The Silent Soul-Crusher: UNDERemployment

I got a job back in June and since then, kind of fell off the blogging wagon. I thought, hey I’m employed now, it’s all good. Hah! Little did I know that with each day I spent at my new job, my soul would be crushed a little bit more.

At first, I was psyched to be back at work – just to be doing something besides searching endlessly for jobs on the internet. Everyone asked me how my new job was and I said things like “I have a whole new perspective now,” and “I’m just grateful to have any job at all.” Which was true.

But in hindsight, I took my job because I was depressed and desperate, not because it was something I was truly passionate about, or a company I really wanted to work for. And as a result, here I am, underemployed and stuck, eight full months later.

Here are some signs that you (and I) are underemployed:

* Your bosses take you for granted and don’t treat you well (i.e. no holiday bonus, no holiday gift, no holiday card, never say thank you, expect you to go above and beyond your job duties with no compensation).

* You accepted a lower salary than you should have because you were desperate, and now you’re barely breaking even. You may have even accepted a job with no benefits (like me), which was a mistake and is a constant source of stress and worry.

* You feel underpaid and under-appreciated on a daily basis and are working in a position below what you should be/are qualified for.

* You dread the idea of having to start the job search process over again and possibly end up in a position you still don’t like, but you know you don’t want to stay in your current job.

* You sometimes consider going back to school, but have no money to pay for it or means to support yourself while doing so.

* You watch your friends and old coworkers advance in their careers while you remain stagnant in yours, and even feel like you have regressed.

* You are depressed that you can’t get unemployment again if you quit your job and regret not spending more time looking for a job you really wanted.

* You want to feel sorry for yourself but know you shouldn’t, but no one really understands who hasn’t been through the same thing.

So that’s it, that’s my sob story of underemployment. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself, or wallow in my underemployment, but it’s hard. All I can do is try to maintain a somewhat positive attitude while going into my job that I don’t like (verge of hate) every day, and hope that someday soon, I’ll get my big break. I keep hearing that there are “millions” of my fellow underemployed Americans stuck in the same position that I am and that should be comforting, but somehow it just makes the task of trying to find a new job seem even more daunting.

Still, it’s good to know that I’m not the only one. So if you’re out there, fellow underemployed, sound off here. What advice do you have for me or anyone else in our shoes? In the meantime, I’ll keep you updated on my struggle to break free from underemployment (have an interview Friday!).

Brad and Angelina enlarge their Los Angeles compound further; long-goateed actor quietly pays $1.1M to buy a missing link for his estate in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood — a two-bedroom, 3,232-square-foot house that his compound had bordered on three sides

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have increased the size of their compound in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, with Pitt quietly paying $1,100,000 to buy a missing link for his property in the form of a 3,232-square-foot house that his estate largely had surrounded.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Pitt’s latest purchase, which like some other property of his was made through his Mondo Bongo Trust. Records show that Pitt purchased the property on August 6 from the estate of the late Anne Tyler Sherman.

Built in 1920, the two-bedroom, former Sherman house — whose property is shaped like a key — sits on a 0.25-acre (10,759-square-foot) lot in the Oaks area of Los Feliz. It helps Pitt round out his compound and means that Brad now owns close to 2 full acres in the Oaks…

Features in the house include two baths, a stone fireplace, a huge main room, a bonus room, and “a bar area and a secret cave,” according to the MLS.

Secret cave? Well, they gotta keep all those kids somewhere…

Other celebrity real estate items of note:

• Artist David Hockney sells 1,908-square-foot house in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills to his former lover and now working partner and friend Gregory Evans for $600K
• Retired tennis stud Pete Sampras pays $5.6M for a six-bedroom, newly built house in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood
• Joan Rivers has her estate in New Milford, CT on the market for $6.5M
• All-time U.S. listing record set in Beverly Hills, CA: massive estate listed for $165M

• Heidi Klum sells her penthouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village for $5.35M

You know, when I was a kid, my best friend lived right down the block from that last listing, and I hung out there all the time. How grand it feels that Heidi Klum now trods the very ground where I used to play stoop ball, and where I couldn’t afford to live these days if I sold two of my most-functioning organs.

</bitterness>

Anti-rent control guy

I’m tired of hearing the residents of Stuy Town complaining that their low rents need to be preserved because Stuy Town is a middle class oasis filled with hard working firemen and teachers.

This is nonsense.

There are people who have been living their for decades paying obscenely low rents. Good for them, but everyone else is subsidizing them with obscenely high market rents.

There is no law that everyone has to live in Manhattan. If they can’t afford a market rate rent, let them move across the river to Queens.

StuyTown resident replies

I’m sick of the wealthy real estate developers catering to the wealthiest citizens. I’m even more sickened by the complete lack of a community oriented, humanistic approach to urban development. Furthermore sickened am I by the lack of even half-way decent public schools to send your children to. Do you work for Bloomberg?

Anti-rent control guy

Hey StuyTown Resident-

If you can’t afford to live in Manhattan, or are too cheap to pay to live here, get out. Everyone else in the city is subsidizing deadbeats like you.

StuyTown resident

(BTW I’m not looking for a fight.)

A) I am not a deadbeat.
B) I can afford to live in Mahhattan, because I’m lucky enough to live in Stuyvesant town.
C) I don’t want to move, because this is my home. I’ve lived in Manhattan for 20 years. My wife was born and raised and publicly schooled here. Our children were born, are being raised and attend public school here.
D) Can you explain to me, clearly, how high market rental rates are directly subsidizing my rent stabilized lease?

Anti-rent control guy

When some people are paying artificially low rents, this creates housing shortages. Other renters not lucky enough to have a rent controlled or stabilized apartment wind up paying artificially bloated rents.

This is not some far out right wing theory. This is basic economics 101.

StuyTown resident

There is no housing shortage. There IS a shortage of AFFORDABLE housing. Occupied, existing apartments, don’t create housing shortages. Poor foresight and greedy development to cater to the wealthy do. Reagan tried supply side, trickle down economics. Look where that got us.

Anti-rent control guy

This has nothing to do with Reagan.

You have been living in Stuy Town for 12 years. You have not moved from your apt. for 12 years because you have an artificially low rent. In other words, since your apartment is essentially off the market it causes a housing shortage.

Trying to make housing more “affordable” by enacting price controls is a bit like putting out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. No other city in the US has rent control and no other city in the US has the endemic housing problems like NYC. The only reason why your apartment is kept artificially low is because of a bunch of pandering spineless politicians. It has little to do with good economics or creating a truly efficient and affordable housing market.

Apparently your version of liberalism does not extend beyond your apartment. As long as you have a cheap place to live to hell with everyone else who is paying a bloated rent subsidizing you.

Stop justifying your greed by attacking Reagan and a bunch of mysterious, faceless landlords. I’m sorry, but you lose this argument.

StuyTown resident

I haven’t moved from my apartment in 12 years because I like it there. It’s my home. I’m not a transient.

Many other cities in the United States have rent control including Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, CA.

I never stated my version of liberalism, and your concise description thereof is based on assumption and inaccurate.

I made no justification of my greed by that statement. I am not greedy. I didn’t attack Reagan. I simply stated that his idea of supply side economics didn’t work, which is fact.

You are allowed to believe you won an argument.

I am allowed to believe you are wrong.

I wish you wealth, so that you never have to worry about the cost of living and can afford any place you may so desire to live.

Anti-rent control guy

You have been living in Stuy Town because it is cheap. If NYC would do the right thing and get rid of rent control your rent would rise to a more rational level (and everyone else’s rent would plunge).

If you had to pay a fairer, market-based rent for Stuy Town you would leave in a New York minute.

StuyTown resident

If I had to pay a “fairer market based rent” in Stuyvesant Town, I’d get a second job to be able to afford it. Just like my parents worked two jobs when we were kids to afford the mortgage on their house so we WOULDN’T HAVE TO MOVE OUT OF OUR HOME.

Maybe I should make assumptions about you as you do about others. I assume you are seated pretty comfortably and don’t understand that most of us work very hard for financial gains that aren’t very lucrative and have to struggle to make ends meet. If you understood that dynamic, you may be more sympathetic to those of a lesser standing than yours.

Anti-rent control guy

I work very hard for my money, thank you. The difference between me and you is that I don’t have a sense of entitlement. I don’t believe I have the right to live somewhere that I can’t afford.

As I said before, if living in Manhattan is too expensive for you, why don’t you move to Queens, Brooklyn or Staten Island? How dare you assume that society owes you a cheap Manhattan apartment with gardens and a river view simply because you want to live here.

Against rent control too

I’m not going to defend Anti-Rent Control Guy’s tone, but don’t be so quick to dismiss the substance of what he’s saying by merely calling him a crank.

What he’s saying is fact: rent control is a market distortion that creates winners and losers, and what’s more sacrifices efficiency in the process. Whether you’d leave Manhattan or work two jobs absent rent control is besides the point. You are a lucky winner in the current situation by not having to do either, but others pay the price and the whole system is suboptimal and unfair.

StuyTown resident

Anti-Rent Control Guy,

I don’t doubt you work very hard for your money. You’re welcome. But again you read into my words. I am saying that you may not understand the dynamic of the struggle to make ends meet.

I don’t want to move to those areas you name, because I’ve made my home in Manhattan.

I don’t have a sense of entitlement. I can afford Stuyvesant town.

Society owes me nothing and I don’t dare to make that assumption (the assumption I made was about your standing). Anything I have I’ve earned. No one owes me anything.

I would pay a higher rate if the laws were to change, in order to be able to keep my home.

To me, it’s beginning to sound like you are a little jealous of we Stuyvesant town residences with our park and river views. TS is still renting some apartments. Maybe you should consider moving here.

Anti-rent control guy

The only reason you’ve been able to make Manhattan your home is because people like me are subsidizing your lifestyle.

I remember a year or so ago the NY Times, hardly a bastion or right wing thinking, ran an editorial critical of Tishman’s antics in Stuy Town. However, in the same editorial it had harsh words for a system that was so dysfunctional that it allowed a lucky few to have cheap apartments in Stuy Town.

You’re damn right I’m jealous. I wish I had a cheap apt. with a garden and river views.

Pro rent-control

Anti-Rent Control Guy, could you please enlighten us as to how YOU specifically are subsidizing rent stabilized tenants?

Another issue for you to grapple with, aren’t tax paying renters subsidizing home owners who get tax breaks on their mortgage interest and property taxes?, plus a $500,000 tax free capital gain on the sale of their home every so many years?

What about the regressive FICA taxes paid by the poor and the middle class on their entire income while the wealthy stop paying it once they reach just over $100K

Warren Buffet, a multi-billionaire and the second richest person in the US, complained to Congress that the wealthy are not paying their fair share of taxes, telling them that his tax rate was 16% and his secretary’s is 25%.

If you are upset over what you consider to be societal inequities, you are better off starting with the wealthy who take governmental financial bailouts from the middle class taxes, then pay themselves insane compensation and bonuses.

Another person against rent control

The fact that there probably exists someone (many ones, in fact) in StuyTown Resident’s exact financial position who is unable to live in his same neighborhood in a comparable apartment for a comparable rent is proof positive that the system as it stands is unfair. He is LUCKY to live in a nice neighborhood, in a nice apartment, in the most desirable borough of the most desirable city in the US, if not the world. No use in comparing him to someone who makes more and can afford more. But plenty of people DON’T make more and CAN’T afford more and DO live in the outer boroughs in much worse neighborhoods in much worse apartments! Is it because they don’t work (as) hard? NOPE. Is it because they are worse people? NOPE. Just like the wealthy are paying high(er) rents to subsidize cheap(er) rents, the UNLUCKY middle and lower classes are paying to live in areas/apartments that are a far cry from where StuyTown Resident lives. Can they afford his rent? YEP. But they didn’t get lucky. Fair?

Yesterday, we posted about what’s happening in New York City’s Stuyvesant Town: The companies that bought the apartment complex for $5.4 billion three years ago have defaulted on loan payments and walked away from the property, turning it over to creditors. That’s the equivalent of a homeowner stopping mortgage payments and mailing his house keys to the bank (see today’s New York Times article for a report on that phenomenon), except that in this walkaway, 25,000 tenants have been left in limbo.

An interesting post last week on the Manhattan real estate blog UrbanDigs.com explains just how wrong-headed the economics of the deal were in the first place, and why, as one observer said to the Times, the transaction is the “poster child for the entire housing bubble.”

Stuy Town – Not The AOL/Time Warner of Real Estate – Worse!

“At the time, it looked like a sound investment.”

    -Clark McKinley, a spokesman for Calpers.

Some of us are still wondering whether mass hallucinations were at work during the bubble years, allowing so many to act so thoughtlessly on such a grand scale…

I keep being plagued by the idea, that after a period of reckless profligacy, lessons must be learned, prudence must be rediscovered and tough choices made and vigorously executed to heal the prior transgressions. Yet our society seems unable to actually tolerate even the most preliminary steps in this process, including fessing up to prior bonehead maneuvers.

Example number one being the statement made above by Calpers regarding its investment in the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village buyout by Tishman Speyer. I hate to disagree with the world renowned stewards of capital at Calpers, but in my humble opinion this deal was patently absurd from the day it was first proposed. If I had a fedora I would pledge to eat it if Tishman Speyer was actually unaware of how ludicrous the deal was when they first proposed it. But alas despite the sponsor having precious little skin in the game, a fantastical deal price and an incredibly pompous assumption that the seller had no clue as to the upside still embedded in the property, a bunch of Stuy Town losers stepped up to fund this deal which will go down in history as one of the biggest and stupidest real estate deals of all time.

I know, I know, you can’t believe it. Why would Tishman Speyer, heretofore an organization of sterling reputation, knowingly invest its hard earned dollars in a deal that was more than likely to fail from day one?

According to news reports the complex of 11,232 apartments was purchased for $5.4B, or $480,000 per unit. As a rule of thumb, savvy (meaning long-term profitable and surviving) investors in New York City rent-regulated buildings like to pay under $100,000 per unit. Granted deals at those prices are very hard to find and this rule of thumb applies more to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Morningside Heights, than to prime Manhattan locales south of 95th St. On the Island of Manhattan many would probably consider $200,000 a unit to be workable long-term, though not a “value investment” as you would need to eventually turn over all the apartments and do a condo conversion to really make out big. But these kinds of deals have been done pretty frequently.

Now the Stuy Town/Peter Cooper complex includes 80 acres of downtown property, an asset with long-term value for sure. But how likely is it that a massive block of airspace largely dedicated to rent controlled buildings would be upzoned in our lifetime…even in a Bloomberg administration…..not much.

The post then goes into specific reasons the numbers never added up, and ends with this analysis, which to my eyes reads like calling the deal pretty much a scam in which the smaller investors — like the Califonia retirees’ fund, the government of Singapore, and the Church of England — were the ones left holding the bag.

For the record, Tishman Speyer was not the first or the only deal sponsor to look at the ridiculous financing parameters available in the market with no recourse to the borrower and say damn the pricing…let’s do the deal. If it works out….. great!, if it doesn’t we get most if not all of our money back and then some (through various fund management, property management and in some cases financing fees) and we just hand the keys back to the bank. The well publicized Riverton Apartments fiasco enjoyed many similar features of the Stuy Town deal.

So for all of those fiduciaries supposed to be investing money for teachers, firemen, the people of Singapore and God, shame on you. This was never a good deal for anyone but Tishman Speyer. The sponsor should have realized, however, that although the debt holders may have no monetary claim on them there is always recourse to your reputation in a deal as high profile as this one was.

Now, according to the Times, tenants are “in limbo,” and a rally was held Sunday to keep the housing complex “an affordable oasis,” in the words of the New York Daily News. Below is a video from the rally featuring dozens of long-time residents, found on the blog StuyTown’s Lux Living. “This is my home,” one tenant says, “and it should be treated better than a Monopoly game; we’re talking about people’s lives, not profits.”

For more on Stuyvesant Town, check out The Stuyvesant Town Report.

A series of posts from the political science blog Monkey Cage addresses this counterintuitive lack of correlation between crime and the economy, in relation to people’s perceptions.

Since 2001, perceptions of crime have become far worse even as the actual crime rate has remained stable. I took FBI’s violent crime rate from 1989-2008 and matched it up as best as possible to Gallup poll numbers for each year.

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.)…

One thing that occurred to me is that the decline in the crime rate in the 1990s coincided with an economic recovery. And the perceptions of more crime from 2002-2008 coincided with a weaker economy. Could the economy also affect perceptions of crime?

A provisional answer is yes: it appears that people perceive more crime when the economy is doing badly.

The relationship is pretty strong, although there are outliers. If you regress perceptions of crime against the violent crime rate and consumer sentiment, both are statistically significant, and they explain about two-thirds of the variance in perceptions.

The logic could be: If the times are bad, people must be bad too…

So because people assume crime will increase in a recession, they perceive that it does, even though it doesn’t.

Along those lines, too bad no one perceived–when times were good–an increase in white collar, corporate crime, even though there actually was one. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to be blogging about this in the first place.

Here are recent segments on the real estate picture in Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens, and of course, Manhattan (if you’re a movie star, unindicted hedge fund manager, or winner of multiple lotteries.)

Posted on the Social Work/Social Action blog and blip.tv.

Of course, if you’d lilke the opposite view of New York City workfare, the American Enterprise Institute is happy to give it to you.

I’m a dogwalker and a catsitter, which places me in a crawl space between the ‘Upstairs’ clients and the ‘Downstairs’ building staffs of doormen, porters and superintendents and the army of service people…and because I have a huge mouth…I talk to them.

*Phyllis, is 45, she’s a designer at an auction house, married with a kid and a dog. She lives across the street from Madoff’s place in mid-level luxury. In 2006, she made $250,000, working 9 months of that year and vacationing/traveling all over the world. In 2008, she made $41,000 and is desperate to sell her condo before she has to tap savings. Her daughter is in an expensive private school that costs almost as much per year as she made last year, which is more than she will this year. Her life was built upon assumptions that no longer exist. By any measure, she has ‘enough’ and is unworthy of sympathy, but simply of note, she will have to adjust and I suspect she will. But the private school tuition seems likely to evaporate and tough choices about where to live and where to school await.

*Marco is 34. He has an MBA from Wharton, the first in his family to go to college, let alone the most prestigious B-School in the land. He took a job right out of grad school that paid him $180,000 his first year, by his 4th year (2006) his income bordered on seven figures. He met a woman, who had an MFA and a taste for fine living and they purchased a condominium apartment in a top tier new high rise and appointed it in style, she decided not to work – preferring to focus on their lifestyle and travel for new art and design elements while her man plugged away at the Bank. They occupied their new 58th floor paradise on January 19, 2007, his company’s stock, where most of their wealth was concentrated, was trading above $170 per share – making them multi-millionaires.

On St, Patricks Day, 2008. Marco was barred from entering his office at Bear Stearns. The shares he had stubbornly held onto, after conferring with senior executives at his firm and others, were essentially worthless and were sold the next day to JP Morgan for $2 per share. He was out of work, wiped out in his investment account and overextended for art, rugs, travel, clothes in his bank account. Within 3 months, he was unable to make the $8,000 per month ‘Maintenance’ payments on his condo and his lady left him. 3 months after that, he’d been evicted from his residence by the board and his possessions were sent to auction. He moved in with his brother, a doorman. Since February of 2009, he has been working part-time as a porter in the building in which his brother tends door. He remains a brilliant, innovative guy and will recover, in time. But right now, he is lucky to have a family who love him, a place to sleep and a job that keeps him fed. His wife divorced him and remarried a 62 year old Mexican millionaire who made his money in ceramic tiles, the sort that can be found in the jacuzzi of the apartment Marco used to call home…

Here’s the full post.