Forget It, Jake — It’s Avalon

There are amateurs:

A Manhattan woman has been arrested for allegedly trying to scam thousands of dollars in fees by placing a bogus ad in a newspaper offering cheap rents in fancy apartments, authorities said yesterday. Raadiya James, 22, is accused of buying an ad in AM New York on Dec. 2 that mimicked an official announcement from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development offering cheap apartments on West 57th Street.

In exchange for a $5 application fee, the home-seekers were offered a shot at studios for $538 and two-bedrooms for $823.

Over the next few days, more than 1,000 money orders poured into a post-office box.

But authorities picked up on the alleged scam and when James came to pick up the loot, she was arrested.

And then there are professionals:

“Of course, honey, we’re in a recession,” replied Jackie Sim, the building’s [Avalon Morningside Park, a new 20-story monolith capping Columbus Avenue at 110th Street] leasing agent, when asked whether units had been going more slowly than anticipated. “People are shopping around more.”

. . .

Ms. Sim would call the Avalon a “luxury” building rather than “full-service” — in fact, she did slip up a couple of times — if 20 percent of it didn’t fall under the city’s 80-20 affordable housing guidelines. Developer AvalonBay secured $100 million in tax-exempt bonds to keep 59 units rent-stabilized at “affordable” rates (studios for about $620, $922 for a three-bedroom). Though the apartments aren’t quite as swank — Corian countertops instead of granite, for example — AvalonBay won’t have problems filling them up: HPD was still inundated with applications for the lottery.

“Everyone applied,” said Kelly Garcia, owner of the overstuffed Hardware and Houseware store on 109th and Columbus-including him. “Nobody has said they got in. What I think is they keep it for their own people.”

Now If The New Tenant Is A Lehman Employee, You Could Get That Bad Boy On Drudge For Sure . . .

Nope, I don’t believe it. Except there it is, plain as day on Craig’s List and in the Brooklyn Paper:

Finding a cheap apartment on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg? Priceless. Paying $550 a month to sleep inches from a toilet? A little disgusting.

Nonetheless, just such a humble abode turned up on Tuesday morning on Craigslist — with pictures, no less, of a room that fits little more than a bed, a sink, a shower, a mini-fridge and hotplate and, yes, that toilet, all inches away from each other.

Oh, and one more detail: there are no windows.

“Room is in basement,” the listing reads. “There is no separation between the bedroom and the bathroom.”

What did you expect for $550? A gap of more than six inches from the foot of the bed to the toilet? Are you some kind of Rockefeller?

If not, join the club. The landlord’s housekeeper, who showed the room to The Brooklyn Paper on Tuesday afternoon, said there has been lots of interest in the listing.

“We’ve gotten a lot of e-mails today [to come see the apartment],” she said.

But by sunset, the listing for the “prison chic” unit had been “flagged” by Craigslist for further investigation, possibly because a basement apartment with no windows is illegal.

Illegal or not, there could be another reason why the listing was de-listed. “The apartment has rented,” the landlord claimed when contacted by The Brooklyn Paper on Wednesday.

Then There’s The Issue Of Buying Something Without Knowing What It Actually Looks Like

Oh, that wily Eloise:

Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.

What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an “attic-like space.”

In a $31 million suit, Vavilov says the purchase — which would have represented the second-highest amount for a residential sale in New York City history — was the result of a bait-and-switch scam. Unlike The Plaza hotel of the children’s story “Eloise,” where rooms “embodied the height of elegance and sophistication, the same cannot be said of the penthouses,” said lawyer Y. David Scharf, who filed the suit Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.

“The disparity between what they were supposed to get and what [developer] El-Ad was planning to deliver to them is outrageous.”

Vavilov’s wife, Russian actress Maryana Tsaregradskaya, “burst into tears” when she first saw the finished unit on June 28.

Wow, Old People Are Weird

In other news, some snotnose at the Post thinks 66 is “elderly”:

A group of elderly tenants has won a court order blocking their landlord from installing windows in their rent-stabilized Lincoln Square apartments — even though the windows would give them sweeping, much-coveted views of the park.

“I’m not terribly interested in looking at Central Park or the East Side,” said Ned O’Gorman, one of the four tenants who turned up their nose at the offer.

The poet and his cronies had filed suit to stop their landlord, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, from ripping out the walls in their one-bedroom apartments and replacing them with windows.

“Plaintiffs argue that they would be severely and irreparably damaged by the removal of the wall and by the dust, fumes, noise and vibrations,” Judge Michael Stallman wrote.

He signed off on their bid for a preliminary order barring the landlord from doing work on their apartments, finding the changes were purely cosmetic and not a “necessary repair.”

The landlord’s lawyer, Seth Denenberg, said the window installation between the 22nd and 37th floors was part of a massive rehab of 60 W. 66th St., designed to transform the tower into a “premium building.”

When work is finally completed, the plaintiffs’ four units — all on different floors — will be the only ones without the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The four tenants all said they had good reason to block the construction.

Abraham Cherney is 87 and gets kidney dialysis several times a week.

Former model and dancer Laima Drobavicius has severe allergies, and both said they would “suffer potentially life threatening health consequences” if forced to stay in their apartments during construction.

Donald Stone, 66, said the windows would cost him a wall that’s “now covered by antiques, books and watercolors,” and the construction and sunlight would “endanger his valuable belongings.”

And Averaging 93.6 Inches Of Snow Annually!

Adam “Jersey City” Sternbergh out-Sternberghs himself:

Until last May, Cloyd and Herbeck were living in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, and they were barely making it. They ate mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. They couldn’t afford to go out with their friends. They wanted a family, but “there was no room in our Brooklyn equation to have kids unless we put them in a closet,” Herbeck says.

Then one night, Herbeck, who’s 30, found herself browsing online listings in Buffalo. (Why Buffalo? She comes from Buffalo. And like many young Buffalonians, she got out as soon as she could.) “We were like, ‘Okay, the prices are great,'” she says. So they looked at some photos. “And we were like, ‘Okay, they’re really nice apartments. They’re really big. And right by the park.'”

And all of a sudden, they found they were staring at a very different what-could-be life: the one they’d be able to have if they were willing to leave New York.