I am now officially a hypocrite. I’ve probably been an unofficial hypocrite for many years — who among us hasn’t? — but now my hypocrisy has become so blatant that I am uncomfortably aware of it, and feel the need to confess my transgression against the ideological purity I find wanting in other people.
The cause of this two-facedness is my recent entry into the propertied class of New York City. At the end of June, I moved into a cooperative apartment. The purchase of a New York City co-op was my first act of hypocrisy, because these strange places violate sacred conservative tenets about a man’s home being his castle. Hobbes and Locke taught us that we gather in societies to protect ourselves and defend our property, which Locke understood primarily to mean land. But a co-op owner’s apartment isn’t actually his. Co-ops are a form of collective ownership — and you know how chilling “collectivism” is to a conservative.
I had little choice in the matter, because I wanted to buy a flat, and the lion’s share of tenant-owned apartment buildings in New York are co-ops. That’s fitting for this overregulated and overcomplicated city. Co-op buildings are far more self-regulated and complicated dwelling-places than the condominium complexes in which the vast majority of home-owning apartment dwellers in the United States live.
The symbolism is also appropriate because New York is the world center of stock transactions, and when you live in a co-op, what you actually own is shares in a corporation corresponding to your apartment’s size and location (the more square footage and the higher the floor, the more shares you own). You then are assigned a proprietary lease to the apartment. For example, my building is divided into 36 apartments, and the corporation that owns the building comprises 11,000 shares. Buying my flat meant buying shares in the corporation — 345 of them — and the proprietary lease that goes along with Apartment 4-A.
What this means is that while I have the right to hammer nails into the wall to hang my pictures and make modest cosmetic repairs, I would have to submit any other changes I wanted to make to the building’s board. A co-op’s board has nearly unlimited authority over the building; it can reject buyers at will and put a stop to any renovation plan a shareholder might design.
This represents a monumental aggravation and source of anxiety when you make an offer on an apartment and the offer is accepted — because you cannot be sure you will meet with what New Yorkers call, with terror in their voices, “board approval.”
Of course, once you’re in, you love Big Brother. The collective cossets you, as the unseen authorities (well, you see them in the elevator, but you know what I mean) provide safety and assurance and a certain blissful sense of irresponsibility that is wholly at odds with the hardy self-reliance of the pioneers who went west.
My hypocrisy extends to the neighborhood I’m living in — Brooklyn Heights, which is directly across the East River from Wall Street and just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a spectacularly gorgeous place, and not only for the picture-postcard view of lower Manhattan you’ve seen in a thousand movies.
Some of the houses on my block date back to 1841. In the 1960s, following a spurt of development in which lovely old buildings were torn down and replaced by ugly new ones — much of this the work of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who seem to own half of the neighborhood — the socially powerful Old Guard succeeded in having Brooklyn Heights declared the city’s first official Historic District.
This designation, which effectively froze Brooklyn Heights in place, is an affront against the legitimate rights of property owners — another assault on John Locke’s philosophy. It puts in place a height restriction of 50 feet on all new buildings, gives veto power over any exterior changes to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and in general intrudes on important freedoms in ways that intellectually I consider calamitous.
But if, for some reason, the Landmarks law and the Historic District designation were to become an open political issue again, I would fight their repeal with every ounce of hypocritical energy I could muster. Just like the co-op board, Brooklyn Heights enfolds me in a never-never land of regulation — to which I have willingly, indeed even eagerly, submitted.
I can offer no defense for myself, except to invite you over for a cup of coffee and a walk through one of America’s most breathtaking parcels of real estate — hoping that perhaps you, too, will be seduced into the happy world of the hypocritical conservative.
JOHN PODHORETZ
