Yesterday at the Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear, attendees were treated to several collage-like montages of media talking heads listing all the things we need to be afraid of, including flip flop, bedbugs and hurricanes. There's one new thing to add to that list: conspiratorial lesbian-controlled low-rent apartment buildings!
According to Roberto Caballero, a former Lower East Side Democratic district leader, a seven-unit building on East 11th Street near Avenue B has tacitly become a lesbian-only building, favored by well-to-do lesbians such as Margarita Lopez, the $187,000-per-year Housing Authority board member and one-time city councilwoman, and Rosie Mendez, a current councilwoman (and Lopez's protege). "I find it strange that no man has ever moved in. I would consider that a form of discrimination," Caballero, who is "openly gay," told the Post. Maybe what's angering Caballero the most is the fact that units sell for an astoundingly low $250 apiece, plus capital improvement fees (and with the rule that apartments can't be sold for profit). More than half the building's 12 tenants are reportedly lesbians (does the Post know this because they all play softball?), and Lopez admits that new tenants tend to be friends-of-friends: "the apartments are not marketed. It's through word of mouth to the people we know in the community."
The building in question was once owned by the city, but was given away for very little in 1989 at a time when the neighborhood was overrun by junkies and drug dealers. Lopez and five other women renovated the gutted building, in return for $630,000 in building funds—most of it in the form of charity and taxpayer grants and loans. Initially, residents had to qualify as low-income, but once they're accepted, they're in for life, even if they start making more money. Just like membership in the Lavender Mafia.
