LIFESTYLE: Sign on the dotted line

Josh Birnbaum can run down a "laundry list" of complaints about his landlord. He seems to have had problems with almost everything in his Hamilton Court apartment. The mailbox. The oven. The heat and hot water. Rats. The Wharton senior has a list of complaints "a mile long" about University City Housing, the company which manages many University students' off-campus residences. And the biggest complaint of all is that he never should have been living there in the first place. "We had an oral agreement with [University City Housing] to sign a lease for 4103 Locust Street," Birnbaum said. "When we came in to sign the lease, we saw another four students signing the lease to that building." UCH officials would not return several phone calls seeking comment for this article. · With a large percentage of the University's student population living in off-campus housing, landlord problems are almost unavoidable. Students like Birnbaum complain year after year about landlords being unresponsive to their needs, repairs that come too late and lease agreements that have been broken. Landlords, meanwhile, complain that students, who often live in an apartment for just one year, make life difficult by trashing the units and sometimes creating the need for repairs. Wharton senior Lawrence Berger, a University City Housing tenant, said his landlord has not honored the make-ready he and his housemates signed as part of the lease. The make-ready, which specifies what the landlord must do to make the residence habitable by the tenants, stated, among other things, that the house had to be clean before the tenants moved in, he said. "There are things living in our basement," said Berger. "There are definitely bugs, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are rodents." The staggering number of complaints students make daily to their landlords might translate into an equally staggering number of lawsuits. But many students have neither the time nor the resources to fight a battle against a huge landlord machine. "They've basically got you in a bind," Berger said. "You're only here for a year and it's not worth your while to take legal action. The system is really stacked against you." Richard Tanker, of the law firm Fineman and Bach, has made many presentations to students about their rights and responsibilities as tenants. "Each semester, we come in to do a presentation about something, and students choose tenant-landlord issues every time," he said. His firm is hired each semester by the Undergraduate Assembly to provide free legal counsel to students, and to run a forum on a legal issue affecting the student body. But students have more resources with regard to landlord problems than many realize – namely, the Penn Consumer Board, the Office of Off -Campus Living, and the Tenants Action Group. · The Penn Consumer Board was formed 20 years ago when two disgruntled students – who thought they had no legal recourse with regard to problems with their landlords – formed an organization to give legal information to students. College senior Boris Kaplan, the board's chairman, said the most common problems students bring to the board have to do with landlord-tenant issues. "Tenants aren't really informed of their responsibilities, obligations, and rights before problems arise," Kaplan said. "So they'll let the ball roll too far and it becomes a crisis." Kaplan said although some students call his office before problems arise, many are not proactive, and call only "when all amicable relations with their landlord are broken off and they need a go-between." Some of the leases used by landlords today date to before 1978, when legislation both in Philadelphia and Harrisburg altered many of the standard landlord-tenant procedures, Kaplan said. These leases cause the most problems between student-tenants and their landlords, he said. "Some of these leases are weighted heavily in favor of the landlord," Kaplan said. "Even though [the leases] contain unenforceable clauses, if the tenant does sign the lease, he signs away a lot of his rights." If these cases eventually go to court, Kaplan said, the students' claims "may not fly, in which case the person is screwed." In addition to knowing one's rights, maintaining some degree of reason when dealing with landlords is also a large part of successfully living under a lease. "A lot of the time the students have unreasonable demands," Kaplan said. "They think the landlord has to bend over backwards for them." To aid student consumers living off campus, the Penn Consumer Board has drafted a lease of its own, and publishes a landlord survey twice a year. The PCB lease has been adopted by many University City landlords, including Campus Associates, Marianna Thomas, Joseph Canavan and Fishman Realty. And this year's survey, which is several hundred pages long in its published version, is "the most comprehensive one yet," Kaplan said. The survey asks student tenants to rate their landlord in categories such as honesty, concern with tenant satisfaction, keeping repair promises, accessibility and willingness to alter the lease. Tenants are also asked to answer specific questions about apartment quality and the speed with which landlords carry out repairs. Campus Apartments, one of the largest student landlords in the University City area, scored consistently in the lower middle portion of the survey ratings; University City Housing scored slightly lower. Kaplan says his group does not want to "make a recommendation" to students. Rather, the survey tries to "present the previous experiences of students." Joseph Canavan, Michael Levin, Elizabeth Trotman, and The Courts were all area landlords consistently scoring near the top of the survey ratings. However, students had both compliments and complaints for almost all of the landlords included in the survey. · The Office of Off-Campus Living, located on Walnut Street, is the University-affiliated office "designed to assist students, staff, and faculty at all stages of their off campus living experience," as described by the office's summary of services. The office provides weekly updated listings of available rental properties, and provides information about topics including landlords, leases, safety, transportation and utilities. Counseling and referral services are also offered, and the office keeps a copy of the Penn Consumer Board's landlord survey available for prospective tenants to consult. The Tenants Action Group, based in Center City, deals more with other sections of Philadelphia than the University area. It runs free weekly classes on tenants' rights, and is available for consultation on landlord-tenant issues. Frank Broadhead, a community education specialist for the group, said the biggest problem he finds among student tenants is "when there are several unrelated students on the same lease." Broadhead said sometimes landlords will put people together for the sake of filling an apartment or house. When one person pulls out, the others are automatically responsible for fulfilling that person's financial obligation. No matter what the problem, however, the view of many students seems to be that complaining is often necessary to get anything out of a landlord. "It's very nice of them to give us some of the things we ask for," said Jonathan Pitt, a housemate of Berger's. "But it seems as though every significant gain is a result of a lot of argument and a lot of anger." The College senior said although the landlord did not follow through on promises such as cleaning out the basement of the house – which has "20 years' worth of past tenants junk that has never been cleaned out" – he and his housemates have received carpeting and a new refrigerator. "There were things they followed through on," Pitt said, "but they were all a result of our constant complaining and nagging." Birnbaum said he and his apartmentmates know the UCH phone number "all too well." For the first month of school, he called it "once every two or three days" to get small repairs done at his apartment. Even now, he calls UCH "once every 10 days or so," he said. While complaining and nagging has helped for some student tenants, others have had to go to great lengths for results. One College senior who wishes to remain anonymous in order not to alienate her housemates from her Campus Apartments landlord, called in the Philadelphia Board of Health after her landlord refused to get rid of a "fungus" growing in her bathroom. "When we signed the lease, there were a number of problems with the house," she said. "There was this fungus on the bathroom ceiling that looked like bread mold, and they said they'd paint over it and put a fan in the bathroom." But no fan was installed, and the student, who lived in the house over the summer, called CA every two weeks to complain. An "orange fluffy" fungus had also developed as the result of a water leak in her room, and she hoped something would be done before classes began. "I was very nice for the first two months," she said. "But when I got back to school nothing was done, and I got really irrational." She told CA that if they did not take care of the fungi, she would call in the Board of Health. CA hung up on her. She called the Board of Health. The agent from the city Department of Licenses and Inspections who came to inspect the house told her CA would have 30 days to make the necessary repairs, which they said included dismantling and reconstructing part of the wall. The notice sent by the Department of Licenses and Inspections to Campus Apartments on October 18, 1993, listed a number of violations that "create a hazard to the health and safety of the occupants, building, and/or the public." The statement went on to say the conditions "constitute an emergency and must be corrected immediately," and specified 30 days from the notice date as the deadline for making the necessary repairs. Campus Apartments General Manager Dan DeRitis said his department did not receive "a call or complaint of that nature until last week," at which time the problem was resolved. He also said he has received no correspondence from the city regarding that residence. Although the repairs have been made, the College senior who lives there doesn't see why so much time had to elapse before CA solved her problem. She also has had problems with CA's unclear rent statements, and the cleanliness of the house when she moved in, she said. "When we moved in it was disgustingly dirty," she said. "The people before us were pigs, and they obviously didn't get their security deposit back. Obviously, Campus [Apartments] should have used some of that money to fix up the house." Campus Apartments maintenance manager Bob Sanna said he takes notices from the city very seriously, and he dispatched someone to take care of the fungus problem as soon as it became known to him. "If we get a notice from the city and we don't take care of it on time, we get fined big time," Sanna said. "I apologize to whoever [was affected by the problem]." And while students complain about their landlords' maintenance prowess, Sanna said, there is also another side to the story. "Overall, students are responsible," he said. "But I'm sure they don't do some of the things at home that they do in our apartments." In September 1991, Sanna said, a student attempting to move into one of Campus Apartments' properties came into his office with her parents and asked him to come look at the apartment. Upon entering the apartment, Sanna said, they found "the house was destroyed." Kitchen cabinets and doors were pulled off and there were holes everywhere. Although former tenants' security deposits are used toward repairing apartments left in bad condition, Sanna said, "most of the time, the security deposit doesn't cover [the damage]."

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