November 12, 2006
Did you read today's Real Estate section? The two cover stories are vastly illuminating about liberal guilt. Let's say you are like Ginger Strand: you think you are eco-conscious, yet you buy a Prius to ferry your daughter to and from school (that's 10 trips a week) from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side. “It is so ironic that I had to buy a car,” she said. “I had never owned a car in my entire life. I was very holier than thou. I wanted to go to my grave without owning a car.” Why do you feel that's ironic, Ginger? "There was a lot of tween misery involved with the subway,” she said. “It would be really crowded and these kids have these massive backpacks and it wasn’t even convenient to the school once we got off the subway. So then we started taking cabs. And then it occurred to me that if we considered parking fees part of our maintenance, it would still be cheaper to buy a car and park it than to live uptown.” Reminds me of those nice movie stars in southern California proud of driving hybrid Priuses (hello, Julia Roberts) who have been outed taking gas guzzling private jets to balmy destinations (hello, Bahamas).
Read between the lines: Ginger feels guilty because she doesn't want her daughter miscegenating with the kids of color on the subway. So she switched to taxis, most of which are driven these days (it cannot help but be noted) by people of color. So Ginger does the southern California thing now: shuttles around the daughter in a private, confined space, where there is no fear of miscegnating with other peoples. And daughter loves this! Her daughter adores the car. “She hugs it,” said Ms. Strand. “She has completely anthropomorphized it. It has a personality. It gets jealous when we rent cars. She named it Totoro after Hayao Miyazaki’s anime movie about benign forest sprites that sort of look like the car.”
People, this is not normal. Ginger wants to you think she's just like a normal person. Heck, before she started living like Weezy and George Jefferson's white neighbors in a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, they lived like the regular folk: “He had a grubby little studio in Brooklyn Heights, and I had a grubby little one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, where I was living with my daughter and sleeping in the living room.” she said. “Neither of us had any furniture. We moved in with two futons, bookcases and books and that was pretty much it.” Now she declares from her 1,650-foot loft (with Prius parked in nearby garage): “You can’t buy furniture in New York because it is ridiculously expensive,” she said. So instead, the reader thinks, you should either jet off to Michigan or drive your Prius (“It very reliably gets 49.6 miles per gallon, torturing you with its refusal to go over 50.”) to save money in Michigan on furniture. (Note: Scott Jordan, within walking distance of TriBeCa, sells very well-made, reasonably-priced furniture made in Brooklyn. Sorry, no parking spots out front for your Prius.)
Then there is the other cover story in the Real Estate section—which by now I am thinking ought to be renamed "lifestyles of the extravagantly confused solipsistic glass-enclosed hermetic bubble dwellers" section. Except that's too many characters. This other story is about a $38,500 closet. Mind you, these are cover stories, so the editors therefore believe they are of great importance to the average reader. Of course, since I already declaimed driving from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side (uh, six or seven miles, depending on the circuitous route you take to avoid those taxi drivers of color) as extravagant, surely walking or taking a taxi (driven by a driver of color) to the nearest Manhattan Mini-Storage would be a stretch of the imagination, right? (Note: there is usually parking for your Prius at most Mini-Storage locations. South Street Seaport especially, though the one-way streets nearby are confusing to Prius drivers.) So, since you don't want to drive to Mini Storage ("it's tooo far," you whine) or pay the extravagant $29 monthly rental ("that's only at South Street!" you Prius drivers exclaim), you shell out $38,500 for a closet in your condo. Which is much more conveniently located, to be fair. And of course your California closets are already packed with the excessive amounts of clothing you own—and that was beforeUniqlo opened and started selling those cheap Chinese Cashmere sweaters.
If you divide $38,500 by $29, that's 1327 1/2 months of Mini-Storage, or 110 1/2 years worth of storage. So this closet had better be valuable. And it is! Listen to this: “Closet space is so precious in Manhattan,” said Monica Klingenberg, an executive vice president of Marketing Directors Inc., an agency that markets and sells luxury co-ops and condos. “We’re all trying to eke every square inch out of our living space, so the ability to have additional storage space is just a gold mine.” Monica sees closets as worth their weight in gold (when full, obviously). Moreover, "Most important, the Prius made it possible to continue living happily in TriBeCa." (Sorry, I couldn't help but insert that sentence from the other article here. I actually meant to insert this one: “We collect everything, so we really needed this extra storage,” Mrs. Alonso said.) And a Ms. Levitan summarizes the essential nature of all things for the reader: “The city is all about scaling down,” she said, “and I work very hard at not being a pack rat. But if I didn’t have my closet for overflow, all my things would get ruined. They’d all be wrinkled.”
Summary: It's all about wrinkles. With apologies for all my parenthetical asides, there was an election this past week. Will that have an influence on Real Estate? You're reading the wrong paper if you want to know about that. But if you want to know more about wrinkles, you hopefully read the review of the Times' critical shopper Alex Kuczynski. Because if you don't feel guilty about ferrying your daughter around in a Prius in Manhattan, and you don't feel guilty about spending $38,500 on an extra closet for hold things you don't need (note: that's why the Container Store was invented), then it's time to move on to dealing with wrinkles. But first make sure to read No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars. Because even though there was an election this past week (which might possibly have an influence on future Real Estate prices as well as our denial of global warming), parking is a big issue for condo dwellers. Just ask Ginger Strand!
Tags:
container store, leo decaprio, liberal guilt, prius, scott jordan, tribeca, upper east side, wrinkles
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Posted on 11/12/2006
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