We Asked San Franciscans
My North Beach landlady once walked through our apartment, looked around and said, “You know there are decorating classes you can take.” Later, when we were moving out (and after our apartment had just been cleaned by a professional crew that we paid for ourselves but didn’t tell her about), she informed us, “I grew up with servants, and even I can clean better than this.”
Later, a different landlady would tell me conspiratorially that the Chinese ladies in our neighborhood liked to flick “cursed beetles” at her head because they hate her. She once piled metal shelving and rusty old exercise bikes in front of our living-room window for weeks that we were not allowed to move because they were for her art.
In a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is currently a mind-blowing $4,630, no matter how bad your landlord is, many people can’t move.
But although both of them definitely were not my friends, they weren’t actually terrible landlords. Things were fixed promptly. There were no shenanigans involving money or police.
It turns out that I’m quite lucky. In a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is currently a mind-blowing $4,630, no matter how bad your landlord is, many people can’t move. The next place will probably cost more, and chances are the owners could be just as crazy. So all we can do is laugh and commiserate. I rounded up a few Bay Area stories to make you feel better about your own place.
Poop Mountain
Tala Drzewiecki | Brisbane
“We rented an adorable converted garage at the top of San Bruno Mountain that was barely attached to the hillside (it didn’t even have a foundation). We were up high on a private road, which meant the sewage laterals were the responsibility of the homeowner and not the city. Well, one day before Thanksgiving, our sewage was backing up to the clean-out, which was directly in front of my entryway. The landlords invited their ‘church friend’ to come over and blast out the blocked sewage with a pressure hose. All that ended up happening was having loads of chunky raw sewage spewing out of the clean-out all over my entryway and driveway, and all the way down into my neighbor’s yard down the hill. They left it like that, didn’t clean it up and didn’t fix the sewage, and I was having 20 people over for Thanksgiving the next day.
As I’m shoveling shit and used tampons out of my neighbor’s driveway, I saw my landlord driving up the hill, and I was very tempted to smash his windshield with my shovel.
At this point, raw sewage was backing up into our house (the sewer serviced our house plus the huge duplex directly above us—about eight people’s worth of shit). The next morning I get up to find this horror show. As I’m shoveling shit and used tampons out of my neighbor’s driveway, I saw my landlord driving up the hill, and I was very tempted to smash his windshield with my shovel. Turns out, a tree’s roots had grown into the sewage lateral and was blocking all the sewage. It took them weeks to finally get it replaced—to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Hence our Thanksgiving guests started calling our house Poop Mountain.”
New Skylights
Jesse and Elianna Friedman | Potrero Hill
“While working on the unit above us, with walls and ceilings removed, a worker fell through the ceiling into our bedroom, knocking out several 8 x 10s of drywall. We could see stars and clouds from the bed for a week.
Another time I noticed that the worksite below me was flooding. I rang their doorbell to tell them about it, and they cursed me out through a closed door for bothering them. They actually apologized for that when they noticed I was trying to save them thousands of dollars in flooding.
The construction below us was on and off for two years, but the landlords always managed to have a permit to block off three parking spots in front of the house for construction vehicles and used it for personal parking instead.”
Freezer Woes
Anonymous
“During my move-out inspection, my landlord brought me a photo she had taken of the inside of my freezer. Because, as she said, I had a habit of keeping my freezer super-full, they were considering charging me to replace it. When did she look in my freezer? Why did she take a picture? Can a freezer be too full? I had to just laugh.”
Breaking In
Jessica T.
“The property manager’s wife used to break into our apartment to drink out of our alcohol cabinet. My husband was in grad school at the time (so he had odd hours), and she knocked on the door all the time. If he was home, she gave some gibberish reason for knocking, but if he wasn’t home, she let herself in. We finally hid it all and left a note in the cabinet asking her to stop.
One day, I came home with our toddler daughter to find the building crawling with police. Turns out, she had drunk herself to death, and they had just discovered her body in their apartment.”
Sub-sub-letting
Tanya Khlebnikova | Mission
“My best friend lived at this place in the Mission for two years, and I moved in with her. After half a year of calling that apartment home, I’m taking a shower on a fine December morning, and I hear loud thuds — someone banging on our door so loud, it overpowered the sound of running water. I opened the door, and it was the police serving us an eviction notice, telling us to get out by 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday. It was Friday.
On Monday I learned that our landlady wasn’t the owner of the place like she claimed to be. She actually was a tenant herself who had bought a house in Daly City and was paying it off with our rent money. The owner was suing her. Now it made sense when she was coming over every two hours asking for money, like the crack lord in Chappelle’s skit.
The owner’s lawyer told us, ‘Sorry, but you do need to be out by tomorrow at 6:00 a.m.’ I had just paid rent a couple of days before. Of course, we weren’t getting that or the deposit back. I had $20 to my name and nowhere to go. So that was fun. F you, Monica. Even better, the scam-crazy landlord was at the place I found the next day.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Tanya Khlebnikova | Downtown SF
“The next place I moved into was a vibrant community in downtown SF of 20-plus people of all ages, genders and walks of life living in a dorm-like setting in a converted warehouse in a prime location. The catch? It was technically an office space, and no one was allowed to actually live there. Which means, whenever shit went down, we couldn’t call the cops because everyone would get evicted.
The building manager lived there. He was OK by day but a belligerent drunk who would scream threats and profanities, break walls and throw appliances out the windows by night. I eventually had to move out when we got bedbugs at the far end of the building (from my room), and the landlord refused to do anything about it. I remember one new tenant was particularly devastated, because she was a model for Kink.com and lost her contract because of the bites all over her body.”
OK, Mom
Anonymous — Inner Sunset
“I’ve lived in a downstairs flat under my landlords, who have the top two floors of a remodeled old Victorian farmhouse, and am currently moving out. They have sent me 27 texts in one year complaining about my TV; my talking; my music; my four-year-old son running, jumping and playing too loud; and my dog crying. I have never had a party—it’s usually just me and my son. I have literally been walking on eggshells. I hold the remote in my hand and am constantly adjusting the volume so as not to disturb them when a commercial or music comes on that tends to be louder. At 43 years old with a four-year-old son, I refuse to feel like I’m living with the strict parents I never even had.”
You Stink
Cynthia Dawson | Outer Sunset
“Our old landlord told us we were spoiled brats for expecting to take a shower every day, because when he was in World War II, he had to bathe out of his helmet. And he wanted to keep the deposit because we painted the white walls white again (and made it look better) without asking him first. When paying $1,200 a month (back in 2004) for a mold-infested, disgusting apartment where things barely worked, I expected to be able to take a shower daily, at the very least.”
I guess the moral of the story is: San Francisco living is a cluster, and it could always be worse.
