Where have you lived, Julie Buntin?

95th Street between 1st & 2nd Avenue, Upper East Side/East Harlem, $600/mo. (my share), 10 months, 19 years old
The two-story basement apartment was on the invisible line between the UES and East Harlem, bracketed by a housing project on the East River and an Irish bar where I’d lose a good chunk of my sophomore year accepting free drinks from entry-level accountants in rumpled suits. My bedroom was on the first floor, directly by the front door, and it was just barely larger than a barred window I never opened, because it overlooked the building’s trash cans. An unexplainable outcropping jutted from the left wall, narrowing the room further. No closet. I bought a crappy futon from IKEA to try and maximize the space, though once I unfolded it I never folded it back up again, so my room was all bed. Street noise entered unfiltered. I never felt safe there—once I heard a rustling in the trash and stood on my knees on the bed, peeking between the bars, and caught an old dude jerking off aggressively as he stared up at me. My three roommates, whose big bedrooms downstairs cost almost twice as much as mine, were rich and benevolent and full-time students. After class, I worked as a cocktail waitress to pay my rent. At one or two in the morning, I’d sprawl on the floor in the kitchen and eat my free shift meals, weird bar appetizers, potato skins, and salads littered with soggy croutons. I was 19, and budgeting meant divvying up my tips into little envelopes—RENT, FUN, FOOD, EMERGENCIES. One of the girls had an idiotic Bichon Frise that would do anything for a dirty tampon and fell down the stairs so often it stopped being funny. We broke our lease after a big rainstorm, when two feet of water flooded the entire lower floor, drowning wardrobes of their expensive clothes.

47th Street and 2nd Avenue, Turtle Bay or midtown (doldrums) Manhattan, $400/mo., (my half of an $800 room), 11 months, 20 years old
I moved with the girls when their parents helped them find a new place. Like before, I took the smallest room, though this time the room was normal-small. No floods here—we were on the 16th floor of a high-rise in Turtle Bay, with a modern kitchen, two full bathrooms, and central air. The living room was converted into a bedroom (big enough for a king sized bed and then some), which left a tiny windowless alcove for our dining room table. After some frantic number crunching, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford my $800 portion of the rent—I’d barely been scraping by paying $600. I asked a friend, one of the few people I knew in New York who, like me, had no parental support, if she wanted to share my new room—small, but not SO small. We could get bunk beds! $400 a month! She moved in, though we never got those bunk beds. Both of our mattresses were on the floor, so that if one of us rolled over or tossed an arm in her sleep, we’d bump into the other. I started staying at my then-boyfriend’s place a lot—less because of my hampered space than because my new apartment, which was on a floor undergoing construction, soon became overrun with mice and roaches. At night the mice shrieked as they chased each other across the stove. Once I picked a pizza box off the counter, and three tiny roaches shot across the marble surface.

15th Street and 3rd Avenue, Flatiron/Union Square, Nothing? My old rent?, 12 months, 21 years old
Slowly, one backpack full of clothes at a time, I moved into my then-boyfriend D’s studio. One morning I realized I never, ever left, and that by definition, if not by any legal agreement, I lived there, though I continued paying my portion of the rent for my “real” place. The apartment building, on 15th and 3rd, was called Hattan House. No matter how messy D was (absurdly, chaotically, sitcom messy) I’d never seen a roach. He cared little for his surroundings, and the apartment felt resolutely his, so we made do with furniture we recovered from the street. The tiny kitchen, tucked into a corner behind the sleeping area, had no dishwasher or counter space to speak of. The fridge came up to my chin. Two kitchens could easily fit into the walk-in closet. Drifts of his clothes piled up against the walls in there—no matter how I fought, I never managed to have all his clothes clean at any given time. We painted two walls a foresty shade of green, dark and light-swallowing, and another a pollen-y, oppressive gold, so the boxy room caved in on us. We’d live with this miscalculation for over a year. A few months before we moved out, there was a fire on our floor. We woke to smoke drifting in a hazy cloud above the bed. Outside, we watched our neighbor’s windows shatter out, studding the sidewalk with glass. The day we left, I turned on the bathroom light, to say goodbye I suppose, just in time to catch a cockroach the size of my palm idling toward the bathtub drain.

Gay Street, West Village, $1900/mo. (together), 12 months, 22 years old
Gay Street is the shortest street in Manhattan, little more than an alley between Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street, lined with brownstones and ancient carriage houses that were, at the turn of the century, horse stables for the brownstone dwellers on the West Village’s more heavily trafficked byways. Here’s a New York City real estate secret—in 2009, you could rent a fifth floor walk-up on Gay Street for under $2000, if you didn’t mind the stairs, the lack of amenities, and the fact that a litterbox shaped stain on the kitchen floor (that was not much bigger, itself, than a litterbox) released an ammoniac cat piss smell no matter how much you scrubbed and scrubbed. During rainstorms, the odor crescendoed to a hysterical potency. Despite the smell and worse, the crumbling bricks that glazed everything in the apartment with a cancerous dust, the noodles I found stuck to the wall near the stove, the pancaked mouse in the closet alcove, the man passed out in the unlockable foyer with a needle in his arm—I loved that apartment. In the summer, tour guides shouted Gay Street’s history to a gaggle of charmed travelers dozens of feet below my window. I liked to lean over the sill and wave. Who did they think I was? By the summer of 2010, the housing market was on firmer footing, and our landlord raised our rent over $500. I had just graduated from college, and was going straight to graduate school—do not pass go, do not collect a paycheck with benefits, make do with a measly stipend. I cried when we left, in the passenger’s seat of a Moishe’s moving van.

Lorimer Street & Bedford Avenue, on the Greenpoint side of McCarren Park, $2000/mo. (together, my rent subsidized by a part-time job working for his real estate agent mother), 9 months, 23 years old
Moving to Brooklyn would make us feel like a real couple. This time, we signed the lease together—at Gay Street, we’d decided to leave my credit history out of the equation (thanks to some medical stuff, my credit card history is tragic) and I paid his mother by working for her real estate business—helping complete/file paperwork and maintain her social media and web presence. This eased my conscience, and D’s—we kept up this arrangement when we moved to Lorimer Street. As if to prove something to myself, I took on a higher volume of work, proportionate to the uptick in rent, after we moved to BK. This 3rd floor apartment was as charming as Gay Street, in its way—railroad style with a yellow kitchen, deep brown wooden floors, and a tin ceiling in the dining area. The bedroom was separated from D’s office by sliding glass doors, and a filled-in fireplace provided a mantle for books we wanted to showcase. No amenities—no air conditioning unit, no dishwasher, no microwave, and the bathroom was a tiny triangle, clearly added as an afterthought when the row-house was portioned into three apartments. My knees touched the door when I sat on the toilet, and in the summer, the air inside the narrow apartment had the texture of pudding.

Seventh Avenue between 23rd and 24th St, right smack in the middle of Chelsea, 11th floor, FREE, 3 months, 23-24 years old
After it became clear that no place we lived in together would feel real because our relationship would forever be stuck in the desert all serious relationships get mired in when they start too soon and last too long, I left in a cab, with a rolling suitcase and a duffel bag, when D was out of town for the weekend. My friend, who lived in a two-bedroom family-owned movie-fancy apartment in Chelsea, offered to let me stay in the unoccupied second bedroom until I found my own place. He was in and out of the city for the summer, and the apartment was going through renovations—I could earn my keep by cleaning it before decorators dropped by to take measurements and compare paint swatches by the light of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking, literally, all of Manhattan. Whatever, my friend said, in response to me asking over and over if he was sure it was okay. It’s not like anyone’s using it. I could go on and on about how nice this place was—THE GYM, THE ROOF, THE WASHER/DRYER, MY OWN PERSONAL BATHROOM, THE KITCHEN ISLAND WHERE I COOKED ALL THE THINGS—but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate the unreality of the situation is to say that the building’s residents included Penelope Cruz, Bobby Flay, and Lance Bass. I will never in my life live in a place that nice again.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg, $500/mo. (my share), 8 months, 24 years old.
Thanks to my friend, I had a little buffer time to find a new room—which was great, because I had very little buffer in my graduate student checking account, no longer supplemented by my part-time job working for my boyfriend’s mother. I doubled my hours as an office assistant for the graduate program where I was also a student, and started saving. My budget was no more than $600, maybe $700 a month. I preferred not to sign a lease. Though I’d taken strides toward healing my wounded credit score, it was nowhere in the ball park of NYC rental territory. I looked at so many places. One $600 room in Crown Heights was full of bikes (way more bikes than humans) and a weird milky smell and had a ferocious dog that sprang out of a closet and tried to attack me when I was checking out the “extra storage.” An $800 room was the size of a twin bed, and the 2nd Avenue East Village location didn’t make up for the fact that literally everything about 2br place (probably, I swear, no bigger than 250 sq ft TOTAL) was weird—most especially the roommate, who wouldn’t stop stretching. Desperate, I considered answering an ad advertising a room near the LaGuardia airport, for $450 a month. This can only be temporary for anyone, explained the Craigslist post. Then, in a stroke of fortune so good it almost makes me believe in horoscopes, a call for a roommate was posted on my graduate program’s list serv. Tiny room, lots of natural light. $500 a month. It’s so cheap because it’s outside the main apartment, on the landing, with it’s own lock. I went to see it and was sold—the room was again, twin-sized bed small, but the apartment was airy and quirkily decorated, and the girls living there were smart and funny—the kind of people I’d imagined becoming friends with, all those years ago when I pictured my life in New York City. A couple times I locked my keys in the main apartment and had to wait to go to the bathroom for inhumanely long periods of time. Other than that, it was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg. $580 (my share), 10 months, 25 years old
One of my roommates moved out and I was in! Like, literally inside! I took over the baby room near the kitchen, about the same size as the black sheep bedroom in the hall that I’d previously occupied, except this new room had lots of built in closet space and a lofted bed, so I was able to fit a tiny desk (the kind they have in elementary schools) against the wall. The long window spied on our rage-addled Polish neighbor’s equally cranky Pitbull. I slept inches from the ceiling, where all the apartment’s cooking smells accumulated no matter how I tried to air it out. It smells like Italian food, the guy I was then dating said during one failed attempt at a sharing the tiny lofted space—he wound up sleeping on the couch.

Stuyvesant Oval, Stuyvesant Town, East Village, $800/mo., 3 months (and counting!), 25 years old
I fell in love with the guy with the sensitive nose, and when his roommate broke his lease early, I decided to do what worked out so horribly for me the first time, again: Move in with my boyfriend. Here’s the thing. When it works, it works—I hate those girls who say all dreamy-eyed, when you know you know, but if there’s anything I learned from the fiery explosion that was the end of my first serious relationship, it’s how to identify the opposite. In general, I had no interest in moving to Stuyvesant Town. My voyages from apartment to apartment, up and down the length of Manhattan, had, at some point, and almost without me noticing, turned me into a New Yorker—the kind of New Yorker who doesn’t believe Stuytown, with its lush summertime trees casting DAPPLED light all over the sidewalks like some kind of suburban wet dream, is a real city neighborhood. Agree with me or not—Soul Asylum is playing a private concert in the Oval in the coming weeks. That’s not New York, folks. (Then again, that’s precisely New York for countless people.) But my boyfriend’s been living in his place for a long time—since he moved to the city years and years ago, and unlike me—he’s attached. It’s not just an apartment anymore. It’s his home. I’ve grown fond of the separate kitchen, the noisy air conditioner, how quiet it is outside at night. And it’s really, truly rent stabilized. During the recent Stuytown rent hikes, I held my breath for two days, terrified that our rent would be jacked up too, and that we would have to leave. I’ve always had to leave. But this time this home, this life, feels real—it feels like mine.

Julie Buntin lives in New York.

Have you lived in some places? Tell us about them! PICK ONE: logan@thebillfold.com OR mike@thebillfold.com

Back in February, I posted about Nigel Warren, a 30-year-old New Yorker who was hit with $40,000 in fines for illegally renting out his East Village bedroom for three days using Airbnb. Warren had initially learned that he could admit to the violations and get his fines reduced to $6,000. Airbnb sent their lawyers to observe the case.

CNET reports that NYC officials have determined that Warren should pay $2,400 for “violating the city’s illegal hotel law” and that apartments “may only be used as private residences and may not be rented for transient, hotel, or motel purposes” essentially making Airbnb illegal in New York (except for stays of 30 days or longer).

A group called Swipe Back! is encouraging unlimited metrocard users to swipe people into the subway on their way out to boycott fare increases.

A lot of people with ulimited metrocards already swipe strangers in every day because it’s a Good and Nice Thing To Do that costs $0 and is totally legal (it’s only illegal if you charge money for a swipe).

I do wish there was an easier way to show that you’re willing to do it, though. Swipe Back! has made buttons, but I was thinking more like a very long bright blue curly ribbon attached to your card. A party hat. A golden scarf. A secret hand signal. A tiny turtle pin on your lapel. Purple shoes. Patting your head and rubbing your belly simultaneously while exiting the subway. Or the old standby, trying to make eye contact with people loitering by the exits, in hopes they pick up on what I’m putting down and … ask me to swipe them in. (This has worked one time.)

Check out Cord Jefferson on the the importance and value of public transit as, if not an equalizer, a way to expose us to different people than we normally encounter, particularly the homeless: “One bad thing about LA, I think, is how easy it is to avoid homeless people … At least New York—being a place of walking and public transit—makes you regularly confront the fact that there are homeless people all around, and that many of them are not receiving adequate care.”

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan has a very good profile of George McDonald and the Doe Fund, a New York nonprofit that has proven itself to be particularly effective when it comes to putting an end to homelessness:

Here is what they do: They take in homeless people, referred to them by places like Bellevue Hospital. Many of these people are fresh out of prison, with little safety net. They house them. They ensure they’re sober and make them abide by a schedule. They give them a job for starters—cleaning up trash around the city, for a month. The men in all-blue jumpsuits you see pushing brooms and emptying trash cans throughout New York are Doe Funders.

After that, the fund gives them classes in life skills and specific job training (they can choose between pest control, catering, building maintenance, and other specialties) for the next six months or so. There are mock job interviews, to get the pitch right. Then they send each one out to pound the pavement and find a job. When they find a job, they find them a place to live. By the time a year is up, the Doe Fund has transformed a homeless person into an employed person with a place to live.

George McDonald is currently running for mayor—not because he wants to be mayor but because he wants to make sure that the issues of homelessness in the city will be part of the political dialogue during the race. It’s a very smart way to get people to pay attention.

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a baron of NYC parking meters, Mayor Bloomberg can make that happen for you (give him $1 billion dollars, is how).

We all do money differently. How do you do money, Heidi N. Moore, Marketplace NYC bureau chief and Wall Street correspondent?

Logan Sachon: Let’s talk about your money. Do you use credit cards? 
Heidi N. Moore: I do not. I actually don’t have a credit card, I only have a debit card. The last time I had a credit card was in college, and I ran it up really fast. It was a pitifully tragic credit limit, like $600 dollars—it was one of those Capital One cards they send you in the dorms. I maxed it out so fast, on nothing, just stuff that offered momentary comfort.  I was just buying stuff. And most everything you buy is a depreciating asset. As soon as you take it home, it loses value. I’ve gone to The Strand with stacks of books and gotten nothing for them. Clothes are useless, you can try to resell them but really you just end up giving them to charity. The only thing that I think is a really good use of money is experiences—travel or a really great dinner with friends.

So after I saw just how easy it was to do that, and how hard it was to control, I swore off credit cards. So ever since I was 20, I haven’t had a credit card. I just spend what I have.

LS: But how do you know how much you have to spend? 
HM: It’s really hard to get very specific about these things in your own life. I found it really helpful to actually see where all of your money is going—to see it on a spreadsheet or a list. I’ve started to use Mint, and I used to keep a list of what I spent. You leave the house in New York and you’re out $20, and you haven’t even bought anything: a coffee, a bagel, a newspaper, a MetroCard. $20 bucks a day—that’s $7,300 a year. You could go to Europe for that. So you have to pay attention.

LS: Do you have a budget set for yourself? 
HM: So there are my expenses, the list of things I absolutely have to pay, and then the rest I’m kind of flexible with. I do keep my expenses very low. My only fixed expenses are housing, gym, MetroCard, and my goddamned metastasizing Verizon bill, which is the bane of my existence.

And if you keep your expenses low, basically you would be shocked how much money you have. Which is what I try to do, although I am not above splurges.I just prefer intentional splurges, rather than impulsive ones. For instance, I held out on buying an iPad for three years because I wasn’t sure it would justify the expense of the device plus the data plan. Same for the iPhone. Now I have both and I love them. But I made Apple work for that money. 

Really, though, I misjudge too. Often! Very often. I just try to be right more often than I’m wrong. And I realized that the way you manage money doesn’t change all that much with income. I have a friend who makes very little—she works at a nonprofit—but saves very well and watches discount airline fares and thus always has money to go to Guatemala, Thailand, or wherever.

I’m not a fan of micromanaging. I’m a fan of setting your principles. When I go into a store, for clothes or books or whatever, I ask: How important is this? I’ll often take a picture with my iPhone, and if three days later I’m still thinking about it, I’ll go back and buy it. In the store, it’s in front of you and it’s so cute and so tempting and it’s in just the right light—it’s hard to resist. Or if it’s a book, you read it in a day and then it’s on your bookshelf for ten years.

It all becomes much easier if you start to believe that almost everything around you should represent you. The things you own should be something that you truly love, and most the things we buy aren’t. If you can avoid those things, you can control your expenses. It’s about exercising that judgment. Money is a state of mind issue. You work from principles: What is important to me, what do I want in the future—start from there and work backwards. If I want to be comfortable no matter what happens, I have to do that for myself.

LS: Is this something you developed on your own, or did your parents teach you? 
HM: I grew up in a house that didn’t talk about money, and I had to figure it out on my own. My mom is excellent with money, just really magnificent with it, but she didn’t talk about it. My parents wouldn’t let me have a job in high school at all—studying was the most important thing. But when I was 17, I decided I that didn’t want to ask anyone for money ever again. I wanted to be independent. So in college I got a job, sometimes two jobs or three jobs, to keep up the lifestyle I wanted. But my parents paid my tuition, so that was a possibility for me. And it’s not like I was immediately Jean Chatzky.

In terms of spending money, if you set yourself a financial goal that is necessary in your life, you’re likely to meet it. I have tremendous sympathy and understanding for people right now who can’t do that.  This is a crappy economy, and it’s not easy to get jobs that will pay you enough to meet all the obligations you have to meet, even just as a single person living in NY. So if you get to the point where you’re like, “Okay, my parents can be my fallback, but I can’t use them to sustain me,” I think that’s a good goal.

LS: So what do you spend your money on? Vacations? 
HM: I went years without vacations because I’m such a workaholic, and that sucked. I did not enjoy that. The mental health value and general perspective change of a vacation is something I really enjoy, so now that is a priority for me, and I save for them.

LS: How do you save? 

HM: The first time I looked at my 401(k) statement, I was like, “Holy moly how did that money get in there!?” I never would have done that on my own. So that taught me the value of making the the money invisible. I have a Chase checking account and three savings accounts. So my first savings account is savings I need to live for the next three months or whatever. The second one is for if I want to buy house, so future things. And then the third is for vacations. So a portion of paycheck immediately goes into each of those savings accounts each month. If it goes into your checking first, it seems like it’s your allowance and your job is to get it to zero.

LS: I don’t even have one savings account.
HM: Of course if you’re young and paying New York rent, it’s going to be hard to put much away. If you’re living in New York, you have this understand that living expenses are going to be 50% of your spending. But even if you’re just saving 10%, that’s 10% more than you had the month before. This is just my solution—there are a lot of other solutions. I think the most important thing is to keep your mind on future goals. It’s fine to charge a trip on your credit card if it’s once in a lifetime experience, but you need to have a plan to pay that off.

The only reason you should care about money is options. If you don’t have money, you don’t have options—you don’t get to exercise free will, and if you don’t have free will, you’re a slave. A lot of young people freelance and have low-paid jobs, so a lot of this isn’t realistic. Like if you’re making $17,000 a year as a fact checker, this isn’t realistic right now. But there are also things you have to invest in for your life. If you’re a radio reporter you need equipment, if you’re a photographer, you need cameras. Having that judgment about what is frivolous or what is necessary is a lifelong process.

One of the books that woke me up—I must have read it in college, but I don’t know why I read it—was called Prince Charming Isn’t Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money.  I don’t remember any of the specific advice, but it had a lot of stories about women who just had magical thinking when it came to money. That it was all going to work out, if not in a form of a man, than in the form of a windfall. There were all these stories of women who had real complications in their lives, and they had to start from scratch and it was a huge reality check for them.

LS: Banking on a windfall. That sounds very familiar…
HM: Reading that when I was young impressed upon me the idea that if you have you save for yourself. And beyond that, if you spend your money well, if you don’t just spend it all on stuff, you have some to give to charity or to spend on other people. You can help do good in this world. And you can’t do that if you don’t have disposable income. I do believe the more you give away the more comes to you. I don’t like the selfish view of money. I think it’s important to support causes. There are cosmic values to this.

I am by no means an expert in money management. It’s important not to look at other people—that’s not your life. Your life is your life. You don’t know what compromises other people are making. We’re all just cobbling it together.

LS: You mentioned you have a 401(k). Is saving for retirement a priority? 
HM: Right now, retirement is not a tremendously top goal for me. I want to save money for other things, like a house. So I do make 401(k) contributions, but I don’t pay attention to it.

LS: Do you invest?
HM: Nope. I can’t do it, because I cover Wall Street, so I can’t have stocks and bonds.

LS: Has covering Wall Street influenced how you manage your own money?  
HM: I generally keep work and myself separate. The money I write about is like Monopoly money—we’re talking about billions and trillions of dollars. But it’s good to know how a company’s balance sheet works, and that’s applicable. Really high finance has very little to do with personal finance. The things that companies do, we would all get arrested if we tried. So it’s not tremendously useful. But this isn’t the kind of thing where more knowledge will solve all your problems. We all know that to lose weight you need to exercise and eat less, but you have to get to a point where you apply that. I don’t think everyone just wakes up one day and figures it out. You have to relearn it everyday.

The idea of living within your means is something that our society has been missing for decades and decades. It should be a comfort to young and middle-aged people that people die never figuring this stuff out. It’s hard. But to know you need to figure things out is an awesome place to start, and that’s a form of wisdom that it takes people years to get to. I think it’s valuable to hit bottom. It teaches you that it really sucks to be in that position—it’s like aversion therapy.

Photo: flickr/ @yakobusan Jakob Montrasio

W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) is an organization that is fighting for minimum payments for artists in NYC.  As part of their work, they surveyed NYC artists about payments they’ve received for exhibiting with non-profits.  Hyperlink has some infographics displaying the results of the survey, but here’s the gist: most artists showing work at non-profits in NYC do not get paid.

Alternatively, Canada has an organization called CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation/Le Front Des Artistes Canadiens). The organization was founded in 1968 in response to a National Gallery of Canada project that intended to use the works of Canadian artists without providing compensation. The non-profit CARFAC is now the voice of the Canadian artist community. They publish an annual fee schedule, which a list of minimum fees that artists should be paid for the use of their work. 

The schedule is very detailed and slightly complicated to someone (me) who isn’t well-versed in the art world, but this section, outlining payment minimums for a solo show, is a good example of the kind of fees that artists might garner (group exhibitions get much lower fees).

Since payment is guaranteed in Canada and not in the U.S., I wondered why an artist might choose to live here. My roommate Mona Kamal is a Canadian artist living in New York City. I spoke with her briefly about the difference between Canada and the U.S. for artists, and why she chooses to be here.

Logan Sachon: What is it like to be an artist in Canada versus the U.S., as far as compensation?
Mona Kamal: Artists in Canada do get fees for exhibitions in public galleries, and there is a good granting system, but the money that artists receive within this system is small. An artist can live very meagerly with this sum. In the U.S. there isn’t a funding structure like there is in Canada, but the art market is so much larger, the art market allows artists to be able to make a living through selling their work.

What is it that has allowed or encouraged the Canadian system of artist pay versus the U.S. system (which I gather is no system)?
Canada has a long history of government funding for the arts, beginning with the Canada Council forming in the 1960s and then Canadian artists began public galleries called the Artist Run Centre—all these galleries pay artist fees. During this time the CARFAC also started.

Unfortunately the U.S. doesn’t have a government-based funding structure for the arts. They do have the National Endowment for the Arts, but that got heavily cut in the 1990s when Andre Serrano made a piece called “Piss Christ” [You've seen this. It totally outraged Republicans, and Jesse Helms fought to ensure federal dollars never went to fund such filth ever again —LS]. There is little funding in the organization and it has a lot of red tape.

Why, as a working artist do, you choose to be in the U.S. rather than Canada? It seems like there would be better opportunity for pay there, because of CARFAC?
I choose to be in New York, not the U.S. Being here enables me to be exposed to an international art scene that has international artists and curators. This is what opens up a world of opportunity for me as a working artist. There is “pay” for artists in Canada, but it is not enough to sustain yourself. There are more non-profit galleries in New York City than all of Canada. It also is difficult to sell work in Canada, and being paid $1,500 for a solo exhibition isn’t enough to make a living.

You still have healthcare in Canada. Is there an opportunity for you to get healthcare here, as an artist?
I can get health care through teaching (at Parsons), and there is also the Freelancers Union, which I find to be expensive. Healthcare in the U.S. is an entire other issue. It’s a system that’s broken and needs to be fixed, but in my opinion has gotten so bad that I think it’s too late to fix. Even if I had insurance here I would still keep my Canadian Health insurance because it offers me so much more at zero cost. I’m taking a trip to Canada soon just to go have a physical.

What are some ways the working artists you know here supplement their income? (I know you teach …) Are artists in Canada able to spend more time on art, because of the payment system?
I think artists do anything they can to supplement income. Many artists freelance because that way they can choose their schedule. I actually feel like I focus on my art more now than I did in Canada, though this may be because of a change in my attitude and wanting to make more time for my art.

Have you been paid for shows here? 
I think I’ve been paid once, in all the time I’ve been here. Whereas I went to Toronto last month and, because of CARFAC, I was given a stipend for travel and a fee.