A blue light flashes on the automatic cat feeder as a disembodied woman’s voice fills the room.
“Hey Lily! Come get your food Lily!”
Kibble dispenses into the bowl.
“Pspspsps!”
The cat doesn’t move from Mardi’s lap – doesn’t so much as flick an ear at what I can only assume are the familiar sounds of her owner. She’s purring like a small motorbike, and has been ever since we let ourselves in to the apartment.
It was late on a Thursday when we received a text from our landlords, who live above the one-bedroom apartment Mardi and I are subletting from some friends.
Lily has been home without us for longer than we expected and a visitor would make her day! The lockbox code is **** – one of the keys will open the door. Mind checking that the autofeeder is working? She may swat at you or claw. If you’re confident and pet her head she should warm up.
I’ve not met them yet: a couple my age with a baby and a Latina nanny. They own both the upstairs and downstairs apartment in our low-income neighbourhood. I’ve met their cat though. She ran in from the scraggly yard once, ransacked the house and scratched me. This week, I’ve heard her meowing through the ceiling constantly. I hadn’t realised the owners were away.
When we first unlocked their door, Lily threw herself at us, desperate for affection. As she wove frantically between my legs, I walked over to the automatic feeder, beside which sat three bowls of water, fur glistening on the surface.
“Hmm. There’s no light on it or anything.”
I prised the lid off and pulled out a handful of biscuits. Lily leapt on them hungrily.
Crunch crunch crunch.
The apartment upstairs is sun-filled, beautifully decorated – two storeys with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, nice wooden floors and a laundry.
Our place on the ground floor is dark – one storey with barred bedroom windows, tiles and grey laminate flooring (IYKYK). There are no taps for a washing machine to be installed, so we use the laundromat down the road with the free soap and the $1 claw machine that contains two pairs of headphones and a watch. The landlords charge our place out at $2900USD a month – which is why Mardi and I are sharing.
There’s this ad I’ve been squinting at on the subway lately. It’s part of a campaign for a real estate marketplace called StreetEasy that’s trying to tastefully market itself to cashed-up millennials. ‘Let the journey begin’ is the tagline, and it was cooked up in collaboration with advertising agency Mother New York.
In this particular visual, a group of people crowd around a table groaning with donuts and coffee, deliberating over a picture of a pomeranian. ‘Co-op Board Investigates Lifestyle, Hobbies and Habits of Buyer’s Dog – Upper East Side (2024)’ reads the title.
I know without looking that New York is an expensive-ass city to own a dog in – but I’m curious how much a pomeranian puppy costs.
Lancaster Puppy is an American dog marketplace that connects buyers with breeders, though Please note that we do not take liability for any puppy as we are not sellers!
I click the button that links to the sales page – ‘Show me the Puppies!’ – and have the option to filter by ‘Purebred / Designer’ or ‘Hybrid / Mixed Breed’.
Twirlie the pomeranian, at 14 weeks and 3 days old, is $3,850USD. Debutante, who is 9 weeks and 1 day old, is $2,250USD. Ariana is 7 months old and has different-coloured eyes, so she’s up for $4,000USD.
Nedal Ahmed is the executive creative director of Mother, the agency behind the real estate campaign. Like me, she studied journalism once upon a time, but now works in advertising – perhaps because it’s possible to make a liveable wage in that industry.
She told Creative Review that advertising to New Yorkers represents a unique challenge.
“On one hand, you have a population capable of tuning out almost anything. On the other hand, you have a savvy audience who can appreciate a clever ad that speaks to their experiences,” she said.
When it comes to experiences, ‘journey’ means a lot of different things to a lot of different people in New York City: a throbbing muscle of an island held together by mutual aid and the strength of community, and built on a tapestry of migration (almost 700 language varieties are spoken here, with more than 300 along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens alone).
Those on the journey to acquire real estate here are in the minority.
Right now, the homeownership rate in New York City is 30% – a figure well below the nationwide average of 66%. By race (I’m getting these figures from StreetEasy themselves), the rate is 41% for non-Hispanic white people, 44% for Asian people, 26% for Black people and 18% for Hispanic people.
For the 70% of us who don’t own our home, this city is the most rent-burdened in the country. To secure an average apartment here, a household on New York’s median income has to pay nearly 69% of their wages – and rent just keeps going up. Not only that, but nearly one in every 120 New Yorkers is without a home altogether.
“As challenging as housing affordability is for prospective renters,” New York City’s Chief Financial Officer Brad Lander wrote in January this year, “it is even more dire for all but the most affluent prospective homebuyers.”
I wonder how many of them catch the M.
A few weeks ago, I was walking with a friend through a park named for longtime community organiser Herbert Von King. It’s Black space in a historically Black neighbourhood – but the demographic of the local population has been shifting, with rents rising and long-time residents being pressured to sell.
According to census data, between 2010 and 2020, Bed-Stuy gained more than 30,000 white residents, whereas more than 22,000 Black residents left (in this neighbourhood, 78.1% of properties are rented; 21.9% of properties are owner occupied).
As we strolled, my friend told me about a tension between dog-owning and non-dog owning community members in the park. Later, I find a blog post about it on NYC Dog Runs: a self-described “community reporting project” started by a man who is a dog owner and a newcomer to the city.
The post links to a video from 2022 showing a group of white dog owners letting their animals run around off-leash in an already-patchy section of Herbert Von King Park (instead of using the designated exercise area). In the background, a woman who has lived in Bed-Stuy for 20 years chastises them through a megaphone.
“We should be able to share the park. They took over,” she calls, lamenting the very real impact of dogs on grassy public space (not to mention the fact that not everyone feels comfortable around dogs – something another Bed-Stuy resident pointed out when I discussed the incident with him).
Though the NYC Dog Runs blog writer eventually acknowledges that the woman has a point, his position and focus on her means of protest reflect a deeply rooted narrative about Black women in this country. She’s disgruntled; she’s screaming obscenities. It’s ironic that she is berating the dogs as a noise disturbance when she herself is holding a megaphone.
This encounter at Herbert Von King Park was not the only time the woman – whose name is Candise Jones – has addressed this issue in her community. According to the post, fed up with the NYC Parks Department for allowing it to arise in the first place (the dog run was dilapidated, the regulation wasn’t being enforced, and there were reports of leptospirosis in nearby parks), Candise and her neighbours repeatedly called the city’s 311 hotline to complain.
Thanks to Candise’s efforts, the dog run (which is giant by the way) has since been tidied up, and plans are in the works for a full reconstruction. But still – not everyone is using it as they should be.
It’s not just wealthy, fussy pet parents being targeted by ‘Let the journey begin’. There are several other modern-day Renaissance paintings plastering the subway, each with different appeal.
In one, a white man discovers a future podcast studio in Greenpoint.
In another, a Black woman real estate agent guides a white heterosexual couple to open houses from aboard a ship in the harbour.
In a third ad, a greying couple – two Black men – concede that their friends in Park Slope may have a point as one of their curious babies reaches for a pair of sunglasses for sale at an Asian woman’s side-of-the-road stall in East Village.
Annoying! Let’s sell up and move into a Brownstone somewhere without street vendors.
To New Yorkers like my millennial landlords, perhaps this content comes across as sophisticated and clever. (In fact, I’m certain the companies behind the campaign know their audience – hell, one friend told me his housemate’s phone is serving her targeted ads for his cat, and the ads know the cat’s pronouns). To the vast majority of people in this city however, ‘Let the journey begin’ probably looks more like a series of dark political cartoons.
But, as I’m learning, New York isn’t really built for the vast majority.
None of this country is.
On Sunday night, Mardi and I opened the door to the shared hallway in our apartment to find a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a thank-you note from our landlords. We can no longer hear the cat meowing through their flood boards – just the constant clomp of their shoes as they walk about.
“I wonder if they got Lily a bottle,” I joke.
“There were heaps of them in a wine rack. I saw when we were up there,” says Mardi.
“Oh. Well I don’t drink champagne.”
“It’s good they acknowledged it. Like, that we looked after her.” Mardi brandishes her hands, which are covered in the long scabs of cat scratches. Lily may have been beside herself to receive human contact, but she’s still a wildly aggressive pet.
In bed later that night, I decide to dig a little deeper into Mother New York: the local arm of the global advertising agency that created ‘Let the journey begin’. When I click their About page, I’m greeted with rows and rows of photos of women labelled with executive job titles.
I hover my mouse over the first picture. CSO & Partner. A black-and-white photo of an older white man pops up. I hover my mouse over another picture. CEO & Partner. The same thing happens.
They’re everyone’s mothers.
It’s a lovely idea, truly, knowing that everyone who works there has a mum.
I wonder if they also have pets. And automatic food dispensers.