A luxury residential building in Downtown Brooklyn has been besieged by rowdy swarms of unwashed college students, who shuffle the halls in sweatpants and terrorize their respectable adult neighbors with exuberant weed parties. Residents of The Azure, a doorman establishment where the rent for one-bedrooms starts at roughly $3,000, now watch powerlessly as the scourge of youth sprawls across the rooftop lounge chairs and takes up all the treadmills inside the building's gym.
"You never know how long it will take to get down [to the lobby]," one tenant griped to the NY Post. "You can't even order an Uber and expect to be downstairs in five minutes. It's added 10 minutes to my morning commute."
Cut off from car services as their user ratings plummet, these poor bastards may be soon forced to take one of the 11 nearby subway lines to work—the A, C, G, F, B, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, and 5 trains are all within walking distance—a fate even more degrading than having to share one's communal wet bar with a 20-something clad in pajamas.
But surely, college students do not have thousands of dollars to spend each month on in-unit washer/dryers and bike rooms: what in the hell are they doing in The Azure, besides relentlessly Snapchatting their chill rooftop daygers? ("Dayger": a handy portmanteau blending the words "day" and "rager," which kids these days reportedly use to describe day-drinking events.)
According to the Post, The Azure's management company rented some 45 of its 150 units to Kings College in lower Manhattan. Since August, it has functioned as a "de facto dorm," obligating more mature residents to coexist with bros who shout sweatily at one another across the gym, unable to modulate their volume over the Chainsmokers bangers blaring through their Air Pods, and young women who sunbathe topless on one of the building's two terraces.
"They marketed it as being a luxury building with families," 38-year-old, stay-at-home dad Tommaso Kralj complained. Instead, Kralj now finds himself living the basic plot of Neighbors, a 2014 comedy in which a boring married couple with a baby battles the fraternity monsters living next door. I have never seen it, but I understand from the trailers that mayhem ensues: fires break out and expensive hedges are reshaped into sexual topiaries, as the unbroken thump of dub step drives a pair of responsible, tax-paying citizens to the brink of madness.
Although their complaint campaign has won them some minor victories—students have officially been banned from wearing PJs outside their apartments, for example—tenants who feel themselves to be too old for this shit are cracking under the strain.
"I was being cursed out right to my face," Diana A. Ortiz, an employee with Smart Management, recalled of her experience liaising with adult residents on student move-in day. "Somebody called me a bitch." Perhaps proximity to carefree youth has caused these grown-ups to revert into babies, or perhaps the problem is that overexposure to an abundance of privilege has a funny way of turning people of all ages into assholes.
