Today’s post is a guest post from Obi.  Enjoy.

There’s some property that my family owns that I recently renovated and began renting out a little over a year ago. Initially, I was targeting medical students because of the proximity to a local Brooklyn hospital but I soon found that the timing had to be right for those kinds of arrangements. In other words, anyone interested was fair game as Craigslist became my oft-used tool in my search to fill any of the vacant rooms in our residential unit.

A one-family dwelling upstairs with a restricted office downstairs, the housing is decent especially considering that it had been built in 1925. My father, a doctor from Nigeria, has been using the office for 30 years for his private practice, so there’s a good deal of respected history there. Even with this in mind, I don’t tend to discriminate against prospective tenants, but I have observed that gender plays an interesting role in my relationship with them. The women tend to be more respectful of the environment while the men are less bothered by the issues that arise from living in an older residence. The neighborhood is predominantly black with a particular leaning towards Caribbean immigrants, but for as long as I’ve been renting out this unit, the majority of the tenants have been white.

Either way, at the end of this last summer, a tenant who had been living there for over a year moved out and I was sad to see him go. He was always nice, helpful and on-time if not early with the rent. Now, the hunt was on for someone to replace him – and fast. The bills were piling up and despite the recession, there is no good reason for the space to stay empty for more than a week. This process is always annoying because I have to make appointments and drive to the property with every single interested, disinterested, or bullshitting prospective tenant. I got lucky early: a young man and his girlfriend were coming to New York from Montana to stay for a few months and they desperately needed their housing arrangements set up before they arrived. Before long, we were exchanging information, pictures of the property and addresses to send signed leases. The plan was for them to move in at the beginning of the following month and stay for four months.

I made sure that everything was looking as good as it should the day before their arrival: floors and shelves, cleaned, mopped and vacuumed. If nothing else, despite the age of the building, I’ve always tried to make the residential unit look like a home, providing furniture and housewares long before anyone set foot inside to rent a vacant room.
My attention to detail had apparently done some good. When the young Caucasian couple arrived the next day the girl was most excited by the at-home feeling that touched her as she stepped inside. She was cool and very clearly a small-town girl but the young man and I took to one another very quickly. He was apparently a Fulbright scholar who had spent some time in Ghana, Cairo, and Bangkok. Upon learning this, I found myself admiring his worldliness and the courage and curiosity that moved him to go about traveling around the third world. We spoke at length about various subjects and it seemed mutually understood that there was plenty between us about which to relate. Feeling good, I left them to move their stuff into their room as I went about my day’s business.

Later that night as I was home doing some work on my laptop, I got a surprising Instant Message from my new tenant. He said that he and his girlfriend had done some research online and walked around the neighborhood, and concluded that it was unsafe and thus not for them. Aside from their short walk, his research included personal chats in online forums that told him of mass shootings of upwards of 20 people at a time just outside where he was expecting to take the train everyday to work. He wanted to discuss the terms by which they could move from there into a different, safer neighborhood as soon as possible.

Is this a dangerous neighborhood? My father has been working inside this house for 30 years without incident; we have a young girl living in one of the rooms that comes back from work at 2 o’clock in the morning and has yet to report any problems. As for the alleged mass shooting, I didn’t need Google to tell me that an incident of this magnitude wouldn’t pass under my notice let alone that of even the local media – it had never happened. Even those points say nothing about how white people have been moving into predominantly black neighborhoods with impunity for the last ten years while black men endlessly and indifferently maul their own.

So, how should I feel that this young man can travel around the third world and yet comes to Brooklyn, New York and is suddenly shook? My father asked me if he was robbed when he was walking around and when I told him no, he responded “So, what’s his problem, then?”

Despite the initial offensiveness of the situation, I had come to quickly develop my own understanding of what had taken place. This fresh and very well-meaning young man had been hoping to come to New York with his sweetheart to take in the best that its more recently redeveloped and gentrified neighborhoods had to offer. Maybe he had no real interest in the the lower to middle-class black neighborhoods because as far as he may have been concerned, they’re not part of an America that he would care to acknowledge. I’m certain that there are plenty that have come into this city and engaged its residents safely in the bars in Park Slope or Greenwich Village and feel satisfied that they had had a complete New York experience; but some part of me feels that they are all really robbing themselves of something potentially enriching and enlightening.

Nonetheless, we eventually came to agree on terms that allowed for him to move out early. I realized that I could not determine the answers to these questions for him nor am I so sure that it would be my place to do so.
Besides, I needed to spend my time looking for new tenants…

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