don’t want a guy and I don’t want a couple.”
Realizing that this was a tall order and also discriminatory, the broker prepared to bail on the apartment hunter.
Then a colleague revealed a possible solution. “She had a lesbian couple,” he said. “I didn’t think the guy would accept them. But then the women went for an apartment tour, he turned around the pictures of Jesus and his mother, and he wound up renting the place to them.”
A property manager, based in Las Vegas, in search of female tenants, did the New Yorkers one worse. He stood accused, in civil court, of having particularly unsavory intentions.
Allan Rothstein allegedly made a woman sign a document giving him permission to have sex with her in exchange for a lease.
He also wanted her to confirm that she does not have a boyfriend who is “larger, meaner and more physically aggressive…” than Rothstein.
The lawsuit settled in May, on the eve of the trial.
Proving that everybody has their own sets of priorities – never mind that for most landlords, it’s a tenant’s ability to pay the rent and not throw ragers – a brownstone-living couple only wanted to rent to people who maintained tiny carbon footprints and cared deeply about the environment.
“The couple said they would go through the garbage to make sure that a lot of it was composted,” a broker on the Brooklyn digs told The Post.
“They wanted people who did not fly anywhere, worked at home and did not own a car that used gasoline. They wouldn’t use email because deleting junk email wastes a lot of electricity.”
While the broker is ordinarily an honest person, in this instance, he had to fudge some facts to keep from putting off the clients who saved H2O by using pots of rain for watering plants.
“I drove to appointments there and parked my car a few blocks from their home,” the broker said. “I knew what they would have been thinking if they saw me getting out of my vehicle.”
