(Untitled)

[spinelli2021]

i just read this and now i can't stop thinking about how dirty my keys are and how badly i want to clean them. now I feel dirty!

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/apartment-therapy-on/at-on-cleaning-your-housekeys-009271

Comments

[anonymous]

lobos also had several section 8 properties: these are units that the tenants sometimes pay some of the rent on, but mostly the rent is paid through government aid for the tenants. lobos loved these because the government aid always came on time, and the tenants weren't paying directly so they couldn't withhold rent when things went wrong and lobos could ignore their complaints. for example, a block of houses in the same street, all owned by lobos, had the same plumbing malfunction: the upstairs toilets would routinely back up and the sewage would come up through the kitchen sink and flood the kitchen with excrement. lobos would send someone out there within a day or three to clean up the mess and temporarily fix the pipes (good response time for them). but they never fixed the underlying cause, because it would be too much work/money and these people weren't worth it. it was clear that the family running the business considered anyone who needed public assistance to be second-class citizens and that any "help" lobos provided, e.g. actually sending any maintenance people out there, was more than they deserved.

my boyfriend and his roommates also rented from them at the same time i did, and they had even more trouble than i did. their apartment was in much worse condition, both when they first moved in and from lobos not coming to fix things while they lived there. lobos tried to charge him over $100 in "late fees." my bf and his roommates never paid their rent late; rent was due on the first of each month, and the checks generally arrived at lobos around the 25th of the month before. however, since the checks were about a week early each month, lobos just assumed that these student tenants were paying three weeks late for the previous month, so they added late charges on each month. it took my boyfriend multiple visits to their office to sort this out, both while they were still living there and after they moved out. even when he would sit down with their billing person and be like "ok, if you add up these payments, it gives us $1000 CREDIT, rather than breaking even, see?" they still didn't seem to get that they shouldn't be charging him late fees.

when my boyfriend and his roommates moved out, lobos tried to take out $500 of their $1100 security deposit for things being "dirty" or "broken," which they totally weren't (excepting the items that they called to have lobos fix but never got fixed, such as the oven that was consistently 150-200 degrees above the correct temperature and didn't get fixed after 7 months of calling about it).

the front/"security" doors to our building also didn't actually keep anyone out. in my building, people would prop the door open all the time because, if you closed it, you might not be able to open it again. many tenants called lobos but nothing changed. one night i came back to find 2 people standing out front, trying to get in to the building. all three of us tried all three of our keys and they didn't work. i ended up going in through the fire escape to their apartment, through their apartment to the stairs, then into my own place. we tried opening the door from the inside; turns out we were actually stuck in the building unless we went out windows or fire escapes (in which case we couldn't secure our own apartments after we left). they sent someone to fix it within a day or two, but only once the lock got so bad that we were trapped. my boyfriend's building had a glass security door which somebody broke; lobos sent someone by to tape the broken glass pieces together, and that's how the door stayed for over a year (even several months after we moved out, it was still like that).

ok... i've written a lot, but i could come up with more stories if he needs more convincing. suffice it to say that both the people that have worked for lobos and the people that have rented from lobos all agree that the guy who runs the business is a HUGE cheating jerk and that tenants routinely get screwed over. let me know if you need more.

[cursedthesky]

Thank you! The property he/we looked at is over in Bellevue, so it's not as student-filled as the places around Oakland, but I doubt they're any more attentive to it. We talked with a girl who lives in the building and she said that for example when someone broke into her apartment, someone came quickly to fix her window, and that when he toilet leaked, someone came quickly for that, but when the tree out front collapsed and the fire department came nobody from Lobos ever showed up. While we were there, some other lady had a hard time getting her key to work in the building's front door and said it's always like that. And the woman who showed us the apartment made the comment three times that it'd be cleaned before we would move in. It didn't look like much cleaning was needed really, but the fact that she kept saying it seemed odd to me.

Right now we live in a two bedroom and a den place with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom, so it's big for two people now that my boyfriend's obnoxious roommates have finallyy moved out. The boyfriend is opposed to having to pay half of the rent there, and I'm absolutely opposed to his suggestion that we have roommates again(He's 27, I'm 23. We both have "professional" jobs.. I work for a bank and he works as a chauffeur for a high end transporation company. And we've been together for a year and a half, living together for most of that time. Seriously, can't we be done having roommates by now?) So anyway, moving is necessary I think, but I'm definitely not desperate enough to move that I want to move into a place managed by people I hear nothing but bad things about.