Students who live off-campus can be put through hell trying to find the perfect place — and once they’ve found it, their troubles aren’t always over.
Caley Finlin, a Ryerson University philosophy student, found out that a neglectful landlady can ruin an ideal home.
In a beautiful house, near the trendy Kensington Market area in Toronto, Finlin said she and her roommates became victims of the city’s bedbug population, courtesy of the upstairs tenants.
“Our landlady didn’t believe us, and she wouldn’t do anything,” Finlin said.
Bedbugs breed very quickly, and after a month and a half, Finlin said she was covered in bites.
“I even had bites on my wrists, and I looked like a drug addict, because I kept scratching myself because the bites were so itchy,” Finlin said.
“Bedbugs only come out at night, so I was too scared to sleep,” Finlin said. “I was so stressed out I wasn’t really eating.”
Finlin said the psychological problems caused by the bugs began to affect her schoolwork, and her landlady ignored her pleas to deal with the issue.
By the time Finlin and her roommates convinced the landlady to fumigate the building, it was completely infested, and they had to have all their belongings cleaned.
Finlin terminated the lease and moved out as soon as she could, but not without a parting shot.
She put a warning up on the online bedbug registry, in the hope that future tenants would steer clear of the house and its owner.
Third-year Carleton journalism student Chris Herhalt lives in a house on Gladstone Avenue – within busing distance of the campus, and walking distance of downtown.
But when he moved in at the beginning of the school year, he said he faced rotten floors, useless outlets, a faulty furnace and an indifferent landlady.
“I’ve probably made 50 phone calls to her,” Herhalt said. “She’s just full of excuses.”
Herhalt said he and his roommate have tried to make repairs, but some things are beyond fixing.
He said the windows are decades old, and the building shakes when large trucks drive by.
To students looking for off-campus housing, Herhalt urges them to test everything.
“Don’t be fooled by the price, test everything and don’t value location over quality,” he said.
Anne-Marie Cronkwright, a second year math studen at Carleton, started her first year in an unfortunate living situation.
Her landlord, who lived in the house that Cronkwright shared with several other students, set up 11 cameras to monitor them.
“He said that if something got broken, he would need to know who did it,” Cronkwright said. Since there were no cameras in the bedrooms or bathrooms, Cronkwright said she thought little of it, until he started nagging her and the other tenants about how they treated the house, making it clear that he was reviewing all the footage.
“It was like he thought he was my father,” Cronkwright said.
She said he told them how to shut the cupboards, how to sit on the sofa and wouldn’t let them cook after 9 p.m.
Cronkwright said he told her to call him if she would be out late, which she refused to do.
“That’s above and beyond what a landlord should want,” she said.
Eventually, the landlord’s micromanaging became unbearable, and Cronkwright said she talked to some frosh facilitators about the cameras, asking if it was normal.
When she was assured that it was definitely not normal, she spoke to the police.
Cronkwright said although the video feeds had no sound, and hence were not technically illegal, the police urged her to get out of the house as soon as she could.
After less than a month of living there, Cronkwright went to stay with a friend.
“It was definitely a weird way to start university,” Cronkwright said.
Above all things, she said that a tenant should never, ever live with their landlord.
As these students have found, when living off-campus, a bad landlord can turn a slice of heaven into a house from hell.