Can We Just Move Our Stuff Into Evans Hall?

Posted by: Avinash on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Well well. It appears that the city advocating peace and nirvana and Marxism also succumbs to its own cases of bureaucratic corruption.

Berkeley’s Housing Authority paid federal rent subsidies to landlords for 15 dead tenants “some for at least two years” according to a pair of scathing reports to the Berkeley City Council Tuesday night. The council responded to the news by firing all 22 employees in the department.

But City Manager Phil Kamlarz, who prepared one of the reports, said only eight will be terminated outright. The 14 others are protected by union contracts and will have to be transferred to other departments.

This puzzled Councilman Kriss Worthington.

“If they messed up, why in the world would we want to move them to another department, where they can mess up there, too?” he asked.

The two reports list 14 instances of blatant misuse of $25million in federal funds and claim that city staffers “actively thwarted” an investigation by a new director who began uncovering possibly illegal practices last summer.

We really have nothing to say about the Housing Authority except that rent control blows, but it would explain the number of corrupt landowners that seem to put up shop in Berkeley and profit off of the helpless student. We’re sure there are many greedy owners who never fix the mailboxes, have carpets dating back at least ten to fifteen years, and ceilings festering in asbestos. Oh wait a minute, that describes our living conditions and our landlady!

Our roommate famously quipped that “I now know God exists, because no way would evil of this magnitude be present in the world otherwise.” This old, incoherent, cheap, irresponsible creature suckered us into the worst living conditions we have ever experienced. Since, by the time of this posting, we will be almost packed up and gone, we are now happy to share our painful story with the world. Our tale includes occasional blackouts, broken locks on mailboxes and doors, hollow walls so that we could hear the shouting from the adjacent apartments, the sex downstairs and the stomping upstairs, weekly visits from her asking favors that we would take hours to comprehend, random phone calls to send us sprawling back to show the apartment to new tenants–all of this we think deserves mentioning. Not to mention the manager she hired apparently lives at the gym and never fixes shit, and the repairman speaks about five words of English and strings syllables together to make himself sound like he’s saying something we can understand. We just pray that she doesn’t know how to use a computer or discover our obscure website before she gives us back the security deposit. Is three days a pretty solid window?

Have any horror landlord stories? Share them in the comments.

Berkeley fires all housing workers [Inside Bay Area]
(Image from SmugMug)



Topics: Berkeley, Economy, Politics, Students

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