Cross-Dressing For An Apartment

Sure, Curbed covers real estate, but it's high-falutin real estate (see $20 million loft), but Gothamist is here to tell you what real New Yorkers do for apartments: They dress up as their mothers for $170/month public housing. It's sort of like Big Momma's House meets Bosom Buddies, with a twist of Green Card. Authorities busted cross-dressing Michael Jones for impersonating his mother, who died four years ago. Other family members who lived in the apartment can usually stay in the apartment, but Jones was banned from NYCHA buildings for drug-related activities. The Daily News thinks the Housing Authority shoud have figured out something was up when "a bearded man in women's clothes showed up at the management office last year claiming to be Carol Jones," but they only found out when cross checking residents against death certificates. A neighbor said, "If you need a place to stay, you have to do what you have to do. He's a nice person. He dresses as a woman."

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By Jen Chung in News on July 15, 2004 1:40 PM

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thenamegame

Although we don't automatically think of it as such, Carol can be a male name. (Caroll Spinney, aka: Big Bird, comes to mind). And unless they were looking at information that said this particular Carol was a female of a specific age, it's doubtful the name itself would have been anything that seemed necessary to question.

Mother Theresa

Lease fraud: illegal.

Impersonating dead mothers: not illegal.

I should know; I'm a guy and I impersonate dead mothers all the time.

Holly H

The Daily News thinks the Housing Authority shoud have figured out something was up when "a bearded man in women's clothes showed up at the management office last year claiming to be Carol Jones."

Interestingly, investigating someone solely because their name doesn't match their... uh... beard... might violate New York's recently revised (Jan 2002) non-discrimination law, which now covers gender expression as well. I'm sure that somewhere in New York, there is someone whose real legal name is Carol (or Jane, or Alice, or something) and who has a beard... and it might not be grounds for investigating them.

Then again, impersonating your dead mom is illegal regardless of your gender, and you'd think they would check drivers' licenses.