Bill De Blasio Slept Here

[brooklynite]

New Yorker

It was a three-story yellow clapboard house in Park Slope, with blue French doors and southern exposures. There were three bedrooms—easily convertible to four—and amenities such as a dishwasher and a soaker hose for the back garden (herbs, rose of Sharon, a dwarf crab-apple tree). The rent was reasonable: four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars a month. And it was only a five-minute walk to the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A.

“It felt like a bit of a fixer-upper,” Julian Hornik, a twenty-five-year-old theatre composer, said. “But it was a whole house, and it was in our price range. We could clean it up and make it lovely.” Hornik and his roommates—Lauren Modiano, who also works in theatre, and Spencer Bokat-Lindell, an editor at the Times—were looking to move out of their six-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment in the neighborhood. “There’s an upright piano in our living room that Julian uses for work,” Bokat-Lindell explained. “When both Lauren and I were working in offices, this wasn’t an issue. But, now that we’re all confined to the same workspace, it’s not really tenable, because my room, like, abuts the piano.”

When they saw the listing on StreetEasy for the yellow house, which had three times more space than their current place, Hornik e-mailed the broker, Trisha Webster, a former body-parts model. (Her hands have been used as stand-ins for Farrah Fawcett’s.) When Webster called, she had a lot of questions. “She asked, ‘Why are you moving?’ ” Hornik said. “ ‘Who are you moving with? How do you know your roommates? How long have you lived together? What do you do? How much do you make?’ ” She told him that he and his friends seemed like “decent candidates” for the house and offered to show it to them if they all signed nondisclosure agreements.

“Do you know who the landlord is?” she asked. They did not. She said, “Well, it’s the Mayor.”

“As soon as I found that out, I was like, O.K., I don’t think this is going to work,” Bokat-Lindell said. He contacted the standards editor at the Times and asked, “What is the policy about renting an apartment from the Mayor?” (The gist of the response: If you can avoid taking the place, that’d be great.)