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Sep. 25th, 2006 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI spent today packing up and moving out the M family. Mr. and Mrs. M worked, for a time, for Mr. C., a man whose mortgage we hold and who personally vouched for Mr. and Mrs. M when they came in to rent the apartment back of 321, the one we'd just redone. After Mr. and Mrs. M got fired, they stopped paying their rent. After about a month of unemployment (remember that it takes approximately sixty days to get a tenant out if the tenant is not paying any rent at all and you file all your paperwork in a timely fashion), Mr. M apparently broke into Mr. C's place of business and stole from him to the tune of about $1200.00. As a result of that, Mr. M is currently in jail for breaking and entering. I do not know where Mrs. M is and I don't much care where she is. Since we weren't getting any rent from 'em, we filed to evict the tenants M. We won, of course. Yay for us!
Well, then the Evil Landlord takes pictures of the state in which the ex-tenants left the apartment. It wasn't as bad as we had feared, but it could have been better. (It doesn't really matter -- they aren't getting any deposit because of the unpaid rent. But they didn't totally trash the place, which will make it easier to put back together and rerent. They did leave about twenty cigarette burns on the brand-fucking-new carpet. They were the first tenants on that carpet. The carpet cost more than their deposit. Asshat tenants.) After the obligatory photography, we started packing up their fucking shit. The rules, at least in Pennsylvania, are that the tenant does NOT lose the rights to his or her property even if he or she left it behind in the Evil Landlord's apartment during an eviction.
What a right proper Evil Landlord does to dispose of tenant property is send the ex-tenant a certified letter at his or her last known address (For tenants M, that would be the apartment we just threw them out of -- they didn't leave a forwarding address.) informing him or her that he or she has left shit in the apartment and had better come and get it within thirty days or it's going to be thrown the fuck away. If the certified letter comes back as no forwarding address (as we fully expect to happen for the tenants M), the wise Evil Landlord files it, unopened, in the tenant's file and keeps it forever. Then, Evil Landlord packs up the shit, moves it to storage, waits thirty days, and throws it the fuck out. (This is not the route we used in the past. In the past, we stored stuff until we forgot whose it was and then threw it away when we needed the room in the basment for some other tenant's shit. This new way of dealing with tenant shit arose because I spent some quality time talking to Constable Cregger at the eviction of the tenants M and then fact-checking what he told me with the landlord-tenant law thing that Dad has. I expect a lot fewer basements full of shit in my future... which means that we can nearly always be moving ex-tenant shit into the very accessible rooms right by the big garage door instead of dicking around in the warren of small rooms that comprise the basement under 629. I *hates* moving furniture around corners, I does. Stupid tricksy corners.)
On the off chance that the ex-tenants show up to get their stuff, the Evil Landlord has to hand it over, all of it or part of it. Evil Landlords are not allowed to charge ex-tenants unreasonably for storing the shit or for packing up and moving the shit so's to rerent the apartment to someone who might actually, y'know, pay the fucking rent. If the ex-tenants show up to get their shit, the Evil Landlord has gotta give it to them even if they've got no damn money and haven't made good on the back rent or the court costs or that unpaid hundred-and-forty-dollar water bill. Evil Landlords are also not allowed to keep the shit after the thirty days and then sell the shit to try and make back some of the money they owe. That's prohibited by the Code of the Brethren, which is not all that damn much like guidelines, thank you. Evil Landlords can donate the unclaimed shit to charity [hah!] or keep it for personal (not-for-sale) use but they can't sell it because offering an Evil Landlord a profit-making option is apparently like asking the fox to guard the henhouse and casts some doubt on how much of a good-faith effort the Evil Landlord will make to locate the ex-tenant. Obviously, the Evil Landlord *can* levy on the personal property of tenants, but that involves paperwork and filing fees and shit, PLUS the first three hundred dollars an Evil Landlord makes from selling an ex-tenant's shit goes to the ex-tenant. I don't know how it is for other Evil Landlords, but we have very, very few tenants whose left-behind personal shit is worth more than one hundred dollars, let alone three.
General Rule Regarding Tenant Property: The personal property of tenants is not worth anything. Tenants can leave a three-bedroom apartment chock full of stuff that, total, has a value of $0. Cleaning out a few apartments gives most Evil Landlords one hell of an appreciation for the total worthlessness of most consumer goods.
The ex-tenants M had (surprisingly) taken rather a lot of crap out of the place but we still hauled six pickup loads of not-trash out (two washing machines [one of which probably works], an old-ish Maytag dryer [works], a blue recline-o-couch [shitted up], a microwave [probably works], a mattress [crappy], box spring [broken], metal bed frame, two occasional tables [crappy], a particleboard entertainment center ['nuff said], two dressers (real wood -- veneer), a particleboard bookshelf, lots and lots of *stuff*, endless crafting supplies, et cetera and so forth. Since the basement had flooded at some point (They clogged up the sump pump. The basement DOES NOT flood if the sump pump is working normally. Putting crud into the sump is a dumb-ass thing to do and it is not MY FAULT someone thought that the sump was a good place to put plastic bags and scraps of cloth.), a lot of their stuff was trash (mildewed, dripping wet, the kind of thing that happens when there's three inches of water in the basement and all your shit is stored in cardboard boxes on the floor of the basement) and we threw it out. Evil landlords disposing of left-behind tenant property are allowed to throw out obvious trash.
We also cleaned out the stuff that was clogging and slowing down the sump pump. It's all better now.
Anyway. These people, the ex-tenants M, are people to whom $1200 is enough money to be worth stealing. They had trouble paying their rent. They did not own a car when they became our tenants. But they had a Singing Bass and a Talking Christmas Tree and a stuffed Harley Davidson Eagle toy and more winter coats than a kindergarten coat rack in January and decorative ceramic shit for every holiday known to man and boxes and boxes of xmas stuff (sadly, stored in the basement and thus thrown out) and stuff for fishing and a wetsuit (farmer john shorty) and hunting clothes and six extension cords and scented lamp oil and assorted Yankee Candle candles (they're expensive) and a fancy coffee maker and a spare coffee maker and a cuisinart and a fake xmas tree and dreamcatchers and craft shit and boxes of glassware they hadn't even unpacked since moving in last winter and two (probably nonworking) television sets and (obviously) thousands of plastic coathangers. Seriously, I think there's a connection between how trashy a tenant is and how many of his or her coathangers are plastic.
It's the tyranny of stuff. Their stuff owned them. They were fucking poor, seriously poor. And yet they lived among sheer mountains of completely useless stuff. Why so much stuff? What the fuck is with the stuff? I don't have that much stuff, for fuck's sake. They obviously don't care about the stuff because they don't take it with them when they move. (They did take some stuff, but not all of it. They hardly ever take all of it.) Why do they fill an apartment with stuff that they don't like enough to move? What the hell is up with that? Why don't they just throw away the stuff they don't want? We pay for the trash removal there. They could have worked through the crap over a couple of months and gone forth with less shit to a less cluttered and more worthwhile life... at no cost to them. Having fewer things does not make you poorer. Having fewer things, in many ways, makes you richer.
I don't get the stuff thing.
Well, then the Evil Landlord takes pictures of the state in which the ex-tenants left the apartment. It wasn't as bad as we had feared, but it could have been better. (It doesn't really matter -- they aren't getting any deposit because of the unpaid rent. But they didn't totally trash the place, which will make it easier to put back together and rerent. They did leave about twenty cigarette burns on the brand-fucking-new carpet. They were the first tenants on that carpet. The carpet cost more than their deposit. Asshat tenants.) After the obligatory photography, we started packing up their fucking shit. The rules, at least in Pennsylvania, are that the tenant does NOT lose the rights to his or her property even if he or she left it behind in the Evil Landlord's apartment during an eviction.
What a right proper Evil Landlord does to dispose of tenant property is send the ex-tenant a certified letter at his or her last known address (For tenants M, that would be the apartment we just threw them out of -- they didn't leave a forwarding address.) informing him or her that he or she has left shit in the apartment and had better come and get it within thirty days or it's going to be thrown the fuck away. If the certified letter comes back as no forwarding address (as we fully expect to happen for the tenants M), the wise Evil Landlord files it, unopened, in the tenant's file and keeps it forever. Then, Evil Landlord packs up the shit, moves it to storage, waits thirty days, and throws it the fuck out. (This is not the route we used in the past. In the past, we stored stuff until we forgot whose it was and then threw it away when we needed the room in the basment for some other tenant's shit. This new way of dealing with tenant shit arose because I spent some quality time talking to Constable Cregger at the eviction of the tenants M and then fact-checking what he told me with the landlord-tenant law thing that Dad has. I expect a lot fewer basements full of shit in my future... which means that we can nearly always be moving ex-tenant shit into the very accessible rooms right by the big garage door instead of dicking around in the warren of small rooms that comprise the basement under 629. I *hates* moving furniture around corners, I does. Stupid tricksy corners.)
On the off chance that the ex-tenants show up to get their stuff, the Evil Landlord has to hand it over, all of it or part of it. Evil Landlords are not allowed to charge ex-tenants unreasonably for storing the shit or for packing up and moving the shit so's to rerent the apartment to someone who might actually, y'know, pay the fucking rent. If the ex-tenants show up to get their shit, the Evil Landlord has gotta give it to them even if they've got no damn money and haven't made good on the back rent or the court costs or that unpaid hundred-and-forty-dollar water bill. Evil Landlords are also not allowed to keep the shit after the thirty days and then sell the shit to try and make back some of the money they owe. That's prohibited by the Code of the Brethren, which is not all that damn much like guidelines, thank you. Evil Landlords can donate the unclaimed shit to charity [hah!] or keep it for personal (not-for-sale) use but they can't sell it because offering an Evil Landlord a profit-making option is apparently like asking the fox to guard the henhouse and casts some doubt on how much of a good-faith effort the Evil Landlord will make to locate the ex-tenant. Obviously, the Evil Landlord *can* levy on the personal property of tenants, but that involves paperwork and filing fees and shit, PLUS the first three hundred dollars an Evil Landlord makes from selling an ex-tenant's shit goes to the ex-tenant. I don't know how it is for other Evil Landlords, but we have very, very few tenants whose left-behind personal shit is worth more than one hundred dollars, let alone three.
General Rule Regarding Tenant Property: The personal property of tenants is not worth anything. Tenants can leave a three-bedroom apartment chock full of stuff that, total, has a value of $0. Cleaning out a few apartments gives most Evil Landlords one hell of an appreciation for the total worthlessness of most consumer goods.
The ex-tenants M had (surprisingly) taken rather a lot of crap out of the place but we still hauled six pickup loads of not-trash out (two washing machines [one of which probably works], an old-ish Maytag dryer [works], a blue recline-o-couch [shitted up], a microwave [probably works], a mattress [crappy], box spring [broken], metal bed frame, two occasional tables [crappy], a particleboard entertainment center ['nuff said], two dressers (real wood -- veneer), a particleboard bookshelf, lots and lots of *stuff*, endless crafting supplies, et cetera and so forth. Since the basement had flooded at some point (They clogged up the sump pump. The basement DOES NOT flood if the sump pump is working normally. Putting crud into the sump is a dumb-ass thing to do and it is not MY FAULT someone thought that the sump was a good place to put plastic bags and scraps of cloth.), a lot of their stuff was trash (mildewed, dripping wet, the kind of thing that happens when there's three inches of water in the basement and all your shit is stored in cardboard boxes on the floor of the basement) and we threw it out. Evil landlords disposing of left-behind tenant property are allowed to throw out obvious trash.
We also cleaned out the stuff that was clogging and slowing down the sump pump. It's all better now.
Anyway. These people, the ex-tenants M, are people to whom $1200 is enough money to be worth stealing. They had trouble paying their rent. They did not own a car when they became our tenants. But they had a Singing Bass and a Talking Christmas Tree and a stuffed Harley Davidson Eagle toy and more winter coats than a kindergarten coat rack in January and decorative ceramic shit for every holiday known to man and boxes and boxes of xmas stuff (sadly, stored in the basement and thus thrown out) and stuff for fishing and a wetsuit (farmer john shorty) and hunting clothes and six extension cords and scented lamp oil and assorted Yankee Candle candles (they're expensive) and a fancy coffee maker and a spare coffee maker and a cuisinart and a fake xmas tree and dreamcatchers and craft shit and boxes of glassware they hadn't even unpacked since moving in last winter and two (probably nonworking) television sets and (obviously) thousands of plastic coathangers. Seriously, I think there's a connection between how trashy a tenant is and how many of his or her coathangers are plastic.
It's the tyranny of stuff. Their stuff owned them. They were fucking poor, seriously poor. And yet they lived among sheer mountains of completely useless stuff. Why so much stuff? What the fuck is with the stuff? I don't have that much stuff, for fuck's sake. They obviously don't care about the stuff because they don't take it with them when they move. (They did take some stuff, but not all of it. They hardly ever take all of it.) Why do they fill an apartment with stuff that they don't like enough to move? What the hell is up with that? Why don't they just throw away the stuff they don't want? We pay for the trash removal there. They could have worked through the crap over a couple of months and gone forth with less shit to a less cluttered and more worthwhile life... at no cost to them. Having fewer things does not make you poorer. Having fewer things, in many ways, makes you richer.
I don't get the stuff thing.
