10 RMS W/VW BST BLK

Stories that make the times we live in sound like the ancien regime or the final days of Rome ought to be told gradually. Otherwise, people panic. They begin to think they can hear Madame Defarge’s knitting needles clicking as head after head tumbles into the basket below the guillotine. So, writing from Manhattan, I’m going to begin by telling you folks in the rest of the country simply that, according to a story in the New York Times by Monique P. Yazigi, apartments in so-called A+ buildings on Fifth Avenue are now selling for what real estate brokers have come to refer to as the “teen millions.” No, that’s not for the apartment building; that’s for an apartment.

If it would help you in trying to take in this news with some equanimity, I’d be happy to point out that “teen millions” is a rather soothing way to express these prices, given our association of “teen” with the familiar world of dirty sneakers and orthodonture. It’s necessary now, though, to let you know that anyone laying down, say, $14.5 million in cash for an apartment in an A+ building has to prove to the building’s board that he has a net worth at least 10 times that amount.

Board? Yes. In New York someone who wants to buy a co-op apartment is also asking to join other residents in a partnership responsible for the entire building, and the board, after examining his references and his tax forms, can reject him without even troubling to give a reason. Supplicants before a co-op board–people who ordinarily may be contentious or even fearsome–accept this treatment without a peep. Now that characters like Somoza and Trujillo and Stroessner have passed from the scene, Americans who live in other cities may get the impression that the exercise of totally capricious and untrameled power is drying up in this hemisphere, but New Yorkers of a certain station understand that co-op boards will always be with them.

Lately, some co-op boards have apparently rejected ostensibly qualified buyers–even buyers they wouldn’t mind sharing the elevator with every morning–simply to add to the cachet of the building. In other words, a board member who paid $100,000 for an apartment in an A+ building during the down market of the early ’70s may reject people willing to pay $15 million for an apartment two floors away in the hope that such rejection will increase the value of his own apartment to $16 million.

It wouldn’t help for the rejected buyer to prove again that he can easily afford the monthly maintenance each resident pays to cover expenses like doormen’s salaries and interest on the building’s mortgage. Speaking of a building whose apartments carry a monthly maintenance of $12,000, one broker interviewed by Ms. Yazigi said, “Look, anyone can afford the maintenance. It’s not about that.”

If that quote strikes you as uncomfortably close to what “let them eat cake” might sound like if translated into Upper East Side real estate talk, try to forget it. Dwell on something comforting–the fact, for instance, that the maintenance in an A+ building can often be expressed as something in the teen thousands. Whatever you do, don’t panic.