This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,146
Washington. Fully remodeled bathrooms; new electrical, roof and hardwood floors; weatherproofed French doors onto a deck and views all the way to downtown. Charming period details throughout. A dream starter home for a lucky couple. $589,999.
CLAUDIA MOVED INTO HER NEW APARTMENT ON ONE OF THOSE sunny, crystalline winter days, a day that had been plucked out of bucolic May and planted serendipitously at the end of January. It hadn’t rained since December and, in the papers and on TV, meteorologists were offering ominous predictions of an impending drought, but up here, within the double-paned central-air-conditioned safety of her sixteenth-floor loft in downtown Los Angeles, Claudia felt she could ride out the weather.
Her new home was one of fifty-three units in The Luxist, an Art Deco bank building that had spent time as a Mexican movie palace after World War II, a flophouse during the decline of the 1970s, and then abandoned entirely, before it was finally reincarnated as a luxury condo conversion during the recent real estate boom. The building was in a state of permanent near-completion, construction having halted when funds ran out the previous fall. That unintentionally left Claudia’s one-bedroom loft with exposed heating ducts overhead, flaking plaster friezes above the windows, and a sink in the open-plan kitchen that didn’t actually run hot water. Upstairs was a rooftop swimming pool, surrounded by an empty framework of cabanas that had yet to be built; in the basement was a gym, where CNBC played on television sets over a row of Stair Masters and nonfunctional treadmills. And yet there was free building-wide Wi-Fi, a doorman in the lobby, and sustainable bamboo flooring in the hallways. Besides Claudia, and Esme in her condo two floors below, only eighteen other units in the building were occupied. Claudia had rented hers for a bargain, since the building’s developers were on the verge of bankruptcy and desperate to milk every dollar from their prerecession folly that they could.
Moving here had been Esme’s idea. When Claudia put her house on the market in December, Esme had begged her to move into her building. “I could use the company,” Esme said, “and frankly, so could you.” She wasn’t wrong. After two months of staring nightly into a dark canyon, wearing her solitude like a second skin, Claudia was looking forward to life in an urban center, to peering out at orderly grids of yellow squares glowing in the buildings around her, each cube filled with the promise of humanity. She was ready not to be isolated anymore.
She hadn’t quite expected everything to move so quickly, though. Her house in Mount Washington had sold almost instantly, thanks to the aggressive pricing and savvy marketing of Marcie Carson. The fire turned out to be an asset in the end; all that brand-new construction brought up the value of the house, and she’d ended up listing it for only $36,000 less than they’d bought it for in the first place—a minor miracle, considering the state of the real estate market. She was in escrow with an environmental scientist and his pregnant wife before the bank had even accepted Claudia’s final offer on Dolores’s house across the street.
As for Dolores’s house, Claudia had bought that outright, using the money from the Beautiful Boy account, knowing she’d never be approved for another mortgage. Buying Dolores’s home for her may have been a stupid move, financially speaking, but it wasn’t going to be a completely losing proposition. The monthly rent that Dolores would be paying her should cover nearly half of Claudia’s rent for this condo. Someday, far down the line, if and when the market ever bounced back, she might even be able to fix the house up and sell it at a profit.
Not that this was the goal, it never had been. Nor had it she bought the house as a bid for ego-affirming gratitude; she knew better than to expect Dolores to be appreciative. Rather, Dolores had reacted to Claudia’s proposal—that Claudia buy Dolores’s home out of foreclosure and let Dolores rent it back from her—with her usual display of curmudgeonly skepticism. “Better to own,” she grumbled. “Not paying deposit, OK?” She then proceeded to bargain Claudia down on the rent, from $700 a month to $650.
And it wasn’t a form of revenge, either—though Claudia had imagined how horrified Jeremy would be to know that Aoki’s museum-quality masterpiece had gone to pay for a house for Dolores, of all people. Take that, Aoki, she found herself thinking, as