Letters to the Editor

• Being nice

  [Read the article: My new roommate arrived ... with mom attached!]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  In my first letter on this thread I asked what was wrong with the LW. Why did she not make friends with these people instead of bitching about them?

  Maybe I was a little hard on the LW.

  We have this situation here where all of the combatants have their living situation dictated by a lack of money in a place, probably, where it is expensive to live. Hence three people share a house. Hence one of them sublets their room when they go away for the summer. Clearly tenant #2 who is subletting her room is more concerned about getting the money than anything else, as this will make her life a little easier, and bugger tenant #1, the LW, who is stuck in town for the summer.

  Probably the new subtenant (#4) and her mom (#5) have parallel difficulties. We have no idea what their financial situation is, but I will bet that they cannot afford a suite at the Ritz Carlton.

  So you are all in this situation together, and you can either get on and be supportive to each other, find the best bargains on food, or you can be at war with each other.

  Now, here is a confession. I am a landlord. I have seven apartments next door to my house. My tenants are poor, but they mostly get on with each other despite provocations and deprivations of all kinds.

  My tenants are of different ethnicities including African American, Mexican, Caucasian, and mixed. At weekends the Mexicans drink and play their music loud, but the children and babies seem to be able to sleep through it.

  But the tenants get on together, for the most part. They babysit each other's kids, they launder for each other, they help each other put out the trash.

  Room mates move in and out. Sometimes five guys are sharing a place that would be the right size for me alone. Sometimes the room mates move out and one guy is left to pay the rent alone, so maybe I reduce it a bit. Sometimes it rains for days and no one gets paid and they can't pay the rent on time. Sometimes their electricity or cable gets cut off for non payment.

  However, it is much better to assume that people are trying to do their best in a difficult situation and to try to work with them, than to decide in advance that they are all bad and call in the full force of the law against them.

  At times, I have even allowed people to take showers or cook in my house when their power has been cut off. When a hurricane left us without power for ten days, I excused the tenants rent for that period, got ice for them each day, and paid some of them to work cleaning up the property, and provided them with portable generators and a gas barbecue. Fortunately the insurance company picked up the tab for some of this, but I would have done the same even if it did not.

  As a result I have had relatively little trouble with my tenants. I did have to get court papers to evict one guy, and may have to do so again in the near future so as to do some remodeling, but generally speaking, the legalities of each situation tend to come second to human needs.

  However, without wanting to revisit the issue of ethnicity--well, I guess I do want to revisit it a bit--those of us who have come to the US from elsewhere in the world will have been much more accustomed to having to get on with neighbors and their families as a matter of survival, so we instantly recognize (at least we think we do) the ethnicity and attitude of the LW as being that of a particular culture that sees every little detail of life as being a matter of individual rights and entitlements.

  Now, if this woman and her mother are going to stay for ever an refuse to leave at the end of the sublet, then clearly there is a huge problem and they will have to be removed by some legal means. And if the mom is going to hang around until the end of the sublet, then they need to chip in a bit more to cover the cost of utilities, extra toilet paper, etc. But these are not insurmountable difficulties.

  And as someone who has worked in public health, I would guess that the likelihood of the daughter having some secret, but virulent transmissible disease is rather small.

  It does not appear that the mother is dealing crack out of the apartment, flushing her lingerie down the toilet, or a doing something really heinous like smoking.

  So since overall I suspect that the likelihood of the daughter and mom being fellow strugglers is much greater than the likelihood of them being sinister aliens escaped from a Stephen King novel, application of Occam's Law suggests that there is no need to panic yet and that going with the flow is probably the best plan for the intermediate future.

  Permalink Monday, July 9, 2007 09:45 AM