I know I’m home when the familiar urine smell welcomes me as I enter my apartment lobby. And though such a greeting may be atrocious elsewhere, in Westwood it’s nothing but ordinary.
Today in Westwood, students are living in apartments facing myriad problems that need to be ““ and can be ““ changed. But such can only be changed if we proactively and persistently address maintenance problems to managers in addition to being responsible tenants.
After all, regarding the urine smell, are the students who peed there to blame or is it the management’s responsibility to clean up the mess?
For students, skyrocketing rental rates only taunt us, where we succumb to Westwood’s real estate monopoly in order to live close to campus.
As I entered a random apartment in Westwood, the lobby seemed pretty decent. But looks can be deceiving.
“The complex as a whole is in pretty bad shape. There are holes in walls, (and) the elevator’s usually broken,” Jesse Curran, a third-year biology student said.
Curran also said that when he first moved in, there was “stuff on the ceiling” and the bathrooms were moldy.
Another resident who lived in the building, third-year psychobiology student Roger Liu, told me that his apartment manager actually reassigned his apartment unit two weeks prior to their move-in date without his consent.
As he gave me a tour of the unit, with its ancient kitchen stove with a broken burner, he told me how the broken kitchen drawer was filed for repairs back in winter quarter but has yet to be fixed.
“The biggest problems we find are failures to make adequate repairs, … particularly given the high rents,” said Elizabeth Kemper, director of UCLA Student Legal Services.
But to be fair, managing apartments in Westwood is no piece of cake, according to Nina Javdani, an apartment manager in Westwood.
According to Javdani, 80 percent of her residents stay in the building for only one year, compared to traditional apartment tenants that stay for longer periods. The high turnover rate leaves little incentive for students to take care of the building, resulting in more damages.
“There are too many move-ins and outs per year and leasings. There’s not enough time (for the numerous repairs). There’s too much pressure on managers around here,” Javdani said.
So in some ways we have to point fingers at ourselves. Some students who noted these problems admitted that they did not persistently request repair orders.
“I think that’s the thing with students. They say that it’s not a big deal,” said Toni Nguyen, a third-year undeclared student.
But yes, these issues are a big deal, especially since landlords have a legal obligation to make units habitable places to live, according to Kemper.
And it is our responsibility as legal tenants to remedy these problems by following Kemper’s advice, such as reading the lease agreements carefully and documenting crucial exchanges with managers about any apartment-related issues.
But most importantly, we can proactively seek outside services such as Student Legal Services to interfere with the management if problems are not resolved.
“A lot of students don’t realize what a real apartment should be and what you should be getting for your money. Only in retrospect (do) you realize that you were screwed,” Liu said.
This forced Liu to search south of Wilshire for next year’s lease, which many find isn’t as expensive as the North Village.
“Ninety percent of students (who come into the Community Housing Office) say they want to live near campus,” said Hilary Crocker, supervisor of UCLA Community Housing. “The demand for space is so high. It’s kind of a market situation,” Crocker said.
But while proximity is important, being deprived of hot water pipes and working phone lines because we want to stay close to campus is ridiculous.
Instead of shrugging the status quo, we can stop Westwood’s real-estate tyranny by actively taking a stand to obtain our hot water pipes and working phone lines and by taking care to keep apartments liveable.
And hopefully there will come a day when urine smells in apartment lobbies will be a thing of the past.
If you have a lobby butler, e-mail Yoo at jyoo@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.