living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Wednesday, January 12, 2005 Pacific heights Moving to Los Angeles, I found we are badly wanted by landlords. Our current property manager basically begged us over phone after her office hour back to take our current apartment, the second day we were in California. It turns out the applicant before us was a Con artist, who was charged for fraud as Spielberg’s nephew, and who used to pose for Child porn in Internet. Michelle, the manager was so glad that she let us move in the next day, a Saturday when she is supposed at home. She told us she was so worried earlier that we had to leave because the Con was applying first: “I felt so bad that I had to let the right persons go while I knew this guy has something wrong.’ While we started our second run of apartment seeking, after realize how impossible it is we could own a house in this city, we kinds see how disappointed the managers are when we do not take the apartments immediately after they show us. And they made us feel guilty. We used to see a two bedroom that owned by an old Jewish couple. Not very impressed but trying to be polite, the told the amiable old bald gentleman that we could not move in until two months later. You will think he will just let us go, since not many apartments in Westside can be vacant for that long. Guess what, ‘we can wait’, he said: “good people are more important than the rent”. We don’t quite understand this logic. We got used to be a repressed class that has to borrow the property of evil capitalists, and were afraid of being kicked out in the cold and snowy winter night, like in movies. Renting in California is such a strict procedure, credit check, rent in personal check with home address, no moving-in if the deposit is in cash, and deposit usually is higher than monthly rent, all the fuss. How could we be begged by the smiley capitalists to move into their nice apartment? Is that because they could do whatever they want to us since we are ‘nice’ and will not fight back (then they will be very wrong)? Is it a trap? We don’t quite understand until we saw ‘Pacific heights’ on Bravo! in the weekend. Oh, they want us so badly not because they can take advantage of us but because we will not harm them! Such enlightenment! There are so much harm an evil tenant can do to the landlord while being protected by law: not paying rent for a while, changing locks, damaging everything in the property and kept landlords at custody! Wow, Landlords should be very afraid of bad tenants. I wonder if the movie, shot in the late 1980s brought more paranoid to landlords, or the other way around, some desperate landlords behind the production of the movie cooked such a scary but taking story, a story about good landlords revenge against evil tenants since the law protect the latter instead of the former. I kind of withdraw my plan of starting a project of a bad landlord index on line, for the fear of bad tenants taking advantage, and totally give up plan of investing real property and being a landlord… but the movie is cool. posted by lmeimei @11:35 AM| permanent link| | |
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