Unorthodox Practices

Book excerpt: Think the real-estate market is a current craze? Welcome to New York in the 1980s, where the best thing about being obsessed with real estate is that, as a conversation topic, you can count on it to just naturally arise a bout every ten minutes. Nina Fischman mostly opts out of those conversa tions: She's too busy running down to Housing Court on behalf of her poverty law clients, and tracking down sales on sweaters that camouflage the hips. But Nina's mother, Ida, has a nose for the market, and that nose gets twitchy when old ladies in her neighborhood start dying, leaving apartments that have miraculously escaped what New Yorkers delicately call the cockroach problem. Over a nice snack of low-fat cottage cheese, she nags Nina into snooping around. And Nina is soon forced, reluctantly, to agree with her mother.