A large part of what’s made New York so, well, New York, is its rent-stabilized apartments. The city has over 960,000 rent-stabilized housing units, according to last year’s Housing and Vacancy Survey, and tenants living in them are protected from sharp rent hikes and are granted the right to renew their leases. This rent regulation system was enacted in 1969, and has allowed for generations of tenants, especially artists, musicians, writers and other creatives, to live in New York.
Just ask Susan Schiffman, a photographer who has lived only in rent-stabilized apartments since she moved to New York in 1979. Since 2016, Ms. Schiffman has been photographing dozens of her neighboring East Village apartments. Her photos depict the clutter that collects when one lives in the same home for decades, the intimacies of people’s domestic lives and the homemade quality of spaces that have never been renovated.
The scenes are timeless in that there are few, if any, elements that give away exactly when they were photographed — many of them look like they were captured decades ago, stuck in past version of New York. The images are meant to be portraits of the tenants, without actually showing any people in them. Ms. Schiffman posts photos from the series, titled “i am a rent stabilized tenant,” on her Instagram and on blog posts on the EV Grieve, a local news outlet.
“Rent stabilization allows you to put roots down and build a community,” said Ms. Schiffman, 65. “These days, young people have to keep moving and live a very transient existence.”
Last year, according to a report by the Rent Guidelines Board, the number of rent-stabilized apartments in the city’s housing stock saw a net decrease of 4,170 units. And at the start of this month, landlords were able to increase rents by 2.75 percent for one-year leases and 5.25 percent for two years leases on rent-stabilized units, rates the board approved earlier this year.
With the city’s housing crisis as a backdrop and with the rent-stabilization system’s promise of affordability feeling threatened, Ms. Schiffman’s photos evoke a soothing, homey sentiment. The apartments she documents are unfussy and far from luxurious, but are full of character and are strongly loved homes in their own sense.
I sat down with the photographer in her East Village apartment to chat about her photo series, the changes the neighborhood has seen over the years and the cultural significance of rent-stabilized housing.
‘There Goes the Neighborhood’
After coming to New York for art school, Ms. Schiffman moved around from apartment to apartment until she met her husband, Kim Turim, who had an herb store in the East Village. “I used to wear patchouli oil, and my neighbor said ‘if you like patchouli oil, you gotta go to my friend Kim’s store, he has the best patchouli’ — and he did, so that’s how we met,” said Ms. Schiffman. Mr. Turim was living in a railroad-style apartment in the building adjacent to the store, which is where they’ve been living since they married in 1997.
Ms. Schiffman started photographing her neighbors’ apartments after her mother sent her an article about buildings that had a mix of rent-stabilized tenants and those who were paying market rate. “We talked about what that’s like and what that creates in the building, and this project kind of came out of that. The times were changing,” she said. Ms. Schiffman, who studied at the International Center of Photography in the 1980s, uses a Nikon digital camera for the photo series.
The neighborhood was in flux, and it needed to be documented before it became totally unrecognizable, Ms. Schiffman thought. “I remember the first day I saw a banker in the neighborhood, and I was like, ‘shoot, there goes the neighborhood,’” she said, laughing.
She chooses her subjects in part by keeping a pulse on who interests her. “There’s this older guy at my gym — I take this jump rope class — I would love to get his story,” she said. “You know, in New York City, you meet people who are interesting and you’re just like, ‘any chance you have a rent-stabilized apartment?’”
While photographing her subjects’ homes, Ms. Schiffman always asks them three questions: why they moved to the East Village, how they found their apartment and what they love about it. One thing she never asks them is how much their rent is. “There’s definitely a lot of fear around people losing their apartments, so they don’t want to advertise anything that could be like a red flag,” she said.
Across her images, clutter — organized as well as chaotic — is a common characteristic. It’s unsurprising, since some New Yorkers never leave a rent-stabilized apartment once they find it, free from steep increases in rent. “When I look at these apartments, I’m like, how do you fit 40 years of belongings and memories in, not a house, but an apartment?” Ms. Schiffman said. One of her images features a bed crammed into a nook of a sunroom, overflowing with pillows and plants. Others show kitchen cabinets and shelves lined with spices, small sculptures and dishes.
Ms. Schiffman pointed to a photo of a white sink — surrounded by towels, dishes and a mirror — as revealing of the quotidian scenes she is hoping to document. It’s the only sink in that tenant’s apartment, said Ms. Schiffman, who also has just a single sink in her home. “You have to do everything in that sink — when we have to go to a wedding or a thing, there’s a schedule.”
‘All About Art and Music and Community’
While some rent-regulated apartments have modern appliances and finishes, the ones that Ms. Schiffman focuses her attention on don’t. “These have never been renovated. Renovated apartments don’t have the character, with that really plain, stainless steel,” she said. And that lack of contemporaneity is also the beauty of these spaces, aesthetic proof that these homes hold history. One subject told her, “When I look at these floorboards, I know that these are the same floorboards walked on from the time this building was built in 1898.”
The homes are also colorful, in stark contrast to the gray, muted tones found in newer apartments. Ms. Schiffman’s neighbors have mint-green walls; another subject had a coral bedspread to match her coral walls.
But it wasn’t just the physical appearances that were changing over the years. As yuppies took over, the frequency of neighborly interactions also declined, Ms. Schiffman said. One tenant who had been living in her apartment since the 1990s said to Ms. Schiffman, “At least a crack addict would say good morning to you. Now I say good morning to these young tenants and they look at me like, ‘Why are you talking to me?’”
For Ms. Schiffman, the experience of learning about the tenants’ stories is just as important as the resulting images. So why not just photograph the people themselves? To answer this, the photographer recited a snippet of “Maison de Vent,” a poem by Louis Guillaume: “Long did I build you, oh house! With each memory I carried stones.”
“That, to me, is like all these apartments,” Ms. Schiffman said. “When you focus on the apartment, it’s more poetic and magical — to kind of piece together who the person is.”
The philosophical question of what it means to be a renter is embedded into Ms. Schiffman’s approach to her work as well. “People didn’t come to this neighborhood to buy houses,” she said. “They came here when it was super affordable. And it was just all about art and music and community.”
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