Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

When Renting Goes Wrong

ALEXANDER BROWN/THE HOYA
ALEXANDER BROWN/THE HOYA

For juniors, the fall semester features a scramble to secure housing for senior year. After a flurry of house tours and phone calls, students must pick a new home, compete for a lease and hope for the best. But the reality of off-campus housing that students meet months later isn’t always what they pictured while signing on the dotted line.

And as services are introduced to protect the rights of student tenants, attitudes are changing about who deserves the blame when an off-campus arrangement goes south.
First-time renters are prone to making mistakes, focusing on price and proximity over other important qualities a residence should have. With a limited community of landlords providing housing in the Georgetown area, the time crunch and competition among other students to find housing often trumps logistics.
“Some people will sign leases and will never walk the property,” said Alyssa Peterson (COL ’14), co-chair of the newly formed Georgetown Student Tenant Association. “[Students should] talk to the current residents of the house to see what their experiences are.”
Without the proper research, new tenants are more likely to find themselves in an unfortunate situation.
“The fact that half the houses in Georgetown don’t have basic business licenses is creating a situation in which a lot of students are living in really unsafe housing,” Peterson said.
Through the tenant association, which is run by the Georgetown University Student Association, Peterson hopes to educate student tenants about the mechanics of rentals and leases and solve problems students like Nikita Buley (MSB ’14), a former staffer for The Hoya, encounter with landlords.
“[Our landlords] wouldn’t let us move in on June 1, which is the normal move-in date for most residences in Georgetown, because they said that they were getting [the apartment] professionally cleaned for a week,” saidBuley, who lives in an apartment near the intersection of 35th and O streets NW. “But when I got there, the house had obviously not been deeply cleaned as they promised. It was filthy.”
Walking into an unclean property on the first day of the lease is not unique to Buley.
“The upstairs screened porch was full of trash, mostly old furniture and broken printers and that sort of thing, but also ancient containers of Chinese food,” Nick Parrott (COL ’12) said of the first impression he had to his senior-year home on Reservoir Road across from the Georgetown University Hospital.
Washington, D.C. law requires that landlords make all necessary repairs to ensure the houses are safe and habitable according to safety code requirements. In many cases, however, it can take weeks or months before tenants see home improvements.
“We had rats coming in from behind the dishwasher because there were holes on the inside of the house that [our landlord] hadn’t fixed,” Samantha Lin (SFS ’14), who lives in an apartment near the intersection of 36th and O streets NW, said. “So he got us rattraps, and the rat problem stopped, but then mice started coming in from behind the dishwasher because there are holes back there. He was just really neglecting his responsibilities.”
Until this fall, students were on their own in dealing with these issues, a daunting task for first-time renters. The tenant association is seeking to provide more institutional support through general consultations about issues with landlords and through reviews of leases before students sign them.
“If the students come in and understand their rights before entering into the lease, we can look over the lease to make sure that the clauses aren’t problematic,” Peterson said. “It’s supposed to prevent people from getting in these terrible leases with terrible landlords.”
Campus attention turned to the reliability of landlords and attention to safety codes in 2004, when Daniel Rigby (MSB ’05) died in a fire in his house on Prospect Street. His basement room was near a window that could have been used to escape, but was covered with bars.
“When Daniel Rigby died in the fire, there was brief university action, but then interest waned,” Peterson said. “We have fallen back to the situation where people have these horrible landlords, so we’re trying to reboot that effort and the engagement with the university.”
While safety concerns of a similar scale have not been brought up in recent years, problems with landlords still persist. The reason for this is likely related to the reliable demand for housing in the Georgetown area and a seemingly endless stream of student renters.
“Honestly, I think a lot of the landlords in Georgetown think because we’re students, because we’re young, we’re really busy so we don’t have a lot of time to figure out the laws and our rights and that they’re mistreating us,” Buley said. “They know that we need a place to live and that the university doesn’t have enough housing for all its students, so we’re willing to pay high prices for mediocre housing.”
Eight landlords in the Georgetown neighborhood either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The complaints of Georgetown’s long-term neighbors suggest an overflow of rowdy, disrespectful college students in a subdued, distinguished neighborhood. As Georgetown works to house 90 percent of students on campus, some of the students left living off campus may return inside the front gates.
But until the university adds the facilities to meet these requirements, students who picked out their senior-year house during their freshman fall and students who would rather spend another year in Henle Village will still have to interact with neighbors and landlords.
“We wanted housing on campus because we just didn’t want to deal with landlords,” Lin said of her reasoning for originally wanting to stay on campus. “We entered the housing lottery, and we found out much later that we didn’t get it.”
With few Georgetown housing options for seniors, landlords have a unique control over undergraduates who have nowhere else to turn.
Occasionally, some landlords have gone as far as cooperating with students — or have just turned a blind eye — on code violations, such as permitting more people than legally allowed to live in one house. However, landlords tend toward the opposite direction and take their authority too far.
“The landlord I had for both years I was living in Burleith was a major creep. Whenever he visited the house, which was rare since he spent most of his time overseas, he would provide this weird, sexual commentary,” Parrott said. “Upon seeing my male roommate open the door without a shirt, he said, ‘I’ll try not to get too aroused at the sight of a bare chest.’”
But it didn’t stop there. Having unlimited access to his own property allowed for full invasion of his tenants’ privacy.
“The man dug through girls’ underwear drawers,” Parrott said.
When students encounter these extreme circumstances, many do not know their rights as tenants, a problem GSTA hopes to solve. Buley took it upon herself to learn the intricacies of D.C. housing and told her landlord she was considering bringing in an inspector to look at aspects of the house that were against code, like cracked tiles in the bathroom.
“That was the only thing that they responded to quickly. They arranged the time with the handyman and our cracked tiles were fixed a week later,” Buley said. “So if I point out that something is breaking the law, they get around to it.”
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