Home Sweet Homeless
Recently a tenant in my building slipped a note under everyone's door complaining about a problem with homeless people sleeping in the entryway our building.
First, some quick info. When you enter my building, you walk through a set of outer doors into an entryway where the doorman stands (from 6am until midnight), which leads to a second set of doors to the main lobby. When the doorman is off-duty, these inner doors are locked, but there is a buzzer to each apartment next to them. The outer doors always remain unlocked; since the buzzers are inside, there would be no way to contact apartments from outside.
Anyway, the note described this tenant's frequent encounters with homeless people who have been sleeping, and his fruitless attempts to get our landlord to put locks on the outer doors. He claims that he calls 911 everytime he finds someone sleeping in the lobby... sometimes they come to his aide, sometimes they don't. The landlord claims that it is too expensive to change the outer doors and that the only solution is to continue calling the police. This doesn't surprise me at all, as our landlord is ridiculously cheap, constantly stalling on any repairs that cost money until repeated complaints are filed.
Anyway, the letter included a slip to sign to show our solidarity as a building. I was totally sympathetic to the man, ready to jump on board and sign his petition (at least after I received my lease renewal, which should be arriving any day now)... until I got to this paragraph:
In particular, there has been one man who has been here all winter and who is starting to show belligerent behavior. Yesterday, Wednesday morning, and a week earlier, when I went to walk my dog, he followed me, looking angry as if he was about to hurt me. And, yesterday he also blocked the entrance as I tried to re-enter the building. He appeared agitated and threatening - his fly was open - and he only moved away when I spoke to him in a loud voice. It was a frightening experience, my hands shook as I tried to open the lobby door with my key. How would you have felt?
Now I know I shouldn't be negative, since this did not happen to me personally and I have no idea who this tenant is, how old he is or what his life has been like. But come on... do you have to be sooooooooooo melodramatic? It's totally off-putting. I don't want to tell you to grow a set, but...