Despite Hit Piece, Jared Kushner Is A Brilliant, Generous Landlord
Medium- One day in 2014, I came home to find my stove sitting squarely in the middle of my living room. With all my furniture arranged around the perimeter of the room, the appliance looked like a ship run aground at low tide. In its wake was a void in the corner of my kitchen and jagged, fist-sized holes where its pipes had been torn from the wall.
This sight was less of a shock than you’d think. The underlings of my building’s management company, Westminster City Living, regularly entered my apartment without my consent, ostensibly to work on restoring the building’s cooking gas, which hadn’t worked since I’d moved in two months prior. Every time I unlocked my front door, I wondered what incompetent workers had left in my apartment while I’d been gone.
On that day, the unmoored stove wasn’t the only unsightly surprise the Westminster workers had left for me. In my bathroom, I discovered, to my jaw-dropping horror, the ultimate affront: an unflushed shit.
Some guy wrote a massive “hit piece” on the living conditions inside a Jared Kushner-owned apartment building. It’s clearly meant to lead to a rent decrease for the author. Even though he doesn’t live in a Kushner building anymore, he may be working on behalf of a current tenant to besmirch the golden Kushner name. His laundry list of frustrations are fucking ridiculous, because they all sound positive to me, and he’s getting it all for $1,750. Any true New Yorker would pay SIGNIFICANTLY more for half the features this guy had in his apartment. If I weren’t currently in the middle of a 2-year lease, I would have moved into one of these Kushner buildings tomorrow based on the incredible conditions.
Here are just a few of the so-called horror stories from the article:
Bending over the bathroom sink meant leaving the door open and sticking my butt out into the room that functioned as our kitchen, living room, and dining room.
This is clearly meant to highlight the monstrous living conditions of a Kushner Companies apartment. But where some might feel claustrophobic upon reading that description, I feel only admiration. That sentence shows a resourcefulness, an economization of space, that could only come from a brilliant landlord. A kitchen/living room/dining room all in one? Fuck me, brilliant.
For a week straight at Kushner-owned 201 East Second Street, brown water came out of “everyone’s faucet,” former tenant Alessandro Harabin told me recently.
Oh shut the fuck up. Everyone knows the browner the water, the more vitamins it has. Hell, a lot of women pay through the nose to cake that shit on their faces and call it a “mud mask.” You’re getting it for free? You should be thanking them, you ungrateful dick. Buy a Brita if you’re going to be that much of a bitch.
Tenants’ physical safety has never been a priority of Kushner Companies. Jennifer Hengen’s ceiling, at 118 East Fourth Street, collapsed five times. Harabin once stabbed his hand on a rusty nail sticking out of the wall after slipping on vomit left on the stairs. “Oh, yeah, I was bleeding,” he told me. “I had to go to the hospital, get it disinfected, and get two stitches.”
Vomit on the stairs, huh? It’s not the company’s fault that one of its tenants can’t handle their goddamn liquor. Maybe knock on your neighbor’s door and tell them to clean their shit up. Oh, and a “rusty nail sticking out of the wall”? You mean a coat hook? That’s an intentional, useful addition to any hallway. Especially during the rainy months, when you don’t want to hang your wet coat up inside your apartment.
Westminster is a black hole. Among former and current tenants of Kushner-owned buildings?—?including every one of the six residents I spoke to?—?the most common complaint is that Westminster would repeatedly disregard emails and phone calls, especially regarding problems of the company’s own creation.
It’s called privacy, ever heard of it? The company wants to respect the tenants’ privacy. They’re not harassing you by returning your phone calls and emails? Sounds like the perfect landlord to me. Stay out of my life, I’ll stay out of yours. Also, it’s not a problem of the company’s own creation if you brought it to their attention. If you bring it up, you created it. That’s science.
This one is my favorite:
In the same building, three days before Thanksgiving in 2013, contractors renovating the apartment above Uta Winkler’s ruptured a pipe, sending 19,000 gallons of water?—?“similar to the intensity of water released from an open fire hydrant,” she said in a lawsuit filed in 2016?—?gushing through her ceiling. Westminster’s recompense was meager to the point of insult, offering to pay for Winkler to stay two nights?—?two!?—?in a hotel. Two weeks later, a worker crashed through her ceiling and landed on her bed.
Alright so your apartment was turned into a water park for free? Tremendous. Then they put you up in a hotel for two nights? Generous. And finally, a buff, sexy construction worker comes crashing through your ceiling and lands on your bed? That’s a gift from God, Uta. That’s your husband, sent down from the angels of the Kushner empire. Accept the gift and stop taking life for granted.
Hey Jared, if you’re reading this, I’d be happy to do an Instagram story in exchange for a reduction of the broker fee. Hit me up dude.