don’t panic

SoCal real-estate has always been a bit eccentric, what with our massively overpriced homes and all. But the extent of this insanity isn’t limited to purchased residences, you can get fully reamed just living in an apartment as well.

Nothing drives this point home more than paying an exorbitant monthly rent for complete crap. I mean, part of the point of renting is that you don’t have to do maintenance. You pay for someone else to do it for you in the form of an included fee. They’re called amenities. You give up some privacy, and are pretty strictly confined in what you can do to the place you live in, but those amenities are supposed to make up for that. Anywhere but SoCal.

We pay more for our monthly rent, than most of the rest of the nation pays for a mortgage, which means that we are getting doubly screwed because while most people are investing their money in something that will almost certainly appreciate in value, we are somewhat literally throwing our cash away. But then again, we aren’t tied down to an investment that might be hard to shake if the market gets ugly, and if we get termites, we just call the office and they come and deal with it… Ah, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? When living in an apartment, you make the assumption that management will do their job, or for that matter, even gives a damn.

About a year and a half ago, our apartment complex was bought by a group that owns a bunch of other SoCal complexes. Normally, this wouldn’t really matter much since the owners don’t really do anything other than hire other people to run the place for them. But in SoCal (and many other places in the country I’m sure) it seems to be a trend that the owners are only interested in one thing, and that’s turning a profit. Well, I’m sure that can be tough in places like Kansas, where real-estate, like the terrain, is pretty flat. But SoCal real-estate is rocketing out of control, so even if they did almost nothing, it would actually be difficult NOT to make a profit. And therein lies the problem.

Our little “community” is composed of two separate apartment complexes about a block apart. The one we live in has about 65 units and the one up the hill has over 100. They used to have separate owners, and as such, separate management, but the new wardens decided that that would be wasteful and consolidated to a single office. Unfortunately, they also applied the same logic to maintenance. In short, there’s one guy covering the complete maintenance needs of 165 plus units, and that includes painting, construction or any repairs that might be needed when an apartment is being re-rented. There’s also a gal that helps with the cleaning, and neither speak english well enough to ask the time of day.

On top of that, we’re now on our third manager in 18 months. The last one literally just walked out the door and quit. And I don’t blame her… well, at least not completely. After all, it’s a bit of a cop-out to constantly blame “corporate” for everything that doesn’t get done. Sure, they very well may be behind it all, but management is paid to “manage”. If something doesn’t work, then they need to do whatever is necessary to fix it. If that means calling up “corporate” and cracking a few heads together, then so be it. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the phrase “sorry, that’s something you’ll have to bring up with corporate… my hands are tied.”

But I know it can’t be that hard to find a few english-speaking gents to fix things up around the place. Handymen are everywhere. You just have to wish to pay them. The management at our complex would have us believe that there isn’t a man for fifty miles capable of lifting a hammer, let alone fixing an occasional window screen or replacing a lock.

Well, lately, things have started coming to a head. First, we noticed that the garbage dumpsters seemed a little full. Two weeks later, there was a small mountain of trash rotting in the August sunshine, and the management, when questioned, simply explained that they were “working on it.” Like how? Were they hoping the thing would spontaneously combust or something? It was certainly heading that way. Anyway, we finally found out by comparing notes with our neighbors, that corporate simply hadn’t paid the bill.

And it’s not a big bill… Figure somewhere around half the monthly rent of a single room apartment, if that. And it’s not like this was some surprise. Two weeks had gone by without the normal twice weekly trash pickup. Those things get noticed and reported fairly quickly. “Corporate” it seems, was just taking their time fixing the issue. After all, the hill of garbage wasn’t stinking up THEIR homes.

So this month started with someone dumping an old dilapidated couch in front of the trash receptacle. A least they didn’t actually try to cram the thing into the bin itself, making it a small logistical nightmare to get it back out so that the garbage collectors will be able to empty the thing. And then just this week, somebody came in the middle of the night and dropped a queen-sized mattress and two box springs on top of the couch. Sigh…

What kind of person is so damn lazy that they can’t get up off their fanny and deal with their own crap? Instead, these selfish bastards dump it on someone else and bail. As if our maintenance “staff” doesn’t have enough to do, now they have to find a way to cart off an ever increasing pile of junk before the rats notice that a gold mine of nesting material is just sitting there waiting for them…

This morning I found out that our downstairs neighbor has had enough and is moving out. Guess what broke the camels back. She found out that rats were coming into her apartment through her bathroom and eating her carpet.