David Hedges and Joel Auville recently considered moving. There’s a lot of large-scale, long-term construction right outside their windows. “With this new building,” Mr. Auville said, “we were depressed, thinking we were going to lose light.”
There was another factor: They’ve been living in the same apartment for 42 years.
“I thought, gee, if we spend $5,000 a month, we could find a really wonderful place,” Mr. Hedges said. “And after about two weeks of living in it, we’d probably look at each other and say, ‘Can we go home now?’”
Just the thought of moving led the couple to realize how much of their shared life is defined by the building in Midwood, Brooklyn, that they’ve called home since 1982. The apartment is rent stabilized, and the city’s Rent Guidelines Board sets annual increases for rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments, mostly protecting those residents from the harsh market forces that have typified the post-pandemic rental market.
“There’s an organic quality to rent stabilization,” Mr. Hedges said. “I always thought about it as stabilizing rent, money, but it’s really about stabilizing community in a person’s life, stabilizing a real relationship with the neighborhood.”
ImageMr. Hedges was studying music when he met Mr. Auville at a bar in Paris. He still plays the piano, which is a fixture in their living room. Credit...James Estrin/The New York TimesThe couple met in Paris in 1978. Mr. Hedges, who is from Stony Brook, N.Y., was studying music abroad; Mr. Auville, who grew up in public housing outside of Paris, had a steady career as a leather craftsman. They first saw each other at a bar called Club 18, a small gay disco on the Rue de Beaujolais. “It was more working class than fashionable,” Mr. Hedges recalled. “In those days, the ‘gay scene’ was still mostly underground, unless you were rich and famous.”
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