New tenant selection

Evictions are stressful, but the process of showing an apartment and taking applications from potential tenants is its own special circus.

It starts with a phone call. “Do you accept DSS?” Of course I do. And the show begins.

Entire days have gone by with me sitting around waiting for people who don’t show up. It may be rainy. It may be sunny. For whatever reason, the 12 people who were scheduled to see the apartment never arrive. One girl claiming to be on DSS told me later she was out buying a car.

About half the people bring their boyfriend to see the apartment, too. “Is he moving in with you?” I ask the girl who’s on DSS and she always tells me No. One girl’s boyfriend grabbed an extra rental application and a pen so his girlfriend’s fussy 2-year-old would have something to scribble on. One girl came with her mother and got confrontational when I asked her to fill out an application. The first DSS client I got came with her mother and they didn’t understand why they couldn’t walk through the apartment while I was waiting for the lead test to pass, so they began stalking me, showing up at odd hours to intimidate me. Before the girl moved in, there were notes left at her door by a boy who expected to crash there. One woman claiming to be on DSS said she had three children who weren’t living with her but that the apartment was just for her. She put down half the security deposit. I got two calls from her case worker, the first one saying she would be getting her rent paid by DSS, the second one saying it was a mistake and it turned out the woman owned a house somewhere. When I told the woman to come back and get her partial security deposit refunded, she began to threaten me, saying the money belonged to her boyfriend and he was going to beat me up. She threatened to sue me and she called the police on me, telling them I had taken the money under false pretenses, and she reported me to child welfare to retaliate because I hadn’t approved her application.

My favorite applicants are the ones who report their profession as “dancer.” One girl came to see the apartment with a cane; she was supposedly on SSD and DSS. I walked around the corner to see her holding her cane in one hand and kicking the door hard enough to rattle the frame. Her references were other “dancers” who lived in Florida. I made the mistake of renting to one dancer whose boyfriend was a lawyer, albeit a shabby one, who wound up representing her at her eviction. She got on DSS back when they issued payments directly to the client, and the second month realized her rent could be paid, or not, at her discretion. After she was evicted, she brought a big tough girlfriend to try to knock me over for the security deposit and they assaulted me in my parking lot.

They were disappointed because I don’t carry cash on me, and one of my tenants looking out the window called police even though the two girls vandalized my cell phone.

In retrospect, I think the stripper mentality is pretty common to local legislators, Rochester City Court judges and legal aid attorneys, because they all must look at landlords the same way: like we’re a bunch of walking ATMs waiting to get knocked over for instant cash.

What Budget?!?

We have a competent mayor in Thomas S. Richards, who worked for over 20 years as a civil litigator and in management at RG&E before taking public office. Let me begin by saying he has my full confidence and support in his leadership role, and I completely agree with his assessment that we need a “complete financial overhaul” of our budget. Let’s begin by cutting the salaries of the misguided children we’ve got masquerading as our City Court Judges.

Just kidding, today’s post isn’t really about that. It’s about money coming in to our city from a national charity, The Untied Wig. Last week, after I called my contact at that council that helps landlords and tenants alike, I called the charity that publicly funds them to get their budget cut. I must say I’m pretty annoyed that a bunch of people are paid to sit in chairs someplace waiting for me to call so they can give me bogus and outdated information. And just think, they’ve done it for at least the past four years that I’ve been a landlord. I’d rather have no information at all. Wouldn’t you? And it would be such a waste of taxpayer dollars, wherever they come from. So I called up the people at The Untied Wig to complain. I talked to a wonderful woman with the sweetest disposition who is also paid, let’s face it, to warm a chair. And when she answered the phone, I thought I’d called Disneyland.

Glinda the good witch was so helpful and encouraging. A great listener, I must say; I got a lot off my chest. She offered me all sorts of contacts, and she even told me about 2-1-1 and 3-1-1. She gave me enough phone numbers to keep me chasing Toto’s tail for an entire month. Just click your heels together three times and repeat: There’s no place like home!

She didn’t tell me when the Wig was planning to review the objectives this Council was supposed to meet so they could decide whether THEIR budget should be cut, but I learned that The Untied Wig also funds Legal Aid. Wow. It took about 24 hours for my head to stop spinning, but I managed to get her assistant on the phone the next day.

“You wouldn’t fund cock-fights and dogfights,” I said, “so why are you funding two sides to fight against each other in City Court?” I guess the Wig has more money than sense, enough money to play havoc with our local economy.

So really, the purpose of today’s post is to help Mayor Richards with his budget overhaul. The problem with accepting funds from a national charity is that they mess up the budget. When you go begging for any reason, there’s no way to predict what you will get, so you can’t draw up a budget. It’s as simple as that. You can’t control your spending when you can’t draw up a budget.

Get that untied wig the hell out of our city! If we can’t pay Legal Aid attorneys enough to represent deadbeat tenants out of our own tax dollars, maybe they ought to start paying rent. (God bless you, Mayor Richards, I hope you’re reading this.)

Illegal Tenancy

I stood in court February 3rd with my original water bill, tangible proof of the huge overages I had reason to believe were caused by the activities of the tenant I was trying to evict.

Rochester City Court Judges have a good argument if they choose to vocalize in English, or coherent language of some sort: “You can’t prove this tenant, who lives in a multi-unit building, ran up the water bill.”

Fair enough. But every commercial rental outfit knows the price of a unit goes up by $50 per month for each additional adult who signs the lease, and DSS will cut off a tenant who lets another adult move in with them because it’s misuse of Welfare funds. And landlords will report that, too, because the costs associated with illegal tenancy are real and damaging.

My tenant had let her boyfriend move in with her, and he told me to my face that he had been living there for 15 months without his name on the Lease and that his girlfriend shouldn’t have to pay her late fee. Fifty dollars per month may not be EXACTLY what the water bill overage costs, but it’s the accepted token fee that represents additional wear and tear and other costs resulting from the illegal tenant staying in the apartment.

I always offer to read the Lease out loud to every tenant prior to him or her signing and taking possession of a unit because the Lease is supposed to be a binding legal contract, and the following specific clauses are included in a Standard Lease Agreement for the purpose of defraying real costs incurred by a Landlord through misuse of the premises:

Paragraph 5 “The Tenant shall be jointly and severally liable for payments of Base Rent, any Additional Rent (which may include water usage surcharges for additional guests or tenants not listed in this Lease), and any other fees arising under this agreement.”

Paragraph 6: “Tenant shall pay, when due, charges for services for gas, electricity, or other utility services furnished to Leased Premises deemed to be in excess of reasonable use.”

Paragraph 8: “Landlord may apply the Security Deposit to any unpaid rent and/or late fees, unpaid utility charges, and the expense of cleaning or repairing the Leased Premises as permitted by law.”

The Legal Aid attorney, whose salary was paid by a national charity undermining the local economy, told me, “The tenant has a right to have someone live with her if she wants to.” That was a discussion we should have offered up before any reasonable judge, because she’s right, but only if the other person living there is on the Lease.

Judge Crime, getting in touch with his inner Neanderthal, refused to consider either my testimony or these basic facts in his judgment when considering the cost of my water bill overage, which was $305.54, just for water, NOT additional wear and tear. If I had charged her the appropriate illegal tenant fee of $50 per month, she would have been liable for $750, about $200 more than her security deposit. (Someone dear to that man should buy him a thighbone he can hit the desk with instead of a gavel.)

As I left the courtroom that day, I heard the Legal Aid attorney continuing a discussion with Judge Crime about me and/or my case that she appeared to have started before I got there.

There are laws against insider trading in this country. With the poor wretched logic this Legal Aid attorney employed “protecting” her erstwhile client’s “right” not to pay rent, she was clearly relying heavily on prejudicial advantages of casual routine relationship with the judges. It must grow increasingly easier with every passing year for them to see landlords as an endless parade of buffoons. Ha ha. Here comes another one, stupid enough to pay a filing fee and think that he or she has a crack at a just and reasonable hearing in Rochester City Court.

Setting a bad precedent

It was on the morning news. The figures came in, home ownership has dropped nationwide to nearly 65% and The Boston Globe expects it to fall below 60% by 2020. Meanwhile, nearly everywhere in downtown Rochester, new houses are being built. Who can afford to buy, and live in, these buildings? No one. My friend who does building maintenance tells me they’re for DSS and Section 8 tenants. When I started landlording, I was told to prepare my apartments for DSS inspections because Welfare always pays the rent on time. Even back then, I felt a little funny about that arrangement. When all your friends are vampires, what do you eat?

Maybe that’s why Judge Crime is convinced that he and his minions are so noble. It’s easy to think of landlords as a bunch of vampires bleeding the system dry, the end recipients of seemingly endless bags of welfare money. The guy who sold me my building said, “I only rent to cash tenants.” Back then, everyone had a car, the parking lot was full. While I must say I discriminate when I rent, there’s only one criteria I use. Will the tenant’s rent be paid on time every month and are they willing to put down a cash security deposit? That may be reasonable, but I’m still a vampire, and I still get harassed and accused of discrimination. I was verbally abused by a legal aid attorney in Landlord Tenant court back on February 3rd for suggesting a tenant should help out with the excessive water bill because her boyfriend had moved in with her at the beginning of her lease term and told me so to my face just prior to my filing papers to evict them.

“You’re trying to control what other people do in their bathroom!” said this heavyset woman with close-cropped brunette hair.

“Not unless they’re going to make me pay for it!” I shot back.

“You have no case,” she said. “Are you going to drop it?”

“Of course not,” I told the legal aid attorney. “Do your worst!”

And she had already been doing her worst. Her salary is paid by a national charity, and she and the other legal aid attorneys schmooze with the judges all day long at City Court, five days a week. When the rest of us come in and try to conduct legitimate business, we see judges like Stormy Thomas making eyes at a panel of lawyers. We are more entertaining than second-run movies because we pay filing fees to perform for them, and the judges sit and snigger at us, while the junior lawyers are all peeing on their shoes trying to make sure they laugh along with the omnipotent man in the robe.

Two years ago I appeared before Judge THAT Girl trying to evict a shop owner who had been stringing me along for six months. I had a legitimate complaint and she smiled seductively and dismissed me because I put the guy’s home address on the papers I filed. Another judge dismissed my legitimate complaint because I had served the tenant properly but not on the premises. I was a good sport about losing those cases and the money I paid to file them because hey, I haven’t been to law school. But on February 3rd when I went up before the judge, I had everything filed correctly and I had served the tenant correctly, and I explained my complaint to Judge Crime in a straightforward way. And he listened.

“GLAAAARRRRGHH, case dismissed!” he hollered. It wasn’t language, the noise he made wasn’t even human, but that was the judgment. I couldn’t argue with that. Nonetheless, I didn’t know how I had lost the case and Judge Crime wasn’t going to tell me. I turned around and fled the courtroom. The tenant won the right to stay in my apartment.

Forget about collecting judgments against tenants for the money they owe, you’ll be chasing them for years. The time to get the award is when you’ve still got something they need, the roof over their head. Unfortunately, the Rochester City Court judges don’t feel that’s worth any money. If you’re a landlord, you’re a swindler, the ultimate welfare cheat. They make it difficult for you to own property and yet they insist you pay property taxes on it.

There comes a day in the life of every DSS tenant when Welfare stops paying their rent. Likewise, we may only be getting one-third the money we feel we’re entitled to from Albany, but come on. Isn’t there a more intelligent way to handle the resources we have so we all don’t have to go begging every year? Mayor Richards gave his first State of the City address yesterday, saying that “the city can’t tax or develop its way out of the structural imbalances it faces” (Christine Carrie Fien, The City Newspaper). Certainly not, with City Court judges who shit where they eat.

and [and]

A Rochester landlord swindled in court… again.

What you are about to read will outrage you. And it’s all true. Names have been changed to protect perpetrators and those with small children. My name is Valerie K. Lazarus, and I moved to Rochester in 2007 to go to school. Houses here are cheaper than dirt, and after looking at the cost of renting a dorm room, I chose to buy a multi-unit building and live in one of the apartments. It took me 20 years to get my bachelor’s degree, so I look at student housing as an investment, and after trying to get Powerpoint work here, I was glad I had landlording to fall back on as a source of income. I didn’t have a problem finding work, my problem was getting paid for it. As a last resort I went to Rochester City Small Claims Court, where Judge Crime ruled in favor of the businessman who hired me then changed his mind after I put in 8 hours on his project. Landlording is expensive and requires maintenance, but the hours are flexible enough for me to have another occupation on the side which I can’t quit. The second job also requires maintenance, is expensive and doesn’t pay me one red cent. I’m a full-time volunteer mother.

Landlording when it’s done right involves a binding legal contract called a Lease which is designed to make income relatively predictable. When you own a building you need predictable income so you can pay expenses like property taxes, insurance, the water bill, the garbage removal bill, plus you need to fix furnaces every winter, replace large appliances and fix windows, pipes and holes in walls. You might even need to put on a new roof or pay for other disasters that come up while keeping a roof over your own head and food on your table. Everyone who has ever been a tenant knows they must put down a cash security deposit before the landlord lets them move in. This deposit equals one month’s rent though ideally it should be two months’ rent for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. Landlords who know what they’re doing charge a late fee religiously if the rent isn’t paid by the fifth of the month. The late fee, generally $50, is really not enough to cover costs late-paying tenants run up, which I’ll explain in a moment. And finally, the lease requires the tenant to give 30 days notice before moving out, again so that income will be predictable enough for the landlord to pay other bills. A standard lease holds a tenant responsible for running up the water bill if someone is living in their apartment who isn’t on the lease and gives the landlord the right to remove them promptly for objectionable or destructive behavior. Let me stress that if income cannot be expected to cover costs for any reason, the landlord cannot pay expenses, which include maintenance of the building and property taxes.

I was not good at landlording when I started. I was a poor judge of character. I ran up debts evicting tenants who didn’t feel like paying their rent or were objectionable and destructive. There is a Council in the city designed to give landlords (and tenants) helpful advice, and as soon as I started going to them for advice I learned (in fact, I was told outright) to take everything they said with a grain of salt, so to speak. They cannot give legal advice, and they charge $30 for forms. The first few times I evicted tenants, I had to do it more than once because the process is complicated. I went to my neighborhood copy center on one of these occasions and found a sad hand printed note left behind on the copy machine from a local landlord who apparently could no longer pay his taxes and did not have medical insurance, begging for help from the Department of Social Services. I heard horror stories from other landlords about welfare tenants destroying their buildings and DSS refusing to pay for damages. Most of them had gotten out of the business. And I saw houses up and down my street abandoned, one by one, including my next door neighbor’s house. I knew her for a while and was surprised to find out she was a landlord, too. I was fortunate to be introduced to a maintenance man by my realtor four years ago, who was also a property manager. Today he struggles for paying work because the landlords he meets have agreements with their tenants that they won’t fix the buildings while the tenant lives rent-free until the building is sold. This is how it works in quite a few slums on the west side of the city just north of 490. Before my realtor skipped town, he told me how people from other states and other countries would buy the cheap houses in Rochester and then let them fall apart. I went to my church bishop several times for assistance, and he would always shake his head. “I can’t feel bad for you when you own property,” he would say, before telling me about a gas station that was hiring out in Victor. Finally my church put me on the dole, and I was able to get free food so my daughter and I could eat.

After I gave up looking for paying work, I was surprised to see Judge Crime in landlord tenant court. He and the other judges were chummy with the legal aid attorneys, whose salaries are paid by the same charity that funds the Council landlords go to. They seek out the tenants and offer to represent them against landlords for free. After a year or two, I was persuaded to go to the Council’s workshop for landlords. They had an attorney volunteer his time, and he spoke flippantly and superficially about practices and court rules and judges. It appeared the other landlords in the room were attempting to take everything he said as gospel, but I had already appeared before almost every judge he mentioned and my experience had been quite different. I had to restrain myself from arguing outright with this attorney, who was giving misleading and dangerous advice. As months went by, the legal aid attorneys became more aggressive, making specific wording necessary for a landlord to enforce late fees in the lease. Judges scoff at a landlord’s demand to be reimbursed for a water bill, and at the very idea of a landlord charging a security deposit, which tenants are routinely allowed to use as last month’s rent due to the month’s notice the landlord always has to give. Most recently, the legal aid attorneys have convinced judges to disregard leases converting to month-to-month upon their expiration, which means the landlord can no longer get a five-day eviction for nonpayment of rent or objectionable tenancy but has to wait until the next month, so a landlord can lose out on up to two months’ rent. Eviction procedure in Rochester City Court is now pot luck for landlords, with tenants living virtually rent-free. Ironically, these judges’ salaries are paid for by property taxes the landlords struggle to pay.

The worst part for me as a landlord is that recently my former tenants have been hauling me into Small Claims Court for their security deposits. The judge told the first one outright that she could not expect to get her security deposit back after living in my building a month without paying rent, but he laughed at my counterclaim for her late fees as though I was not entitled to reimbursement for evicting her for nonpayment. Most recently, however, a judge ruled that a tenant I tried to evict for nonpayment (among other reasons) was entitled to her security deposit back and had not caused any damage to my building. Her memorandum states: “Claimant proved her claim by a fair preponderance of the material, relevant and credible evidence.” I had documentation with me in the courtroom and a material witness who had done the repairs, while the tenant basically stated “I took pictures but I don’t have them here,” and that was her proof. I had been evicting the tenant because she ran my water bill up from $80 per quarter to $200 per quarter, and I testified before the judge that I could tell it was her based on the repairs we had to make to her bathroom that none of the other tenants needed, including warped plastic and melting paint on walls. Her boyfriend admitted to my face that he had lived there since she moved in though he was not on the lease, plus it was discovered that she had been running a daycare out of her apartment. The judge heard all this, but she could have ruled simply on the basis that the tenant refused to give me 30 days notice that she was moving out. So the bottom line is, I lost February rent which the claimant did not pay, the money I paid for repairs and the water bill she ran up with her boyfriend, and now there’s a judgment against me for her security deposit. Think this ruling is a fluke? Think again. Four months ago I was sued in small claims court by two people whom I did not know who sublet without my knowledge from a leased tenant, ripped carpets out of the unit and then claimed I owed them money for repairs. I had proof and a witness and the judge refused to hear me because I had not filed a counterclaim, then ruled in their favor. How am I supposed to pay damages to all these no-accounts who drain the system, when I am the one who is repeatedly damaged by poor judgment in the Hall of Justice?

Judge Crime and his honorable henchmen in the Rochester City Court are destroying this city through their ignorance and their refusal to uphold the law. A tenant must pay rent. A landlord is entitled to collect rent EVERY month, and to prompt evictions of objectionable and destructive tenants. Prompt means within 5 days, period. A tenant’s hearsay testimony is not gospel, they are capable of lying and should be subject to the same requirement of tangible proof as everyone else. The Department of Social Services must begin paying landlords first month’s rent, last month’s rent and security for all DSS tenants moving into an apartment instead of paying twice the housing cost to shelters out of Rochester homeowners’ property taxes. And finally, a Lease is a binding legal contract and should be treated as such. If these judges don’t understand what that means, they must step down immediately or be reprimanded and take a cut in pay. And forget about mis-educating landlords: all Rochester City Court judges must now be subject to a public remedial workshop so they can learn about rental agreements, why landlords charge security deposits and late fees and why said fees must be upheld. If these measures are not taken, we will all get the city we deserve, full of abandoned houses, no law enforcement and schools that can’t be paid for.