Miller Dorm, LSU Campus 1997-1998 (I have no idea how much this cost)
Moved from a small town to a university of 40,000 people to live in a room the size of a walk-in closet. Roomed with my best friend from high school. She was obsessed with leopard print. We had leopard print EVERYWHERE including a giant framed painting of a leopard hanging in the center. Our dorm-sized fridge went in my closet and a good amount of my roommate’s clothing. She had a LOT of clothes. She was also in a sorority—along with everyone else in the dorm—except for me.

Varn Villa, Brightside Dr. Baton Rouge, La. 1998-1999, $315 a month (Parents paid half for about 6 months, and then I paid my full share)
First apartment: very exciting! Roomed with another girl from my hometown. All student apartments in Baton Rouge were super-nice. No shared bathrooms or communal washer/dryer units, a fancy pool, and the rent was crazy cheap. I had to get my first off-campus job to pay half the rent which was a much better way to make friends than not being in a sorority. Giant armadillos used to root around in the trash, and guys would sit in lawn chairs with cheap beer and “watch traffic.” Had my first “keg party” to celebrate my 19th birthday. My sister’s 16-year-old boyfriend had to teach us how to tap it.

Brightside Manor, Brightside Dr. Baton Rouge, La. 1999-2000, $285 a month (my half)
Decided Varn Villa was too “expensive” so we moved across the street. Two-story condo. We shared a giant bathroom and there was a half-bath downstairs. It was a pretty gross place as far as girl apartments go. My roommate’s older sister moved in for a while, too. Started waiting tables to make more money so I could go to rock shows every night with my new college radio friends.

Sharlo Townhomes, Baton Rouge, La. 2000 $250 a month (my half)
Moved in with a college radio pal. Super-insanely nice condo. Roommate’s parents had purchased it and set the rent for the girl who had shared with her before me. I don’t think we ever cooked in the kitchen, but we had a couple of great parties including my 21st birthday. Another friend moved in, and roommate’s parents let us just split our half, so we each paid $125 a month. I graduated a semester early, and continued to live here and wait tables. Got kind of depressed and drank a lot of drive-thru daiquiris while “laying out” in the backyard. Wrote the “landlords” a thank you note when I moved out telling them that I knew I wouldn’t live anywhere that nice for a long time, if ever!

Coolidge St., Chapel Hill, N.C. 2001-2004 $362.50 a month (my half)
Moved to Chapel Hill with a close friend from my hometown. We immediately secured our dream jobs, and also got waitressing jobs so we could afford them. We ate a lot of carbs, drank way too much wine, and watched Sex and the City constantly. She moved out, and a college friend moved in. She had an inexplicable habit of leaving coke cans in the driveway, but she cooked incredibly elaborate meals and let me use her internet for free. The weirdest thing that ever happened here was once I woke up on a Sunday morning and a cable guy I hadn’t called for was standing in my bedroom. Never really got to the bottom of that one.

Allard Rd. Chapel Hill, N.C. 2004-2006 $350 a month
My favorite apartment ever. My first time living alone. At the top of a 90-degree hill hidden back in a quiet neighborhood. I only had to pay for my electricity, and the landlords were great. My boyfriend moved back to North Carolina after grad school, and I wouldn’t move in with him, because I wasn’t ready to leave! Watched endless hours of Netflix before a houseguest taught me how to steal cable, and finally joined a gym so I wouldn’t become an alcoholic from drinking alone.

Glenn Lennox, Chapel Hill, N.C. 2006 (the price of rubber gloves and cleanser)
Moved into my boyfriend’s apartment for a couple of weeks before we moved into our first house together. The bathroom was such a disaster, I almost couldn’t go through with it!

Carpenter Fletcher Rd., Durham, N.C. 2006-2008 $450 a month (my half)
A cute little house with zero closets and a truly horrifying bathroom. Came with a huge yard and a cat! The first night we lived there, a snake crawled under the front door and slithered into the TV room. The dog and I calmly watched as my boyfriend killed the snake and had a slight heart attack. The best thing about this house was it was next door to our four closest friends. Oh, and we got engaged & married while we lived here.

Oriole Dr. Durham, N.C. 2008-present
We returned from our honeymoon and immediately began shopping for a house. We looked at 30 houses in two weeks and found our “little old lady ranch house.” Five years and one baby later, it’s still the best! And we got to keep the cat from Carpenter Fletcher!

Christina Rentz lives in Durham, NC with her husband and son. She still has her dream job.

Where have you lived, Julie Buntin?

95th Street between 1st & 2nd Avenue, Upper East Side/East Harlem, $600/mo. (my share), 10 months, 19 years old
The two-story basement apartment was on the invisible line between the UES and East Harlem, bracketed by a housing project on the East River and an Irish bar where I’d lose a good chunk of my sophomore year accepting free drinks from entry-level accountants in rumpled suits. My bedroom was on the first floor, directly by the front door, and it was just barely larger than a barred window I never opened, because it overlooked the building’s trash cans. An unexplainable outcropping jutted from the left wall, narrowing the room further. No closet. I bought a crappy futon from IKEA to try and maximize the space, though once I unfolded it I never folded it back up again, so my room was all bed. Street noise entered unfiltered. I never felt safe there—once I heard a rustling in the trash and stood on my knees on the bed, peeking between the bars, and caught an old dude jerking off aggressively as he stared up at me. My three roommates, whose big bedrooms downstairs cost almost twice as much as mine, were rich and benevolent and full-time students. After class, I worked as a cocktail waitress to pay my rent. At one or two in the morning, I’d sprawl on the floor in the kitchen and eat my free shift meals, weird bar appetizers, potato skins, and salads littered with soggy croutons. I was 19, and budgeting meant divvying up my tips into little envelopes—RENT, FUN, FOOD, EMERGENCIES. One of the girls had an idiotic Bichon Frise that would do anything for a dirty tampon and fell down the stairs so often it stopped being funny. We broke our lease after a big rainstorm, when two feet of water flooded the entire lower floor, drowning wardrobes of their expensive clothes.

47th Street and 2nd Avenue, Turtle Bay or midtown (doldrums) Manhattan, $400/mo., (my half of an $800 room), 11 months, 20 years old
I moved with the girls when their parents helped them find a new place. Like before, I took the smallest room, though this time the room was normal-small. No floods here—we were on the 16th floor of a high-rise in Turtle Bay, with a modern kitchen, two full bathrooms, and central air. The living room was converted into a bedroom (big enough for a king sized bed and then some), which left a tiny windowless alcove for our dining room table. After some frantic number crunching, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford my $800 portion of the rent—I’d barely been scraping by paying $600. I asked a friend, one of the few people I knew in New York who, like me, had no parental support, if she wanted to share my new room—small, but not SO small. We could get bunk beds! $400 a month! She moved in, though we never got those bunk beds. Both of our mattresses were on the floor, so that if one of us rolled over or tossed an arm in her sleep, we’d bump into the other. I started staying at my then-boyfriend’s place a lot—less because of my hampered space than because my new apartment, which was on a floor undergoing construction, soon became overrun with mice and roaches. At night the mice shrieked as they chased each other across the stove. Once I picked a pizza box off the counter, and three tiny roaches shot across the marble surface.

15th Street and 3rd Avenue, Flatiron/Union Square, Nothing? My old rent?, 12 months, 21 years old
Slowly, one backpack full of clothes at a time, I moved into my then-boyfriend D’s studio. One morning I realized I never, ever left, and that by definition, if not by any legal agreement, I lived there, though I continued paying my portion of the rent for my “real” place. The apartment building, on 15th and 3rd, was called Hattan House. No matter how messy D was (absurdly, chaotically, sitcom messy) I’d never seen a roach. He cared little for his surroundings, and the apartment felt resolutely his, so we made do with furniture we recovered from the street. The tiny kitchen, tucked into a corner behind the sleeping area, had no dishwasher or counter space to speak of. The fridge came up to my chin. Two kitchens could easily fit into the walk-in closet. Drifts of his clothes piled up against the walls in there—no matter how I fought, I never managed to have all his clothes clean at any given time. We painted two walls a foresty shade of green, dark and light-swallowing, and another a pollen-y, oppressive gold, so the boxy room caved in on us. We’d live with this miscalculation for over a year. A few months before we moved out, there was a fire on our floor. We woke to smoke drifting in a hazy cloud above the bed. Outside, we watched our neighbor’s windows shatter out, studding the sidewalk with glass. The day we left, I turned on the bathroom light, to say goodbye I suppose, just in time to catch a cockroach the size of my palm idling toward the bathtub drain.

Gay Street, West Village, $1900/mo. (together), 12 months, 22 years old
Gay Street is the shortest street in Manhattan, little more than an alley between Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street, lined with brownstones and ancient carriage houses that were, at the turn of the century, horse stables for the brownstone dwellers on the West Village’s more heavily trafficked byways. Here’s a New York City real estate secret—in 2009, you could rent a fifth floor walk-up on Gay Street for under $2000, if you didn’t mind the stairs, the lack of amenities, and the fact that a litterbox shaped stain on the kitchen floor (that was not much bigger, itself, than a litterbox) released an ammoniac cat piss smell no matter how much you scrubbed and scrubbed. During rainstorms, the odor crescendoed to a hysterical potency. Despite the smell and worse, the crumbling bricks that glazed everything in the apartment with a cancerous dust, the noodles I found stuck to the wall near the stove, the pancaked mouse in the closet alcove, the man passed out in the unlockable foyer with a needle in his arm—I loved that apartment. In the summer, tour guides shouted Gay Street’s history to a gaggle of charmed travelers dozens of feet below my window. I liked to lean over the sill and wave. Who did they think I was? By the summer of 2010, the housing market was on firmer footing, and our landlord raised our rent over $500. I had just graduated from college, and was going straight to graduate school—do not pass go, do not collect a paycheck with benefits, make do with a measly stipend. I cried when we left, in the passenger’s seat of a Moishe’s moving van.

Lorimer Street & Bedford Avenue, on the Greenpoint side of McCarren Park, $2000/mo. (together, my rent subsidized by a part-time job working for his real estate agent mother), 9 months, 23 years old
Moving to Brooklyn would make us feel like a real couple. This time, we signed the lease together—at Gay Street, we’d decided to leave my credit history out of the equation (thanks to some medical stuff, my credit card history is tragic) and I paid his mother by working for her real estate business—helping complete/file paperwork and maintain her social media and web presence. This eased my conscience, and D’s—we kept up this arrangement when we moved to Lorimer Street. As if to prove something to myself, I took on a higher volume of work, proportionate to the uptick in rent, after we moved to BK. This 3rd floor apartment was as charming as Gay Street, in its way—railroad style with a yellow kitchen, deep brown wooden floors, and a tin ceiling in the dining area. The bedroom was separated from D’s office by sliding glass doors, and a filled-in fireplace provided a mantle for books we wanted to showcase. No amenities—no air conditioning unit, no dishwasher, no microwave, and the bathroom was a tiny triangle, clearly added as an afterthought when the row-house was portioned into three apartments. My knees touched the door when I sat on the toilet, and in the summer, the air inside the narrow apartment had the texture of pudding.

Seventh Avenue between 23rd and 24th St, right smack in the middle of Chelsea, 11th floor, FREE, 3 months, 23-24 years old
After it became clear that no place we lived in together would feel real because our relationship would forever be stuck in the desert all serious relationships get mired in when they start too soon and last too long, I left in a cab, with a rolling suitcase and a duffel bag, when D was out of town for the weekend. My friend, who lived in a two-bedroom family-owned movie-fancy apartment in Chelsea, offered to let me stay in the unoccupied second bedroom until I found my own place. He was in and out of the city for the summer, and the apartment was going through renovations—I could earn my keep by cleaning it before decorators dropped by to take measurements and compare paint swatches by the light of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking, literally, all of Manhattan. Whatever, my friend said, in response to me asking over and over if he was sure it was okay. It’s not like anyone’s using it. I could go on and on about how nice this place was—THE GYM, THE ROOF, THE WASHER/DRYER, MY OWN PERSONAL BATHROOM, THE KITCHEN ISLAND WHERE I COOKED ALL THE THINGS—but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate the unreality of the situation is to say that the building’s residents included Penelope Cruz, Bobby Flay, and Lance Bass. I will never in my life live in a place that nice again.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg, $500/mo. (my share), 8 months, 24 years old.
Thanks to my friend, I had a little buffer time to find a new room—which was great, because I had very little buffer in my graduate student checking account, no longer supplemented by my part-time job working for my boyfriend’s mother. I doubled my hours as an office assistant for the graduate program where I was also a student, and started saving. My budget was no more than $600, maybe $700 a month. I preferred not to sign a lease. Though I’d taken strides toward healing my wounded credit score, it was nowhere in the ball park of NYC rental territory. I looked at so many places. One $600 room in Crown Heights was full of bikes (way more bikes than humans) and a weird milky smell and had a ferocious dog that sprang out of a closet and tried to attack me when I was checking out the “extra storage.” An $800 room was the size of a twin bed, and the 2nd Avenue East Village location didn’t make up for the fact that literally everything about 2br place (probably, I swear, no bigger than 250 sq ft TOTAL) was weird—most especially the roommate, who wouldn’t stop stretching. Desperate, I considered answering an ad advertising a room near the LaGuardia airport, for $450 a month. This can only be temporary for anyone, explained the Craigslist post. Then, in a stroke of fortune so good it almost makes me believe in horoscopes, a call for a roommate was posted on my graduate program’s list serv. Tiny room, lots of natural light. $500 a month. It’s so cheap because it’s outside the main apartment, on the landing, with it’s own lock. I went to see it and was sold—the room was again, twin-sized bed small, but the apartment was airy and quirkily decorated, and the girls living there were smart and funny—the kind of people I’d imagined becoming friends with, all those years ago when I pictured my life in New York City. A couple times I locked my keys in the main apartment and had to wait to go to the bathroom for inhumanely long periods of time. Other than that, it was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg. $580 (my share), 10 months, 25 years old
One of my roommates moved out and I was in! Like, literally inside! I took over the baby room near the kitchen, about the same size as the black sheep bedroom in the hall that I’d previously occupied, except this new room had lots of built in closet space and a lofted bed, so I was able to fit a tiny desk (the kind they have in elementary schools) against the wall. The long window spied on our rage-addled Polish neighbor’s equally cranky Pitbull. I slept inches from the ceiling, where all the apartment’s cooking smells accumulated no matter how I tried to air it out. It smells like Italian food, the guy I was then dating said during one failed attempt at a sharing the tiny lofted space—he wound up sleeping on the couch.

Stuyvesant Oval, Stuyvesant Town, East Village, $800/mo., 3 months (and counting!), 25 years old
I fell in love with the guy with the sensitive nose, and when his roommate broke his lease early, I decided to do what worked out so horribly for me the first time, again: Move in with my boyfriend. Here’s the thing. When it works, it works—I hate those girls who say all dreamy-eyed, when you know you know, but if there’s anything I learned from the fiery explosion that was the end of my first serious relationship, it’s how to identify the opposite. In general, I had no interest in moving to Stuyvesant Town. My voyages from apartment to apartment, up and down the length of Manhattan, had, at some point, and almost without me noticing, turned me into a New Yorker—the kind of New Yorker who doesn’t believe Stuytown, with its lush summertime trees casting DAPPLED light all over the sidewalks like some kind of suburban wet dream, is a real city neighborhood. Agree with me or not—Soul Asylum is playing a private concert in the Oval in the coming weeks. That’s not New York, folks. (Then again, that’s precisely New York for countless people.) But my boyfriend’s been living in his place for a long time—since he moved to the city years and years ago, and unlike me—he’s attached. It’s not just an apartment anymore. It’s his home. I’ve grown fond of the separate kitchen, the noisy air conditioner, how quiet it is outside at night. And it’s really, truly rent stabilized. During the recent Stuytown rent hikes, I held my breath for two days, terrified that our rent would be jacked up too, and that we would have to leave. I’ve always had to leave. But this time this home, this life, feels real—it feels like mine.

Julie Buntin lives in New York.

Have you lived in some places? Tell us about them! PICK ONE: logan@thebillfold.com OR mike@thebillfold.com

Where have you lived, Matthew Gordon?

Waterloo, Ontario ($430/mo. for my quarter share)
Three years of student housing to coincide with my last three years of undergrad. We were packed in like sardines and the walls were so thin we could hear the people across the hall sometimes, but it was a ton of fun. The bar fridge in my room doubled as a night table, meaning I could grab a water/pop/beer while reading in bed without having to get up. The main thing I don’t miss is that the kitchen was effectively a wall of the living room, which doubled as the main hallway. I ended up living on one floor of the building one year and then another floor the other two, to move in with a friend who won our battle of wills to see who would be moving where. I moved out a few days before graduation.

Toronto, Ontario ($0/mo.)
Otherwise known as my parents’ house. I was one of those kids who did an arts degree and then promptly moved back home, where I spent the next year. That led to a lot of quality time with the cat. My frenetic schedule consisting mostly of visiting various airports meant I was unable to have a job.

The house was big enough so that I could see my parents when I wanted to, and stay out of their way the rest of the time. Having the subway nearby meant it was easy to get whenever I needed to go, which is crucial considering I don’t drive. I’m glad for the year I had there considering how much I’ve bounced around since, but I’m glad to have been back on my own for a while.

Ithaca, New York ($630/mo. for my half)
I typically seek my place of living based on location and not much else. This cozy two-bedroom apartment I split with a friend was a 10-minute walk to most of my classes and a five-minute walk down a fifty-degree hill to downtown. That meant the closest commercial laundries were only a block uphill, which was great until the hill got caked with ice every winter. The apartment also had an actual kitchen, which was nice for a change. Continued apartment living meant more and more practice cooking with an oven plus even more time away from a barbecue, making me adept with the former and clueless with the latter.

I’ve never been as sad to leave a place behind as I was with this one. As an added kick in the pants, I no longer have an American mailing address, so whenever I want to order something fun online now I have to bug a friend in Michigan. At least I no longer have to beg friends with cars for trips to the grocery store.

Houston, Texas ($0/mo.)
This was the only place on the list without either a roommate or my parents. Also the only place on the list paid for entirely by someone not in my family. (Thanks, corporate employer!) It was the most amazing place I could have imagined, complete with amenities I had no idea I needed until I lived there. I found that he wine cooler went nicely with the wine store down the street. More practically, the washer and dryer meant that for once in my adult life, I wasn’t reliant on having either a university swipe card or a dump truck full of quarters. The apartment backed onto a bar I went to exactly once, which usually resulted in loud talking outside on Tuesday at 1 a.m.

I moved in six days after getting a plate and six screws removed from my broken elbow, which was an ordeal. Thankfully, my godsend of a landlord took me grocery shopping. In my infinite wisdom, I managed to forget where the silverware was for over a month, resulting in having to pilfer plastic cutlery from work. My first day, I ate a frozen dinner for breakfast with a measuring spoon. Getting a $6.29 two-pack of filet mignon was great; eating it with a plastic knife and fork was just awkward. I only had a brutally hot Houston summer in the place, sadly, but my general lack of friends and family in the area made me look forward to going back to school.

Edmonton, Alberta ($762/mo. for my half)
After another year in Ithaca and a month in Toronto, I’m now in the west. Suffice to say I’m pretty much a perma-student at this point. I’m back to dorm living, which means my living situation is 100 percent furnished and right on campus. The approximately $5/mo. utility bill and free internet are nice too. I have no TV for the first time in my life, which racks up bar bills going out to watch games but probably saves money overall.

For those who are unaware, it’s not uncommon for Edmonton to hit negative 40 degrees in the winter—the magical temperature that’s the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. Living in each of Houston and Edmonton over a year-and-a-bit span means I own way too many clothes, most of which had to be lugged by my mom and me in four suitcases plus four carry-ons during the flight from Toronto. I counted it out and I’m pretty sure I can go without buying a shirt until at least 2015. Coincidentally, I’m in Edmonton at least that long.

Matthew Gordon reads way too many books.

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.

Where have you lived, Emma McCullough?

Dürergasse, Vienna, rent included in tuition, 2007
The first place I ever lived that wasn’t a dorm or my parents’ house was a fabulous fifth-floor walkup in Vienna’s sixth district. I was studying abroad for a semester there and, in addition to living in a foreign country for the first time, I was also adjusting to shopping, cooking, and sharing more than just a dorm room with other people. It was the first place I ever really felt like a grown up, and the first place I was ever aware of feeling self-confident and sexy. (My parents paid the rent.)

University housing, Danby Rd., Ithaca, NY, parents paid, 2008-2009
When I came back from studying abroad, I was lucky to be able to move in with three of my closest college friends. The apartment was campus-adjacent and university owned, so it wasn’t anything to write home about, but the living room was huge and there was a gym and laundry room right out the back door. Although I know at the time there was lots of silly college drama, I now look back on this period of life extremely fondly. There was always raw cookie dough in the fridge in case of emergencies, and one of my room mates and I used to take long Friday afternoon naps on the couches in the living room watching E! (the only good cable station we got). Even though I was ready to move on to the next phase of my life by then, we all cried when we moved out.

El Colegio Rd., Santa Barbara, CA. Rent: $800, 2009-2010
When I started thinking about moving to California for my MA/PhD program, I decided I had three non-academic goals: to get a dog, to learn to surf, and to live alone for at least one year. At the time, the third seemed the easiest, but quickly learned that living alone in paradise is prohibitively expensive on a graduate student’s budget. Graduate student housing it was. The apartment was new, modern, and you paid one bill that covered everything, including internet, more TV channels than I’d ever had before, and utilities. This apartment overlooked a soccer field, which meant that the kiddie soccer games served as an early wake up call on Saturday mornings. Actually, it wasn’t the kiddies that were the problem, but their parents.

El Colegio Rd., Santa Barbara, Calif, $850, 2010-2012
Same complex, new room mates, higher rent. One night our kitchen sink sprang a sudden and dramatic leak. When the maintenance man came to fix it, he knew exactly what the problem was and said he fixed at least two or three of the same problem (resulting from cheap caulk) every week. Modern amenities, shoddy construction. During this time I started dating my boyfriend and by the time I moved out I was staying over at his place so often that my room had basically turned into a graveyard of half un-packed overnight bags.

Slavikova Ulice, Prague, Czech Republic, 16,100 czk (about $800US; utilities, but not internet, included), 2012-present
I’m currently on a Fulbright doing my dissertation research in Prague. It’s a magical city and I live in a magical apartment in the Vinohrady neighborhood of Prague. It’s near the center, but not too close that it’s touristy. There are lots of great cafes and restaurants, a really cheap yarn shop, and a big farmers market three days a week, all within about two blocks of my apartment. The whole neighborhood was built around the turn of the 20th century, so I once again find myself living in a fabulous apartment with parquet floors, huge windows, high ceilings, and a fabulous old elevator.

This was the first time I ever had to actually find an apartment on my own, and I’ve finally achieved my goal of living alone for a year (the only one of my grad school goals that has been completed to date, almost four full years in). It”s probably more than I should be spending on rent, but, as a good friend told me, “It’s worth it to eat ramen in a fabulous apartment.” She was right.

When my grant ends in June, I’ll be returning to Santa Barbara and shopping for an apartment with my boyfriend. Already we have different ideas: He is exciting about saving money by living together; I’m looking forward to getting a nicer place by combining what we were each paying already. But we’re each working on lists of our priorities for the new place and I think the fact that we’ve spent the last year 9,000 miles away from each other will make us both more open to compromise.

Emma McCullough lives in Prague.

First House, Portland, Ore.
5-bedroom, 2-bath house,
Mortgage: $731/mo.
Bought: $175,000, May 2004
Sold: $265,000, May 2006
Current Zestimate: $260,000

The housing market was booming and my mom had just inherited some money. She was considering buying an investment property on the east coast. I had just finished my second year of college in Portland, Ore. and was apartment hunting with friends when she suggested we go enter homeownership together. She put up the downpayment, I lived in one bedrooms and rented out the other four (and sometimes also a corner of the basement) to friends to pay the mortgage each month.

This house, built in 1914, was utterly beautiful and full of wonderful memories, and I was so sad to leave it when I graduated. We sold it for a very nice profit (2004! 2006!). My mother got back her whole down payment, and we split the remaining fruits of our investment.

Second House, Troy, NY
5-bedroom, 1.5-bath house
Mortgage: $648/mo.
Bought: $147,000, July 2006
Sold: $137,000, October 2006
Current Zestimate: $62,000

I moved to New York for grad school. Buoyed by the success of my last real estate venture, I used the profit from the previous sale as down payment on a house in town.

Four months later, I decided to quit grad school and move to Florida (love). It was late 2006, and selling a house after six months didn’t seem so crazy! I sold the house at a $15,000 loss.

I sold the house in New York because I didn’t know anyone in the area and was thus extra-daunted by the idea of managing upkeep on a rental house 1,000+ miles away from me. Also, it was late 2006: selling a house after six months didn’t seem so crazy back then, as you’d often make your money back. My mom and I weren’t on great terms right when I moved, either, because she was disappointed in my decision to bail on grad school and New York, so neither of us was excited about co-owning property right then and she kinda wanted her money back.

But: The new owners were made for that house. Sometimes I think I was meant to have it just to hold onto it for them.

Third House, NW Gainesville, Fla.
3-bedroom, 1-bath house with bonus cottage
Mortgage: $1032/mo.
Bought: $160,000, April 2007

I got engaged to the man I moved to Florida to be with, and to celebrate, we went house shopping. Real estate still seemed like a good investment at that time, and we both thought we’d make a killing selling the house in three to four years after graduating—after all, that’s what had happened for me in undergrad. Plus it seemed like the Kind of Thing We Should Do Now That We Were Getting Married, even though we were both grad students with a combined income of about $30,000 per year. Ah, the wild days of the housing boom! I almost miss them.

We got this house—which had a lot of “potential,” as they say in the ads—because we managed to be the first (of hundreds) to respond to the Craigslist ad when it went up.

We spent $12,000 to redo the bathrooms, floors, roof, and walls (the place was built in 1947). Repairs to the plumbing cost us about $10,000 over two years. We also fixed up the and the cottage and rented it out for $550/mo.

We turned the house into something good, but our marriage wasn’t. We split up, and I moved out. It took many, many months for us to agree on an arrangement for the house because he was convinced it was worth a lot more than it was.

Third House, NW Gainesville, Fla., (Again)
3-bedroom, 1-bath house with bonus cottage
Mortgage: $862/mo.
Bought: $129,000, June 2010
Current Zestimate: $117,000

I bought my ex-husband out of the house as part of our divorce. He grumbled about the price, but it was determined by an assessment. He moved out. I moved back in.

I fell in love again and now we live here happily. (He pays me rent.) We still rent out the cottage and are still spending thousands of dollars on repairs every year, but it’s cheaper than the loss I’d take from selling it. Probably. All in all it’s a pretty nice house that doesn’t appear to have any sinkholes on the property. That’s pretty good for Florida.

Jenn That lives in Florida and will not be buying or selling any houses anytime soon.

1. Acton (1), 6 months, £550/mo.
The year is 2003, and two fresh graduates from Southampton roll into London to take it all on. Unfortunately they have no idea what they’re doing, which is why they’ve ended up in Acton, West London. Ten years later, this is still the worst location I’ve lived at in the capital, plus the rent there was more than what I pay now. The flat itself was very nice, but the area was thoroughly charmless and it was just ridiculous to pay £550 per month each. I cringe slightly at admitting that now, but we were new to London, a city that treats its newcomers in a way that makes you understand why it’s nicknamed “The Big Smoke”. My friend and I broke the contract early and have never really spoken about it since.

2. Acton (2), 2 months, £360/mo.
As a temporary arrangement, I moved in with my boyfriend and our other friend in their cream-carpeted semi-detached Victorian facing a very loud road. The rent here was the same as the first Acton flat, but since we split it threeways it was very manageable. The bus stop outside meant you couldn’t watch TV with the windows open though, and everything was beyond walking distance. I was unemployed during these two months and thoroughly miserable. I don’t want to talk about it.

3. Chiswick , 15 months or so
The Acton Three moved up in the world, to a nice flat just next to the Turnham Green tube. It’s pretty pleasant there: There was a lovely chocolate shop that sold lavender truffles, and a coffee shop on the other side of the park. The rent was the same as the previous place, as I’d learned something vital about the London market by this point: Living in a crappy area doesn’t necessarily mean you save on rent. London started to agree with me while I lived in this flat. The porter looking after the block, however, did not; he regularly left notes about drying laundry being visible through the window from the road. I still don’t know what that was about.

4. Dulwich, 1 month
I stayed in temporary dwellings after breaking up with my boyfriend of nearly five years. This marked the move to South London, with its other-side-of-the-river feeling and tricky transport links. I don’t remember much about this place, other than there being a ghost in the master bedroom. We all agreed on this when discussing it in retrospect, but were too fearful to acknowledge its presence while still living in the house.

5. Camberwell, 10 months or so, £450/mo.
This was a spider-infested but otherwise nice basement flat on what was allegedly one of the most burglarized streets in London. Top tip: If anyone you know moves to such a location, please do leave them to their ignorance; we have the Daily Mail if we want to live in paranoia. I think the rent was around £450, which was a bit expensive but okay. Positives to this flat included oak floors and the neighbors’ cat, but the endless bus journeys to get to the tube is the overarching memory, not to mention a general reason never to move back south of the river ever again. Prejudiced, yes, but that’s my opinion.

6. Spitalfields, 10 months, £600/mo.
This little flat marked the wise, wise move to East London. I could see Spitalfields Market from the living room window, a fantastic feature which was strongly reflected in the price, meaning my boyfriend and I were financially unable to take advantage of our new and fancy location. Having said that, paying £600 for this flat would be a steal today; the gentrification is complete and Urban Outfitters has since moved in across the road. I spent a lot of time wandering around buzzy Brick Lane late at night, a consequence of being a night worker, not a street walker—although there were surprisingly many of those there back then. You really don’t want to run into one of them under the fluorescent lights in Tesco at 7 a.m. Every few days, I’d get a bag of fresh bagels, which at 15p a pop from Beigel Bake was budget food. It wasn’t bad at all.

7. Shoreditch, about 18 months or so, £550/mo.
I found this flatshare in a grimy Shoreditch council estate on the Internet while in a daze, brought on by looking for a new job and a new house while also contract-bound to co-exist with my ex in the tiniest flat ever. The fact the ensuing dark-side-of-Shoreditch life worked out as well as it did was a stroke of luck; at £550 the rent even included most bills. The estate kids threw water balloons, sure, but they never managed to hit me, and Shoreditch was the perfect place to live when I was single and needed a crowd on my street to walk through when coming home late at night.

8. Mile End, 10 months, £450/mo.
Really nice flat, this, and the high-speed trains from Essex which brushed up against the wall every 15 minutes provided this interesting suction effect in the air. The rent was discounted because the recession had just hit, and at £450 it was a steal for such a spacious flat, close to both the tube and the park. I lived with a friend who was a cleaning nut, and he deemed my domestic efforts so insufficient that he preferred to do it all himself. It seemed like a good arrangement at first, until his control-freakery leaked into other aspects of our lives and it became absolutely necessary for me to leave. I’d go into detail, but I seem to have blocked out most of it. Safe to say, this is a cautionary tale.

9. Limehouse, 22 months, £420/mo.
This was my longest stay at a London address to date. By this point I’d started to notice how a good flat would invariably reveal an issue to do with plumbing or the other humans and lead to short stays, while the shitty flats tended to result in long stays. This was no exception: The company was good, but the Poplar border-location was terrible and every single household appliance broke while we lived there—some more than once. A constant feature was how the shower would swing rapidly between hot and cold, meaning I can now wash like I’m Roadrunner. It was really cheap though, at just £420 a month, so we put up with it until the rent went up by 20 percent overnight and we left in shock. It was probably for the best.

10. Stoke Newington, 16 months and counting
My favorite house so far: It’s big, it’s full of nice people and touch wood, no major issues have yet to be identified. I mean, the mice moved on almost right away once we got the sonic repellers. If anyone’s curious, I’ve identified the key to houseshare happiness: A mixed group of three to five people, a cleaning rota and a working boiler. I moved to the Stokey-Dalston borderlands after a two-week stay at a friend’s to tide me over the search, which I actually conducted with some care this time. (In hindsight, this may have been the core problem leading to many of the previous duds.) The house is massive but the room is a shoebox; the rent reflects this and consequently I have money left to spend on airfare. I am very happy about this choice. This is also my first North London postcode, meaning I’ve done the circle. To my surprise, I absolutely love it up here. “I may never move again,” she said.

Jessica Furseth is a freelance journalist living in London, U.K. Read more of her writing here.