Landlords - A Phantom Menace
Stephanie:
February 22nd, 2007
Student housing isn’t meant to be luxurious. It’s not unusual for heating to be temperamental if at all functional, and it just wouldn’t be ‘home’ without that rather suspicious looking growth on the bathroom ceiling. Cling film on windows, crumbling plaster, rattling windows and bathrooms with an entire eco-system of their own are the building blocks of student living - but where do we draw the line? In the two years I spent renting at University I never laid eyes on the landlord. What little contact I had with him revolved around a broken shower, an unhealthily mouldy ceiling, and a boiler held together by rust. Now by my reckoning, three problems in two years isn’t bad going for any landlord, but in each case by the time aid arrived I could’ve sooner imported new fittings from Mars.
Slowly, however, my attitude toward the shocking living arrangements began to alter slightly. With each new patch of damp, with every whistling breeze and every inch of peeling wallpaper I began to cultivate a sense of smug satisfaction. Sooner or later the lazy landlord will realise that what might have been a quick fix in the early stages now amounts to a fortune in renovation costs just to keep the building from crumbling around him. It is a very small sort of triumph, but when you’re sitting at your desk wrapped in blankets, having not showered for a week and with a worrying drip coming from somewhere in the roof - it’s all you can cling to.