New York City and Its Third World Bureaucracy

As much as we talk about our crooked politicians, political quid-pro-quos, and nasty Tammany-style grafting, I think most of us have faith in the ability of our local government as it stands to provide us with adequate -- not exemplary -- housing, policing and education.

After dealing first-hand with housing-fraud in my neighborhood, I'm beginning to think that maybe this faith in our system acts as a compensation for the fact that we don't understand how our system works at all. That maybe this faith functions as a veneer that masks a deeper ignorance of bureaucratic regulation and authority.

My roommates and I live in a single-family house in Western Queens. For the past year, we’ve been getting tickets from the Buildings Department for charges ranging from illegal conversion to missed water payments. At first, I was alarmed. I naively gave the tickets to Ahmid, the mild-mannered, balding Bangladeshi employee from the management company who collects my rent. Mild-mannered Ahmid, in his Avirex bomber jacket and backwards fitted cap, promptly ripped up the tickets to show me that there was nothing to be concerned about.

I think he could do that because my actual owner doesn’t exist. I’ve never met him. The management company claims that “he’s gone now,” or that we “don’t have to worry about him.” For a long time, I’ve assumed that he might be a paperwork phantom a fraudalant identity created to absorb fines and penalties without affecting my real owner’s credit situation.

My theories were loosely confirmed recently, when I was served with papers which allege that my landlord turned in a fraudulent document to his bank that declared his mortgage was paid off. He allegedly put the house under the name of a new owner, turned that into the city, and then continued to collect our rent without paying his mortgage. If so, they’ll get caught, but not after years of legal ping-pong, hazy verdicts, and groundless appeals.

This may be the way business is done in Dhaka, where my landlords come from. Bangladesh has one of the most notoriously corrupt governments and private sectors in the world. Don't get me wrong: my landlords are spectacularly crooked for any culture's standards. I can only speculate on the degree that they export their business culture into the States. Still, there's a disregard for real-estate law in my largely South-Asian neighborhood that I've never seen the likes of anywhere else in this city.

Basically, watching these alleged racketeers allegedly turn the regulations and laws of our housing market into empty, institutional threats planted the seeds of my doubt in our ability to govern ourselves with a healthy bureaucracy. Is there even such a thing as a healthy bureacracy, or are all of our systems intrisically inept under their exterior shells of functionality?

New Yorkers don’t take advantage of loopholes and systemic disorganization as obviously or to as much of a degree as they may in Dhaka, but I think that has more to do with widespread cultural belief in the efficiency of our system, coupled with -- or fueled by --  a hesitancy to dig into our messy, alien laws, with their sticky regulations and enigmatic methods of enforcement.

Housing law and the Department of Buildings, like most aspects of local government, are hard to get a good handle on intellectually, because they're intimidatingly intricate and cumbersome; difficult to pick up. We have a rotten Buildings Department, and a justice system that gives unfair and undeserved leniency toward slum-lords and developers. We’d benefit by trying to understand and involve ourselves with our local government, because after all, the legal status of your rent has a lot more importance in your life than what’s decided in Washington, doesn’t it?

 

Follow Will Schwartz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Williemitts

Comments

[Andrew Piccone]

Is it hard to meet girls in Queens?