Op Ed Piece
Dear Mayor Curtatone, Mayor Walsh, Gov. Baker & any other Massachusetts city or state official,
My name is ____ and I’m a 29 year old resident of Somerville. I’m writing to you all today to paint you a picture of how the housing crisis is currently affecting myself, as well as a majority of people my age here in Massachusetts.
After 6 months of trying to find a place to live, my girlfriend and I found a listing for a 2 bedroom apartment in Somerville this past March. We had been struggling to find a place together due to her not having a license and needing to be close to her job, and my financial constraints of having a car. This place, moderately priced at $1850, seemed too good to be true, considering that the listing had no pictures of the actual unit. I was convinced it was a craigslist scam, or we were about to see an almost-$2k-a-month closet.
We went to go see it at 10AM on a Sunday morning. Our realtor, had never seen the unit himself, and admitted he had never worked with the landlord before. The apartment was destroyed, clearly by a family with kids, who had just moved out the night before. The realtor gave us a quick tour, but didn’t seem to have any information as to what was getting fixed, replaced, painted or repaired. The apartment was a great apartment otherwise, but definitely needed some TLC - stickers all over the walls, broken drawers, broken doors, burnt areas of the carpet, oh, and the carpet itself...it’s that single-layer, blue Office Space carpet, made fromPeter Gibbons’ nightmares.
But we needed a place, and we knew that if we didn’t jump on it, someone else would. Someone was actually coming to look at it right after us. Our realtor actually persuaded us to not ask any questions about the lease, apartment, or anything else we were concerned about before getting us credit approved, because “then the landlord might not say ‘yes’”. And with very few options for hard-working people under $2k, now that all of these high-rise, luxury condos have sprouted up, we were backed in a corner and went with it. So later on that day, around 6pm, we went to submit a credit application and try and get approved for the apartment. Our realtor still hadn’t heard anything from our landlord, but luckily by the next day, had said that we were approved and that the landlord was fixing up the apartment and we could move in 4/1. Our problems seemed to be over.
Upon move in day, we realized that the only thing that had been fixed to the apartment was a paint job, which included some beautifully painted over masking tape on a section of the wall, and a fixed kitchen drawer. The rug was still the same, burnt rug from before, and shelving in the closet had been removed and not put back up. Within the first month, our water heater needed to be replaced, and we noticed our windows were cracked and caulked shut. The water heater was quickly fixed, thanks to an on-call maintenance company used by many property owners in Boston, but the windows were another story. We went back and forth with them for months about replacing the windows, only to have to withhold rent in 110 degree heat in July just so we could get some functioning windows to put an AC in. We only got someone to finally come out after we attempted to force one of the windows open which completely fell out of the pane and into the bedroom. First, we were told that they had other properties to get to because school had ended, and then emails were ignored, which rolled into me sending more emails saying that people are sleeping on mattresses on the roof adjacent to our living room window and we were afraid someone could break in, only to receive a call from someone on my landlord’s payroll saying that the police were taking care of the “situation” and that a maintenance man put a small, one room air conditioner in the bedroom of our now “chilly” 85 degree apartment, which according to him should’ve solved the problem of us having cracked, broken, and sealed shut windows.
Needless to say, it’s been a nightmare. It’s been a struggle trying to find an affordable place to live, feeling rushed into paperwork by a realtor who just wants his commission because he knows that there’s hundreds of people just like us struggling to find a place to live, having a landlord who feels as though his bank account is more important than providing a safe and up-to-code place to live which his tenants pay for, and not having any way out in our already financially-maxed out lives.
I know I might live a little bit differently than most people. I’m a creative-type, who left my high paying job in sales to get a better grip on myself as a whole, so I don’t fit the “9-5-er corporate mold”. But I’m sure you have a niece, or a cousin, or even a sister who is my age. I might even look like her. I love pizza. My favorite band is Led Zeppelin. One of my happy places is spending a warm June Night at Fenway Park watching the Red Sox win. I’m just trying to rationalize with you that since you’ve come into office and let all this build-up happen, it’s now impossible for people like me to even scrape by. You’re a politician, and I understand you have money to make and hands to shake, but I’m just asking you to maybe slow down. Step in and stop letting landlords treat their tenants like they don’t even deserve the slightest decency. Your response with the $500 million housing plan that came out last week isn’t good enough. You have to remember, I’m from a generation that was raised on President George W. Bush creating a war to fund his oil expenditures and Dick Chenney’s military weapons companies. So you creating this housing crisis, only to put a band-aid on it by offering up a lottery to us on one of your many cheaply-made-to-break-down-to-keep-the-union-working apartments that you got rich on, doesn’t sit very well.
