| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
I just spoke to my downstairs roommate, a nurse who has lived in my building for eight years now. She' been the one to take the garbage out when the lanlord's been too lazy. Likewise, she's been the one to clean and vaccuum the hallways and replace lightbulbs as needed. She is moving home to PEI because her parents are aging and unwell and her sister died rather tragically last year, leaving a young family. She's going home to help out.
But she's going home really pissed off, too. Joel, the landlord, is jerking her around and taking her to tenants' court. After all she has done to maintain the place when he refused (and note, her apartment has not been painted once in those 8 years!), he is taking her to court to get his money from her and humiliating her in front of potential tenants (yes, he's actually trying to rent the place, too, but refusing to let that count for the rent she owes him!). He brings people in and then tells them that "she's only bounced 3 cheques in eight years," thing like that.
We've all known that the guy's an asshole. But the building we live in (an old Victorian home with beautiful found windows in a turret up the side, that is basically my living room) is really well located and architecturally interesting. Joel has told me many times that he could rent my place in a heartbeat. Mine is a two-bedroom (that I've shared with many a roommate over the five years I've been here: the girlfriend I moved in with, two different law students, one lawyer --whom the girlfriend above (once she became the ex) actually slept with as a housewarming present--and now one manager of a Club Monaco store). Eleanor, my neighbour, lives just under me in a one-bedroom with a similar layout to my place. He could easily rent her place in a heartbeat, too. He's just choosing not to allow her to benefit from that arrangment because being an asshole comes too easily to him.
It doesn't occur to him to do maintenance on the place or to give her a break for all the years that she picked up his slack and because her sister just died or because it might be the decent human thing to do for all the reasons above. Nope, a contract is a contract, says he.
Oh, and by the way, he also has an MBA, teaches Business/Commerce at many universities in town where he uses his tenants as case studies. I'm sure Eleanor's situation warms the cockles of his capitalist heart. AFter all, he can get rent paid to him twice.
Posted by Bush Whacker at March 15, 2003 03:15 PMI, of course, have had my indirect run-in with your slum landlord a while back, although not on the basis of his being a landlord. During the time that there was a strike vote for part-time faculty at one of the universities where he teaches, he had an assistant setting up financial planning luncheons at the U. I told the assistant that I would not attend because I do not trust the advice of a consultant who hasn't the balls to show up at a polling station. Of course I knew that he wouldn't have voted the way I would have wanted him to, but I can't stand those who view teaching stricly as a way of padding their CV.
Posted by: Maurice on March 16, 2003 02:10 PM