We Give Them Home

We give them home. That is what a landlord does. It’s a powerful and humbling proposition. Living in the worst city in the entire country with the greatest number of people without that basic function, this enterprise weighs heavy. Who are we? The people who open their homes or building or havens to others and allow them to share this space called home. I’m not talking about the corporate landlords who buy up buildings far away from their own abode. I’m talking about the breed that opens up their very own house to perfect strangers.  O some will call us greedy and say we do it only for the money. But if that were the basic truth, then wouldn’t everyone who had a space do the same?  We are a different breed. We do not see the offering of a place called home to another as intrusive or an invasion of our privacy. We do not shut ourselves away in mansions of empty rooms, gliding solitarily from room to room. We do not see every human in need of a place to lay their head and bones, who cannot afford to do so alone, as lesser beings.  We take our chances. We fail at times. We succeed at times. But we always throw the tenant dice once more. 

What makes a ‘landlord’ most?  Some come to it on their own as adults with an economic or practical need.  Some, like me, have had a lifetime of learning from our own childhood.  Those Italian immigrant parents of mine opened our house to all manner of visiting folks from their tiny village in Italy. It mattered not that we were seven people spread across two bedrooms with four sisters sharing one of them. We often doubled up to allow a visitor to share our room and gender and age never mattered to my mother. If she could offer someone a place to temporarily hang their hat, she did and it never mattered for how long. Some came to try their hand at labor and living in this land of American opportunity. They came for visits long and short. My paternal grandmother was often a fixture in our room as she moved from one offspring to another throughout the year.  I marvel now upon reflection how my mother was never inconvenienced by any of this. On the contrary, she seemed to thrive at opening up her home. Later, my parents became proper landlords, buying the upper floor apartment in our two family home in the Bronx.  All manner of tenants graced our house for many years, including myself with a poorly chose husband at first and then alone. 

It’s no wonder then, that a cross country move landed me first in Hermosa Beach, California in the spare room of a couple I had just met that summer. It’s no wonder that when seeking my own apartment, an ad in the old Recycler newspaper found me Ingrid to share the two bedroom apartment I had leased with more hope than cash. A few years later, a rented house with one soon to be husband and three empty bedrooms led me to give home to Johnny Fuck, a moniker given for his hilarious Italian soaked pronunciation of the word, rather than a penchant for the deed.  Next came a Minnesota sister-in-law testing the California waters.  Even the purchase of our first home was not done in the usual couples only manner. We bought it with a musician friend of mine living in his own small studio for a short while after years of roommate living.  We gave all three of us home. Decades later, when my housemates were gone through circumstance or pain, I found myself alone again with my two sons and a vacant room out behind our garage.  First built as the musician’s study, then doing duty as my young sons’ playroom, it now became a place to give someone home.  I pretend it’s for the income but I know it’s for the pleasure of giving someone home.

Los Angeles is unique in its constant transient nature coupled with the most obscene housing prices in the country.  There is no shortage of stories and people who need a place to live outside the customary confines of finding one’s own place and living their alone.  My renters all came with a story to be told: the teacher at a local adult school who needed a weekly place so he can go take care of his mother on the weekends a hundred miles away, the film colorist who worked in Hollywood but preferred to live near his daughter.  Not all of my tenants were easy and some required a firm hand to escort them out.  There was the construction worker who disappeared into thin air one day, only to surface about three weeks later with the rent and without an explanation.  Then there was the young man I found during the pandemic who became more trouble than he was worth, including an inability to pay his rent through no fault of the disease.  I managed to break quite a few landlord laws to rectify these two situations.  They gave me pause about continuing to give home to random strangers that no amount of checking on could really give you peace.  My reticence gave way to selecting new ones only from people that I knew.  A good friend building her house graced our presence for four months. A friend of friend who needed a nearby work location gave me three more.  A few months later, the search began again in earnest.  The fruits of my labor gave way to a delightful 49 year old Pakistani gentlemen living in Northern California.  His new job in Southern California had him living out of an AirBnb suitcase for the two nights he spent down south each week.  And so as luck would have us both, we found the perfect situation for me to give him home.