Tuesday July 1, 2003. Homeless in NYC ... Had to go to the garden and sit for an hour or so waiting for the exterminator guy to come and check to see if we had a rat problem. J., the 75 year old evicted person, came and sat in the Vegetable Garden under the Fig tree with me to update me on her progress as one of the newly homeless. She saved her rent money when it became clear that eviction was inevitable, and used it to move to a "tourist" hotel on Riverside Drive. I had advised her to take a room in a hotel to relax and get over the horrible eviction experience when I left her off at the Health Department last week to get a TB test, ( a prerequisite to getting into the welfare system in NYC) So it turns out the hotel she checked into is a rent stabilized SRO and she is requesting a lease. She went up to the NY State office building ( DHCR) today to check the rent history on her room and we have our fingers crossed that the rent stabilized rent will be no more than 2 or 3 hundred a month. Not only that- the room is airconditioned, has a private bath, and a refrigerator. If everything checks out, she will have a much nicer place to live for the rest of her life, and will not have to interface with the Welfare system and nosy bureaucrats trying to push her into a "facility." The rent stabilized rent in these places is usually low because the owners illegally converted them to Tourist Hotels in the late eighties. Therefore, the rent is based on the last legally registered tenant's rent back in the late eighties or early nineties. The reason the legal rents are fairly low and affordable is because the last registered tenant lived there for a long time as a resident. After J. left, I turned the Compost until the rat guy appeared. He looked around, but there were no more rats left.