College Green, Iowa City, Iowa, 1999
My first residence out of college was a single-room sublet with a communal bathroom and kitchen in a giant old house. My roommates and I were in a band and we recorded an album in the attic. I was underemployed, temperatures hit record highs, and I was in the midst of a protracted, summer-long breakup with my college girlfriend. Of course I have fond memories of the place.

Any elisions in this timeline represent long stretches without unpleasant interactions with landlords, and uneventful tenancies make boring stories. I rented many apartments throughout Iowa City and Chicago before my first full-scale landlord-induced meltdown, which set into motion a series of motifs I’d revisit over the next eight years:

1. The Initially Nice but Later Incompetent and/or Crooked Landlord;
2. The Lost Forwarding Address;
3. The Unhinged Phone Call and/or Letter;
4. The Fuck-Off Money;
5. The Admittedly Unwise Decisions on My Part; and
6. The Ineffectual Legal Half-Measure.

Northeast, Minneapolis, Minn., 2005-2006
Shortly after I was accepted to grad school in Minneapolis, I rented a place sight-unseen via email; an alum of my program needed a roommate. Our apartment was the ground-floor unit in a large, extremely neglected house. We were burgled once (the back door was rickety enough that the culprits simply forced it open); the shower was a cold trickle, the bathroom floor was missing tiles, and there was a two-inch gap between the window pane and the frame in my bedroom window.

Our landlord was a single mother who lived on the second floor and was working on a Ph.D. in American or maybe Gender Studies. She was sweet, but when we asked her to fix the shower or the windows she told us she’d “already done everything [she] could” (Motif #1). I will call her Martha Nussbaum, despite my affection for her namesake’s work.

When we moved out, Martha called us to say she’d lost our forwarding addresses (Motif #2), that she was withholding our deposit, and that we owed her even more money to fix up damage to the apartment (damage that had undoubtedly been there for years before we moved in). We each sent her letters pointing out that because more than 21 days had passed since we moved out, she actually owed us our full deposit plus late fees, according to state law. Martha responded with Motif #3, sending us each extremely long letters (mine was seven single-spaced pages) enumerating the ways in which we were terrible people, had ruined her heretofore pristine property, and had put her daughter’s life at risk by allowing our apartment to be burgled. With mine, she enclosed a check for $7, the fuck-off money she’d decided I deserved according to her mysterious calculations (#4). I never cashed it.

Yes, it’s possible that we could have cleaned the place better when we moved out (#5), though with such derelict properties it’s hard to tell where mess ends and decrepitude begins. I can’t claim complete faultlessness, but, in a dynamic that has become unsettlingly familiar over the years, there is a great leap between me neglecting to take care of some basic tenant-maintenance matters and an adult, in some cases decades older than I am, maligning my character and screaming at me.

I went to the University of Minnesota’s free legal-advice service and met with a woman who told me I had a pretty strong case. She called Martha and, after getting an earful, got her to agree to giving me $55 (#4 revisited), which she never paid. In retrospect, I should have just taken her to court (#6).

Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Minn., 2009-2010
This was a tiny unit in an old brick building in a nice part of town, which justified the relatively high rent for closet-sized kitchens and a sinking foundation. The superintendent was a man whose actual name was Michael Jackson. The unit I moved into had been painted garish colors, so Mike kindly bought me paint and my girlfriend and I had a grand old time painting the rooms together.

Mike was nice enough, but after a few months started offering the tenants deals where we could get rent reductions if we paid him in cash (Motif #1). I foolishly took him up on this offer (#5) until I began having qualms, which was also around the time the landlord (whom I’ll call Bill O’Reilly, for reasons which will soon become apparent) found out about the scheme, fired him, and replaced him with an affable hipster who was probably younger than me.

After I moved out and three weeks went by without any returned deposit, I called Bill. He told me that the new super had never given him my forwarding address (#2), then told me I was “a nice enough tenant but a horseshit painter,” and that he was withholding funds for re-painting. I’d left the walls as they were because the super hadn’t raised any objections about them during our walk-through. If anything, I felt like I’d done Bill a favor since my colors were much more palatable than the previous tenant’s.

I pointed out to Bill that none of that really mattered, deposit-wise, since it had been more than 21 days since I’d moved out and that he now owed me my full deposit, plus a fee, etc. I even cited the Minnesota state Tenant’s Bill of Rights, a pamphlet I’d picked up during my Ineffectual Legal Half-Measures with Martha, hoping to give my words a patina of formality.

This was a mistake. Bill, screaming now, told me that “that Bill of Rights is a bunch of liberal bullshit [I] can cram up [my] ass,” and that “[I] could go ahead and take [him] to court, because [he] wins those cases 99 out of 100 times.” He then hung up, preventing me from asking him why he’s been to court 100 times.

I sent Bill a letter officially asking for my deposit back, plus fees, or I’d take him to small-claims court. He wrote back, calmer now, and despite his early confidence in a courtroom victory, suggested that surely there must be an amicable solution. He offered me about $300, which was too much to be fuck-off money but still considerably less than my deposit. And, in keeping with Motif #6, I accepted, because conflict makes me physically ill and I just wanted to be done with Bill.

Hamline-Midway, Saint Paul, Minn., 2012-2013
After Amanda and I got married last summer, we wanted to rent a house where we could have a dog. Unable to find such a place in Minneapolis within our price range, we did the unthinkable and moved to Saint Paul. To certain partisans of either Twin City, moving to the Other One is an act of betrayal tantamount to going from Mac to PC or voting for the Other Party. We had our doubts about crossing over, but we were reasonably happy with our surroundings, and any misgivings we have for our Saint Paul spell have nothing to do with the city and everything to do with our landlord.

Our new landlord lived literally across the alley from us; for reasons we never deduced, he’d moved his family into a new house one hundred feet to the south and was renting out his old one. He was a personal-injury lawyer, so let’s call him Robert Kardashian. Robert loved us at first; he told told us we were ideal tenants. We told him we had a cat and wanted to get a dog; he said he’d allow pets with a pet deposit. When we sat down to sign the lease, our first red flags went up: he wanted a pet fee—not a deposit—of $50 a month, per pet, non-refundable. This would amount to an additional $1,200 if we lived there for a year, kept our cat, and got a dog. We signed the lease anyway (Motif #5), and he said perhaps we could renegotiate the pet fee when and if we adopted a dog. We were charmed enough to believe him.

Robert was often visible through our rear window, since the lease he’d drawn up allowed him to continue gardening in the backyard and using his/our garage. He already felt too close for comfort, and we couldn’t help feeling like he was ripping us off. Our conversations with him were amiable but strained; he had a way of hijacking any discussion by free-associating aloud at great length before finally delivering his bad news or nonsensical ultimatum. When we informed him we were planning to adopt a rescue dog and asked if he was still willing to renegotiate the pet fee, he held forth about how he was already doing us a favor because he’d researched the rental market and should be charging far more for rent, and wished we didn’t have any pets at all (both things he should have expressed before we ever signed a lease), before finally announcing that we still had to pay an additional $50 a month. A simple “no” would have sufficed.

This additional $100 a month on top of our already steep rent, and our burgeoning resentment toward Robert, is what truly catalyzed our decision to begin the house-hunting process. We figured it would probably be at least a year before we even found, much less closed on, a place we liked. Instead, thanks to an amazing realtor and a favorable market, we found a newly renovated house back in Minneapolis almost immediately. We talked to Robert about leaving the lease early, and he agreed to let us if we found new tenants, which we immediately did. We confirmed our closing date with our realtor and informed Robert of our move-out date.

But of course nothing was ever that simple with Robert. The amended lease was accompanied by a letter that began in very officious legalese before lapsing into run-on sentences about news stories he’d heard regarding widespread delays in closing dates due to irregularities in the housing market.

(Robert’s correspondence, like his speech, throbbed with first-draft sloppiness; I had to read his letters multiple times to decoct their meaning. His sudden shifts from the elevated diction of his profession to informal and meandering non-sequiturs made his correspondence sound like it had been written by a Yale 1L on peyote. I feel sorry for his clients.)

The apparent upshot of his letter was that even if our closing date was delayed, we still had to be out of the house, and he would not let us stay a day longer. Okay, boss.

Despite Robert’s expert real-estate analysis and Dickensian ultimatums, we closed on the house with zero delay or hassle. Having learned my lessons with past landlords and internalized all the motifs (or so I thought), I gave Robert our forwarding address in writing. I had the house professionally cleaned. We even agreed to vacate a week early so that Robert could do some maintenance; we thought maybe he’d even refund us that week’s rent. By now we should have known that was a very naïve hope.

Longfellow, Minneapolis, Minn., infinity and beyond
The day after we’d vacated Robert’s house and turned in our keys, he sent us an email dangerously close to embodying Motif #3: a litany of ways in which the house was apparently still a mess, including the memorable phrase “the whole house smells like a cat,” which Amanda and I have adopted as one of those grim one-liners that couples invoke in times of much-needed levity.

Amanda and I freaked out, because, in keeping with Motif #5, I hadn’t done a walk-through after the cleaners left, because I’d had very good experiences with the company in the past. But it was possible they’d missed some things, and I was willing to pay whatever it took to end our tenancy amicably, so I called the cleaning company and arranged for them to return to the house, do a walk-through with Robert, and clean absolutely anything he wanted them to, at our expense. They did so, I paid for it, and we assumed all was resolved. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Exactly 21 days passed before we received a letter from Robert containing our deposit, minus deep deductions for cleaning tasks he’d decided to perform himself. This meant we’d paid for all this cleaning twice: once when the cleaners did it, and once when Robert did it. (He paid himself $40 an hour for rudimentary tasks like wiping off the windowsills; we theorized that because he’d been in the professional sector for thirty years, he thought $40 was now the minimum wage.)

And please don’t forget about the $600 in non-refundable pet fees we’d paid. Robert used $425 of this sum to ostensibly make the house smell less like a cat, which means he pocketed $175. He also took $125 out of our security deposit to change the locks, an unnecessary procedure not covered by damage deposits, according to state law.

In keeping with Motif #6, we decided to challenge Robert on only one point: the $125 for changing the locks. We sent off a very polite letter asking for that sum, and waited. A week later, Motif #4 came hurtling into our mailbox in the form of a lengthy screed (three single-spaced pages, this time) that, in keeping with Robert’s rhetorical style, was one-third legalistic obfuscation and two-thirds hysterical grousing. On the first page he informed us that he wasn’t going to refund us the money for changing the locks because we moved out early, but offered us $27 in fuck-off money. This made no sense, but was airtight logic compared to the next two pages, which were mostly devoted to telling us what disgusting people we were (his actual charge was that we “lack basic hygiene”) because he found some cat litter on the basement floor, and his broken toilet, which remained broken even after he’d come over and “fixed” it, wasn’t flushable. (“It is standard practice to flush a toilet after use” is a sentence he actually typed.)

As I read Robert’s crazy letter, all the other motifs descended on me like angry, estranged relatives. My face grew hot, my stomach contracted, and I became paralyzed with impotent rage. I am not prone to flashes of temper; I don’t scream at people; I’ve never hit someone or threatened to. I don’t belong to a boxing gym or go to a firing range, so I don’t really have any of the stereotypical outlets for my anger. I can only silently fume and then look for legal recourse.

There is a tenant-advocacy organization in Minnesota that provides free advice over the phone. They told me I probably had a strong case, but an in-person consultation would cost $75 an hour. With very little money to begin with, and an uncertain outcome in court, we dead-ended at Motif #6.

At this point you might be experiencing a certain nagging skepticism that usually manifests as two utterances of paternalistic devil’s advocacy: 1. Maybe the author keeps having bad luck with landlords because he’s just not a very responsible tenant; and 2. This guy sounds like he has a real axe to grind and can’t let it go. He should shit or get off the (broken) pot.

Both of these points are fair, to some extent. In response to the first, I will point out that I rented nearly a dozen apartments that aren’t on this list, because everything turned out fine. But in the cases I’ve described here, Motif #5 does apply: There are wiser, more responsible choices I could have made along the way; damage and irregularities I should have documented; sketchy scenarios I should have avoided; walls I should have repainted.

My beef with Martha, Bill, and Robert isn’t so much that they found me at fault: in every instance I acknowledged my errors, and my complaints would still have merit even if I’d done everything perfectly. My exasperation stems from the fact that that, as soon as they were challenged (politely, reasonably), Martha, Bill, and Robert immediately went from 0 to 100 on the Hysterical Childish Behavior Metric, rendering reasonable negotiation impossible. In every instance, I was the younger, ostensibly less empowered party, yet I maintained a dynamic of professional decorum; they were the ones who tipped their hands by having epistolary and telephonic meltdowns that, while undoubtedly genuine, are also strategic: They’ve learned that they can get their way if they just kick and scream enough, derailing the argument and exhausting the other party. What I did wrong or could have done right becomes immaterial.

The International Law of Mansplanatory Fault Finding still dictates, however, that at least one person bang out a comment thusly: “I can’t believe how naïve you were. Here’s what you should have done. ADMONITION THE FIRST …” etc. We see this tendency to second-guess the complainant and side with The Man in everything from customer-service interactions to wrongful arrests. It’s a weird impulse that causes strangers to give violent criminals, financial institutions, and overzealous law enforcement the benefit of the doubt, concluding that because the victim didn’t do everything completely perfectly, his or her grievance is not legitimate.

Not that I consider myself a victim. To do so would be gauche and insulting to actual victims, which brings me to my hypothetical reader’s second point, that I have an axe to grind. Another fair point—after all, the thousands of words I’ve just devoted to Robert certainly suggest as much. But I’ve dwelt on Robert here only in a clumsy attempt to impart a larger cautionary lesson to those patient enough to keep reading: that, even when our axes cry out for so much more grinding, it may be time to give the old grindstone a rest.

I have to choose my battles. I am older and (marginally) wiser than I was earlier in my rental history, and so very, very tired. I didn’t take Robert to court; I didn’t accept his fuck-off money; I didn’t seek any sort of redress or revenge. More tenacious or litigious readers might consider this a failure of character, but I can only speak for my desire to forget the whole incident. Initially, I wanted to keep fighting, hire a lawyer, humiliate Robert. But I could see that my crusade for justice was already stressing Amanda out, even scaring her a little. I apologized and asked her how she could be so calm, why she wasn’t seething like I was. She said that if we didn’t turn our backs on Robert right away, and permanently, he’d gain more ground than he already had. She said she hated Robert so much that she didn’t want to allow him one more second of rent-free metaphysical residence in our heads or home. She said the best revenge was living well, without Robert in our lives. (I was wise to marry someone smarter than I am.)

So weep not for me. My complaints are petty, my axe already ground to slivers. Weep instead for the tenants, great in number and multiplying every day, who live below the poverty line and risk eviction every month; who lack any sort of advocacy or legal representation; who might not be fluent in English, much less legalese; whose education might have stopped in high school; whose access to shelter relies on the mercy of truly corrupt slumlords who make Martha, Bill, and Robert look like Mother Teresa. Owning a home is often a pain in the ass (and I would know), but renting an apartment is a rigged game where the winner is the person who yells the loudest. I feel a hundred times more empowered dealing with a clogged sewer in a home I own than I ever did dealing with Martha, Bill, or Robert. They are bullies, and you can’t truly win against bullies. You can only walk away, and fight the fights that really matter.

Previously: Adventures at the Intersection of Homeownership And Sewage

Jake Mohan is a writer, teacher, and musician who lives in the Twin Cities. He is on Twitter.

Today on “WWYD,” paying your rent, but still seeing the money in your account:

SO. I pay my rent with a check, which I give to the super, who puts them all in an envelope and sends them over to the management office which is another part of town, and they cash them. Usually, they’re pretty quick, although they were stressfully not quick with my deposit (though that is a completely different story), and it usually comes out of my account the next day or within the week. But this month, 10 days pass, and it still hasn’t come out of my account. I’m just about to call and ask what’s up when I get a notice saying my rent is late.

I run into the super the next day and she’s like, “I remember getting your check, and they do this all the time, and I’m sure it’s fine.” So I call the management office, and they tell me their records show I paid on March 1st. I tell them that it hasn’t come out of my account, and the woman at the management office says, “Well, as far as we know, you paid—you’ll have to phone your bank.” I hate using the phone, so I checked my online banking instead, and there is no record of a check coming out of my account on that day at all.

I ran into the super again and told her what happened, because I had given her another check to send them, and she said, “Well, if they said you’ve paid, you’ve paid!”

So my question is, do I have to convince them that I have not paid, or assume some mysterious benefactor has paid it for me? Have I done my due diligence already by telling them it didn’t come out on my end? Because an extra month’s rent in my account would not be unappreciated. — M.

I think the confusing part of this question for me is that you were told by the rental management office that you paid your rent on March 1st, yet you still received a notice from them saying that your rent is late. I would have asked the woman at the management office, “If your records show that I paid on March 1st, why did I receive a notice saying that my rent is late?” There had to be some kind of mixup this month for that to happen.

I know you said you hate getting on the phone, but I’d call up the bank and ask them if the check has been processed, or if there might be a hold on it for any reason. There is probably not a mysterious benefactor at work here. The management office may have received your check, but misplaced it before they could cash it—which could mean they could find it soon and take it to the bank. I would count that rent money in your bank account as good as cashed for now. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how my management company mistakenly sent me a notice saying that I had forgotten to pay rent one month two years ago. They were wrong, but this goes to show you that management companies can make mistakes, and that they’re also willing to pursue payments months and years from now if they think they didn’t get paid.

If having money in your account that you know you can’t spend really bothers you, you could talk to the management office again, lay out the explanation, tell them that you’d like to give them a new check to process if they agree to allow you to call your bank and make a “stop payment” request on the original check that for some reason hasn’t been cashed. If this is an option, I’d also ask if the management company is willing to pay for the stop payment fee, which can be around $20 or more. You’ve done what you’ve could so far—if this is a mistake on their part, they should pay the fee for you.

Email me your WWYD experiences to me with “WWYD” in the subject line. See previous installments.

This weekend, I received a letter from my landlord notifying me that I owed him one month’s rent because apparently, I had forgotten to pay rent one month two years ago. I freaked out, of course, because A) What? I forgot to pay rent? and B) Unexpected bill! and C) No, seriously, how could I forget to pay my rent?

After closely examining two years of rent payments, it turns out that no, I did not forget to pay my rent one month two years ago—my landlord had forgotten to include one of my rent checks in his ledger. I don’t know why he waited two years to tell me this, but after collecting copies of all my rent checks online and presenting all of them to him, the matter was cleared up this afternoon.

I’m not sure if there’s a lesson here besides: Make sure you have easy access to copies of major payments you’ve made somewhere. Thankfully, Chase had electronic copies of two years’ worth of checks online.

When I moved to San Francisco from New York in 2006, I was lucky to have built up a small amount of savings. I’d lived at home for a year after graduating from college, and my poorly paying job in publishing had a surprisingly generous retirement policy. I’d moved simply to have a change in my life, and with several close friends already living in San Francisco, it felt like an obvious choice. Still, I didn’t have a job or an apartment when I arrived. My friend Amanda’s parents generously offered to let me stay at their house for as long as I needed to. At my insistence, I paid them $200 every month in rent. I got a temp job doing admin work at an architecture firm in downtown San Francisco so that I could have some income while searching for a permanent job and an apartment.

Like a lot of temp work, my days weren’t exactly bustling. I spent a lot of time on a freelance job I’d taken on before leaving New York: a page-a-day cat calendar that involved writing something cat-related for every day of the year. It was easy and lovely living with Amanda’s parents, who treated me like the adult child I felt like, but I knew I’d have to find my own place eventually. Still, I hesitated. I felt intimidated by the possibility of living with strangers, which I hadn’t done before. After I’d moved out of my parents’ place in New York, I’d lived in two different apartments, both with my boyfriend. Now I’d up and and left my apartment and my boyfriend back in Brooklyn. It felt lonely.

I was curious about living alone, but didn’t consider pursuing it very seriously. I wasn’t sure it was a good fit for my personality. I also knew enough to realize that San Francisco was hardly any better than New York as far as cost of living. By happenstance, one of the men who worked in the architecture office asked me about my apartment search, and explained that he was planning to leave his one-bedroom in the Castro if I was interested in it. I told him I was sure I couldn’t afford it, but he said I should come by to see the apartment anyway. If I liked it, he’d put me in touch with his landlord. Maybe we could work something out.

I called my brother and told him I was thinking about living alone. “Really?” he responded. “I mean, I would never want to live alone, but I guess some people like it.”

I went to see the apartment on a cold Sunday in December. I met my colleague on his front stoop and we walked in together. He had told me that he’d lived here for 10 years, and was leaving so that he could move into his girlfriend’s place, where he spent all his time anyway.

It showed. As soon as we unlocked the door of the building, we encountered a thick layer of coupon fliers covering the entire entryway like a paper ocean. It appeared to be the buildup of weeks, or maybe months, of mail delivery. He had to shove the front door hard in order to create a path through the coupons wide enough for us to walk through. I followed him up a dusty flight of carpeted stairs and entered the apartment at the top of the landing.

My first impression was that it was horribly depressing. Again, my colleague’s relative absence in his own apartment was obvious. The apartment, a small one-bedroom, looked slightly abandoned. Bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling and a sagging three-legged butcher block sat in a corner of the tiny kitchen like a stout troll. The flooring was stained linoleum in a parquet pattern. Despite this initial bad impression, I also saw nice ceiling fixtures, delicate molding, and design details like a marble mantel (the fireplace had been bricked in) and three big windows spanning one wall of the living room. I am not a handy, fixer-upper type, but despite my worries about the financial and possible psychological strains of living alone, I was interested.

I spoke to the landlord and learned that he wanted to rent it for $1,400 a month—an amount that I squarely could not afford. Amanda’s parents, god bless them, assured me that I could stay at their house for as long as I wanted, and that shouldn’t feel like I had to take the first apartment that came along. I sat down with some friends, who suggested that I should negotiate with the landlord. What could I offer the him in exchange for lowering the rent? We came up with a short list that consisted mostly of variations of

• Avoiding the hassle of posting on Craiglist
• Avoiding the expense of basic improvements like painting, etc.
• Helping with building upkeep (questionable; again—not handy)
• Promising to be a model tenant (desperate; who hasn’t said this?)

I called the landlord back and explained that I really wanted the apartment, but that on my salary ($36,000) there was no way I could afford $1,400 a month. But, I added, if he was willing to rent it to me for less, I would move in as-is. There would be no need to paint or spiff the place up at all. I promised to pay my rent on time every month and be quiet as a dormouse. He asked me what I thought I could afford, and I told him $900 a month. He counter-offered with $1,050, on the understanding, later written into the lease, that in exchange for reduced rent, I would help keep the building tidy. Maybe he was also tired of wading through weeks of coupon detritus.

It didn’t seem like the kind of negotiation that ever would have worked out, but it did. I quickly accepted his offer, high on the thrill of a successful negotiation, even though it was still far more than I’d ever paid in rent. A cadre of friends helped me move in a month later on a sunny Saturday morning. The west facing windows let in tons of light, even on short winter days. And as it turned out, I loved living alone.

Leda Marritz is the Creative Director at DeepRoot Green Infrastructure. She still lives in San Francisco.

I went to school at McGill, which is a very large and largely broke public university in Montreal. McGill boots you out of the dorms after your first year, turning you out in the city to find an apartment on your own. This is a good idea, because you save money and figure out how to do adult things like pay rent and cook for yourself. It’s also a bad idea, because 19-year-olds are idiots.

THE MOVE-IN
My two friends and I went looking for an apartment in the lovely, brownstone-and-park-filled Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood, one neighborhood away from campus, so it would be clear to exactly nobody that we were not much-loathed English-speaking McGill students. The ground-floor apartment we’d found on the McGill website’s classified ads was big but shabby, with a bright blue door and cheap, Soviet-looking wall-to-wall carpeting in a shade somehow dirty brown, dirty gray, and dirty blue, all at once. I often wondered what its original color was. White? Pink? Taupe? All possible. It had a back patio and a yard overgrown with weeds. It cost $1,500 for three bedrooms. (This is unspeakably expensive in Montreal. I lived in two other apartments there, and each was significantly nicer and significantly cheaper. A fair price for this place would have been half that.) 

In Montreal, finder’s fees are both very common and completely illegal, and the tenants in the place before us—three beautiful, intimidating fourth-year management girls—decided to try their luck. Not knowing any better, we paid $500 each, and secured an utter shithole. The girls did not remove the condom wrappers that were under their disgusting couch when they moved out, but they did sell one of my roommates a used bed-frame for about what it must have cost new.

The Plateau neighborhood is in the foothills of Mount Royal. The whole thing is on a steady, mild incline. (Oddly, Montrealers refer to uphill as “north” and downhill as “south,” which is not even accurate, and left me very confused when I moved to San Francisco, in which literally every direction is both uphill and downhill.) Most buildings compensate for this, because it is the 21st century and we are pretty good at building buildings at this point. Ours did not. If you sat in a rolling swivel chair and lifted your legs off the ground, you would slowly roll across the floor until you crashed into a wall.

THE SKYLIGHT
A few months into our lease, a giant chunk of the bathroom ceiling fell onto the bathroom floor. This is not an ideal place for a piece of the bathroom ceiling to be. It took literally months for our landlord to fix, as we called it, our skylight. For the last week or so, a cheerful French handyman with no English worked on the skylight. He would peek his head through the hole while I sat on the toilet. “Bonjour,” I’d say. “Ah, pardon,” he’d say. We had fun.

THE FOOD
We decided to make our living expenses mildly communal. We would each keep our own bank accounts, but all household expenses, including rent, bills, and food, would be split evenly in three parts. For some reason, we also decided that when we went grocery shopping, we would all have to go together. This happened approximately once every six weeks, and the food ran out after maybe five days. One roommate lost weight due to the very unusual problem of unnecessary negligent malnutrition. I gained weight, thanks to subsisting mostly on poutine and Stouffer’s frozen chicken pot pies from the depanneur, or bodega, next door.

THE ROBBERY
Our landlord had a second handyman, whose name was Artur. At one point Artur came by and said he was asked to change the locks. We said sure. He asked us to pay for the locks. We said no, because even as 19-year-old idiots, we were aware that that is the landlord’s responsibility. “I really think you should pay for this lock,” he said. We refused, probably rudely. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.

Two days later, our apartment was robbed. Two laptops were stolen, along with a camera and a passport. We called the police. They gave us a note to give to our professors to get us extensions on any papers we had due, then left. We called the landlord, whose name was Nader and who until this point had seemed an normal absentee landlord, perfectly content to wildly overcharge three teenage idiots for his shithole apartment from afar.

Nader was not normal.

Nader sat down in our living room, on an easy chair only six inches off the ground because, for reasons I have forgotten, it no longer had any legs. We told him what had happened. He threatened to “slit the throat” of the man who had done it. We muttered that we hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Nader stayed to chat, feeling guilty that his asshole handyman had robbed us, I suppose. First he mentioned offhand that he had spent time in Iranian prison. Then his mother called (Nader, I should mention, was at least 45-years-old) to, according to Nader, warn him “not to do anything stupid.” Like slit someone’s throat over a couple of $600 laptops.

We chatted some more. Nader told us, in response to some environmental cause popular in Canada that week, that our whole environmental strategy was wrong. “Earth is water planet, you see. Much more water.”

We agreed that this was true.

“So we should live like the dolphin,” he concluded. Even this, we thought, could be normal, or normal-ish. Maybe he had some thoughts about sustainability and living in tune with the natural world! But Nader meant it literally. “We should build skyscrapers, but under the ocean. And then we will wear backpack with motor to travel between them,” he said. We glanced at each other and quickly agreed this was a very perceptive and forward-thinking plan.

THE HOLE
The water and electricity lines for the three-story building were in a crawlspace under our floor. To access them, you pried up a two-foot-by-four-foot trap door just beyond the second entrance door (Montreal apartments often have two doors, to help keep people sheltered from the ridiculous elements). The trap door, several feet deep, remained open for several days at one point. Several people fell in the hole. I was one of them. It hurt like hell.

THE WINTER
In February, the toughest month in Montreal, where the temperature drops to the point where it no longer matters if you talk in Fahrenheit or Celsius (the two cross at around -40), we had guests, friends of my roommate’s girlfriend from Wellesley. They were politely horrified by our shithole, I think. They slept on our pull-out sofa in the airy, poorly-sealed living room. At some point in the night, both front doors blew completely open. Independently, all three roommates got up, cranked up our personal baseboard electric heaters in our bedrooms, and went back to bed. None of us thought anything unusual was happening—it’s cold, turn the heat up. That happened sometimes.

When we emerged the next morning, we found that the inside of our apartment had reached temperature parity with the outside, and the entry hallway was covered in snow. The guests told us they noticed it was getting very cold, but they never thought to check if a door was open. I think they assumed our shithole apartment would naturally offer no resistance to the brutal weather outside. They were very nice about the whole thing. I never saw any of them again.

THE BILLS
The electricity and heating bills—which in Montreal are often extraordinarily high, as the city is inconveniently located in the god damn arctic—were mildly confusing. Two separate bills came to our apartment. It was unclear why there were two, but one of them was for about $15 per month, and the other was well over $100 in the wintertime. We paid the cheaper one. Why wouldn’t we?

In our last month of residency, Nader told us we owed him some $700. Apparently we were paying the bill for the upstairs apartment, which was unoccupied for pretty much the entire year and only warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We held off paying him for so long, convincing ourselves that if he wanted us to pay the bill that obviously corresponded to our electricity use, he should have told us, that eventually he just told us not to worry about it. I think he still felt bad about the robbery.

THE ARSON
Montreal has very odd renter’s laws. For example, a landlord cannot raise the rent of an apartment without the written permission of the tenant, even if something happened to obviously warrant it (like the installation of a washer/dryer, or a new kitchen). The landlord must politely ask the tenant if the tenant agrees to the proposed rent, and the tenant can just say nope, don’t agree, and then the landlord has to, at his or her own expense, take the case to the Regie du Logement, the housing bureau, and convince them that it is a fair raise. The tenant can just kick back and keep paying the old rent while this mess is going on.

One of the side effects of this heavily tenant-favoring system is that security deposits are not always required. In our shithole, there was no deposit. I was the last one to leave the apartment, and I was by far the biggest idiot of the three of us in terms of cleanliness. I left some unwanted furniture and some food in the apartment, with the back door unlocked, telling my friends who were staying in the city that summer to come by and help themselves. I did not bother cleaning anything, because the place was dirty when we moved in (though not as dirty as I left it). I’m not proud of this. I was an especially big idiot that year.

The next year, I moved into a place in a different part of the Plateau, where the floors were hardwood, the building had security, my bedroom had a lovely fourth-floor view of a park and the mountain, and my rent was, of course, $425. (I live in New York now. It’s hard to talk about Montreal rent without breaking down.) My parents dropped me off at my new apartment and drove around trying to find a parking spot. When they came back, they asked me what happened to my old apartment. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s all charred and burned up!” my mom said.

I took a walk there a week or so later. My mom had exaggerated a little. Certainly there had been a fire. The windows were missing their glass and were now covered with black garbage bags. I took a peek around one of them and saw that the inside of the apartment, while structurally okay, was smoke-damaged and not livable. I asked one of my former neighbors what had happened.

A week or so after I left, the place caught on fire. Suspiciously well-contained fire. Suspiciously not-damaging-or-dangerous fire. The neighbor was convinced the landlord had simply torched the place. If so, he was slow to collect the insurance. It stayed that way for almost a full year.

It’s been about six years since the fire. According to Google Maps, it now looks exactly the same as it did before the fire. Except the door is white now.

Dan Nosowitz lives in Brooklyn and writes words for money, mostly at Popular Science. He has serious opinions about fruit. Illustrations by Charrow

While renting out houses has typically been the province of mom-and-pop landlords, it should come as no surprise that Wall Street wants in. For years, a glut of foreclosures has suppressed home prices even as tighter lending standards and a sluggish economy have kept many buyers away. Banks, meanwhile, still sit on huge “shadow” inventories of foreclosed and abandoned properties, which means fewer places for people to live. The result of all this is a red-hot rental market—primed for speculation.

—MJ’s Josh Harkinson reports that some of the folks who created the subprime mortgage debacle are now scheming to be all of our landlords, whichhhhhhhhhh … will probably not end well, for us. It might end well for them. Things don’t seem to not end well for them.

An American male in Brooklyn walks down the street. He receives a phone call from his landlord; he does not pick up. Moments later, as he is listening to the voice message, he grimaces. His companion raises her eyebrows. He continues listening and grimacing, and then he hangs up. The rent checks were all rejected, he says, so I have to go deal with that. They all bounced, that’s crazy, she says. No, he says, rejected because my handwriting is illegible. Oh, she says. There is a beat. They keep walking.

I don’t get it, she says. He explains: I am in charge of writing the checks in my house, because my flatmates and I are idiots and constantly late with our rent. And it’s not because we didn’t have the money, though that sometimes happened, yes, but because we’d just forget, and be weeks late. And then my landlord would come over and wake us up really early to write him checks.

She cuts in: Wait, that’s it? He didn’t threaten to kick you out? No, he likes us, he says. Sometimes he comes over and hangs out. But after he started to come over really early and wake us up, I just decided to take their checkbooks and write all the checks out together. So now I’m in control of two grown men’s checkbooks. But sometimes the bank can’t read my handwriting, so the checks get rejected, and then I have to rewrite them.

And that is how The American Male In Brooklyn pays rent.

Photo Credit: flickr/rufusowliebat