Lori Falce: The worst Christmas present ever

In early December, I got an early surprise.

It wasn’t a holiday card or a Christmas present or a plate of cookies. It was a lease renewal — with a 20% rent increase.

Was this because I got a 200-pound Mastiff or decided to keep exotic snakes in my spare bedroom? It was not. Was it because I was getting another parking space or a utility was being folded into the cost? No. In fact, the additional fees for amenities went up on top of that.

Nope, this was just the cost of doing business because of how much real estate prices had increased. The purpose was to make sure that the rent of existing tenants was increased to the same lofty numbers being paid by new residents as housing costs spiked amid the coronavirus pandemic.

I said it was a surprise. It was. It shouldn’t have been.

After all, over the course of the pandemic, I wrote about the stress on renters and homebuyers a number of times. I covered mortgages and rent waivers and utilities and how it was all colliding. But while I knew about it, in retrospect, I wonder how much I actually thought about it until I got that notice in my inbox.

That’s because so much is so easy to ignore until it matters to us.

Think about a politician who changes focus on gay rights after his child comes out. Actress Jenny McCarthy’s crusade against vaccines after deciding they caused her son to be autistic. Parents who show up at school to complain about, well, anything, but only when it affects their precious angels.

It’s easy to say that it’s because we are all a little hardwired to be selfish. But the thing is, it would benefit us all to be more aware of what is impacting the people around us. Why? That’s the best way to head off what might happen to you.

I knew rents were rising just like real estate prices. The two go hand in hand. But if I thought more about that relationship, that rent increase wouldn’t have caught me off-guard and forced me to do the worst kind of Christmas shopping — looking for a new place to live.

Everything is connected, so when we worry about what is happening in nursing homes even if we don’t have family members who live there or appreciate the need for mass transit even if we don’t take the bus, it makes for an overall better place to live, which is better for everyone.

It’s hard. We are all focused on our own corners of the world because those are what we know. But that’s also why we have to force ourselves to look up from those corners now and then. We have to see what’s happening around us and read what’s happening elsewhere.

But more than that, we have to think about it. We have to apply it to real life. To how it affects other people, and yes, how it could circle back and affect us. That was my problem. I read about the housing costs. Heck, I wrote about them. It was in applying it in my own backyard — really just a small patio — that I fell down.

I’m packing boxes to move right now and hiring movers and hating every minute of it. Not just because this is really the worst Christmas present ever but because no one likes an object lesson that could have been anticipated, if not avoided.