It sucks to have to move. But it sucks less if you’re moving from an old building to one in the exact same spot — a new, fancier building, in which you have to pay only $10 for your new two-bedroom apartment.
Haha, right, and it also sucks less if Jeremy Renner carries your boxes and your new place is made out of candy! But seriously, though, the $10 apartment thing happened.
In New York’s East Village, on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue, there used to be a small building with one of the neighborhood’s most famously gritty and old-school bars.
It was called Mars Bar, and when the neighborhood learned that it would be knocked down to make way for a fancy new apartment building, it felt to many people like the coda to the long decline of the East Village’s weirdness and the beginning of the total domination by luxury condo dwellers.
This sort of switch-over is happening a lot in the East Village these days, and it doesn’t always go well for the people who’ve been living in the neighborhood for decades. But in this case, the tenants of the Mars Bar building and the one next door made out like bandits. The plan for the new building began, the Wall Street Journal reports, when the city offered to sell one of those buildings to tenants and they brought in a developer as a partner.
That developer made a deal with the old tenants that ensured there would be space for them in the new building. And now it’s finished, and they’re moving in. And so are a lot of people who’ll be paying market rate — $3,000 to $10,000 a month.
