Housing


pwrfrk
 Share

Recommended Posts

I'm asking for prayers & guidance.

Since 12/2015 I have been homeless.  I have shared this with you guys before.  Right now, though homeless, I am blessed by having a place I can set camp without trouble.  In fact I have had one location for the past 2+ years.  I am blessed by having a friend who owns land up in the mountains.  Enough said, there.

Right now I'm trying to find another place to live.  Not like I am now, instead maybe a trailer park or even an apartment (if it's cheap enough).  I'm not asking for anyone to search for me, instead...I have a few leads, so prayers help even more.

As for guidance...I'm like WOW!  Landlords today already expect to file a lawsuit against me just for applying.  To a lot of them it's not "if", but "when".  Back a few years ago when I was an apartment manager, I had few problems with tenants.  Oh yeah, there were problems that arose, prospective tenants that were problems ever since they looked at the apartments, but the tenants themselves, I found the more space I gave them the better they were.  Just pay the rent, pay the utility bills, don't cause any trouble, and all is good.  Now they want a list of all of my credit cards & their numbers?  All of my bank accounts & their numbers and balances?  So they can have something to attach a court order to?  Do you have any idea the expletives that wants to come out right about then?  Court order?  They havn't even sued me for anything yet!  You can't just sue and expect to win, you gotta have grounds, first.  They are going to (I hope) rent to me, not me pay them to be my master.

In my experiences, I have always been good to my landlords.  Only one landlord I can think of might disagree, depending on how drunk he is (and I have a lot of witnesses to that statement).  On the other hand I know my experience in property management comes back to haunt me.  I know what my rights as a tenant are, and what landlords cannot do.  Like walking in and showing my apartment to a prospective buyer while I'm asleep and never telling me in advance; going through my stuff when I'm not there, to make sure I'm not involved in drugs(?); telling me who I am not allowed to have as friends (really happened); even telling me I have to have their permission to look at real estate to buy.  Some of that sounds far fetched, you have no idea how much I wish I still had vidoes of some of that.  I'm hoping & praying I don't have those problems here.

'Nuff said.  All the prayers I can get, I certainly welcome!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am super big on Tiny Houses and BLM.  You can live on BLM land FOR FREE 2 weeks at a time.  Loads of them in Utah and the Midwest. You just have to move at least 25 miles away and not come back to the same spot within 21 days.  So, if you can find 3 BLM spots 25 miles away from each other, you can rotate 3 camps forever and live free and be within manageable distance from a permanent job with zero need for landlords.  And... if you can swing some cash to build an off-grid tiny house on a 16-foot trailer and an old beat up half ton truck... you're set for life. 

In any case, we'll keep you in our prayers.

Edited by anatess2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I found a couple places, one sparks my interest because it's cheap, so I'll put an application in and see where it goes....

I was pulling out of camp this afternoon and the mud is so bad I had to get pulled out of the mud.  It's a mess.  "Knee deep mud" isn't humor- it's real life!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/21/2019 at 4:30 AM, pwrfrk said:

I'm asking for prayers & guidance.

Since 12/2015 I have been homeless.  I have shared this with you guys before.  Right now, though homeless, I am blessed by having a place I can set camp without trouble.  In fact I have had one location for the past 2+ years.  I am blessed by having a friend who owns land up in the mountains.  Enough said, there.

Right now I'm trying to find another place to live.  Not like I am now, instead maybe a trailer park or even an apartment (if it's cheap enough).  I'm not asking for anyone to search for me, instead...I have a few leads, so prayers help even more.

As for guidance...I'm like WOW!  Landlords today already expect to file a lawsuit against me just for applying.  To a lot of them it's not "if", but "when".  Back a few years ago when I was an apartment manager, I had few problems with tenants.  Oh yeah, there were problems that arose, prospective tenants that were problems ever since they looked at the apartments, but the tenants themselves, I found the more space I gave them the better they were.  Just pay the rent, pay the utility bills, don't cause any trouble, and all is good.  Now they want a list of all of my credit cards & their numbers?  All of my bank accounts & their numbers and balances?  So they can have something to attach a court order to?  Do you have any idea the expletives that wants to come out right about then?  Court order?  They havn't even sued me for anything yet!  You can't just sue and expect to win, you gotta have grounds, first.  They are going to (I hope) rent to me, not me pay them to be my master.

In my experiences, I have always been good to my landlords.  Only one landlord I can think of might disagree, depending on how drunk he is (and I have a lot of witnesses to that statement).  On the other hand I know my experience in property management comes back to haunt me.  I know what my rights as a tenant are, and what landlords cannot do.  Like walking in and showing my apartment to a prospective buyer while I'm asleep and never telling me in advance; going through my stuff when I'm not there, to make sure I'm not involved in drugs(?); telling me who I am not allowed to have as friends (really happened); even telling me I have to have their permission to look at real estate to buy.  Some of that sounds far fetched, you have no idea how much I wish I still had vidoes of some of that.  I'm hoping & praying I don't have those problems here.

'Nuff said.  All the prayers I can get, I certainly welcome!

Bud, you just seem to have terrible luck with landlords.  When I was working out in Vernal last year and needed an apartment during the week I put in an application, stated my employer and income, and I’m pretty sure that was that.  Sounds like you’ve encountered a lot of nutters, but the sane ones are out there too!

Edited by Just_A_Guy
Had to correct the auto-correct . . .
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here in Utah it seems landlords are either above the law, or they sure think they are.  I have done property management for a number of years in several states, and the laws don't change.  But the landlords do.  This time it's a HUDD facility, so I have an advantage there, I hope.  Then again, having 2-1/2 miles to my next neighbor is rather nice....

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was a landlord for a few years in Utah back in the '90's.  I simply could not do it.  It was just too hard to start eviction proceedings against families who didn't pay rent.  Kicking people out in December was just murder on my soul.  I couldn't handle being Scrooge.  I figure I lost around nine grand on the whole enterprise, start to finish.

One family, for years, was habitually late on rent.  They always panicked and came up with the late fee before I started eviction on them, but they always seemed to be paying that fee.  They basically raised their own rent by 20%, by just not paying on time and always paying a late fee.  I couldn't see a way to help them.

I dealt with almost a dozen different tenants.  Came face to face with insurmountable idiocy.  Maybe there was some drug/alcohol abuse or something, but from what I could see, these people were poor and struggling because they were unable/unwilling to learn to not be poor.  They were the only ones holding them back, nobody else was doing it to them.  I am not saying that's the norm.  I am not saying anything about you pwrfrk.  I have been poor, I remember the struggle, the grind, the heavy weight pressing down.  But I have witnessed things I cannot un-witness, and I speak from firsthand knowledge that sometimes folks are their own worst enemy.

Anyway, I will never again willingly go into a position where I have to cause people pain because they do foolish things or will not be responsible for themselves.

Edited by NeuroTypical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/21/2019 at 3:30 AM, pwrfrk said:

Landlords today already expect to file a lawsuit against me just for applying.

You have my sympathy. That's a hard row to hoe.

A view from the other side:

My sister and her (lawyer) husband have recently filed a lawsuit against a renter who owes them in excess of $5000. If they win, they will be fortunate indeed to recover $2000 after expenses. Even if they win, it's unlikely they will recover much if anything from her, since she just won't pay. This woman has begged them for extensions on her loans and asked for time to clean up the property so she can get some of her deposit back, then has told her neighbor in confidence that she does not plan on doing anything, but just wanted to stick it to her landlords. In short, this is a horrible liar of a human being, willfully defrauding her landlords. After years of dealing with this kind of crap, my brother-in-law and sister have had enough and are finally going to court. Their odds of prevailing in Washington State are rather slim, since this place is outrageously anti-landlord and pro-tenant; but in this case they have so much evidence (including subpoenaing the neighbor) that they feel pretty confident in getting some sort of a judgment in their favor. This whole deal will have cost them probably $10,000 when all is said and done; you can bet that they don't make anywhere near $10,000 profit on that house in a year's time.

Several years ago, we had some nightmare tenants move into a rental property near our house. I will not bore you with extensive details about how truly evil these people were (and I'm not using that word lightly); suffice it to say that I felt sorry for the three daughters, who were obviously learning to tread the same path their parents took. They lived in that place for almost a year and never paid a dime in rent. It took that long to get rid of them. At the request of the landlord, I and another neighbor walked through the house after they finally, mercifully vacated the premises. I have never seen such damage to a property. They trashed the place, painting nasty things on the walls and kicking holes everywhere. I heard that it cost the owner over $20,000 to repair the damage. When you factor in a year's lost rent (which around here, at the time, would have been around $25,000), that's some serious coin the landlord had to shell out to cover these reprehensible people. How many years of decent renters would it take to make that money back?

Landlording sucks. If I were ever a landlord, you can be sure that I would put my renters under a microscope, requiring background checks, letters of recommendation, and lots of dough up front before I would rent to them. To do otherwise would be to put my family finances at the mercy of the tenants, which is (dare I say it?) an untenable situation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tenants aren't the only housing deadbeats our there. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners in the US haven't made a payment in over 5 years. Many of them haven't made a payment in over 8 years. They are mostly deadbeats who have jobs and fancy cars, but who just decided to stop paying because they could - nobody was going to foreclose on them anytime soon.

Why Bubble-Era Home Mortgages are a Disaster waiting to Happen

And many of these mortgage deadbeats also trash their homes when they finally do get evicted. I personally saw it happen several times in expensive neighborhoods when I was an RE Broker in WA.

Honor, integrity, and gratitude seem to be bygone virtues. No wonder men's hearts grow cold toward others.  You need housing. I hope you find it and when you do, despite your impoverished conditions please take meticulous care of it! You will be blessed for your integrity. 

 

 

Edited by clwnuke
Link to comment
Share on other sites

In the downturn back in 2008, a full ten percent of my neighborhood was in forclosure.  That was absolutely horrible.

I'm grateful for the church's longstanding advice, and it's current efforts to help folks not get into a situation like this in the first place.

https://www.lds.org/self-reliance?lang=eng

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I gotta tell ya, I'm looking to switch careers and get into real estate investing and these kinds of stories make me lean heavily toward the buy and flip side, rather than the rental side. 

Many years ago, a close friend of mine (basically a brother) was doing evictions for a property management company.  When I needed extra money he made room for me on his eviction crew.

One day, we had to do an eviction on a really nice house in a relatively upscale section of Prince George's County, Maryland.  At first, the Sheriff was refusing to let us get going because he was expecting a larger crew (there were only 10 of us.)  Eventually my friend convinced him that there were enough to get it done in under an hour (which was true) and so he let us start... but then didn't hang around.  Things were going okay at first, but slowly a crowd of angry neighbors started to gather around the property.  At one point, the tenant got home and was enraged.  He demanded thta my friend change the locks back (changing the locks was  his first step in any eviction.)  The mob of neighbours were starting to move in.  It was beginning to get ugly when my buddy decided it was time for us to retreat.  As we left, we got racial threats from the growing mob. 

We got the County Police to come in and clear the crowd, who had broken into the house and had started to move stuff back in.  We were able to finish the eviction and  got out of there.

What really made me feel bad was that one of the rooms I was assigned to clear was a bedroom for two little girls.  Having to help disassemble those beds and take them outside really got to me.  As you might imagine, that was my last eviction, and my buddy quit doing them not long after. 

The thing is, I felt bad for those little girls, but I didn't feel guilt.  It wasn't my fault their parents rented more house than they could afford.  Now, maybe it was a job loss kind of situation, which can happen to anyone, but even so from what I could tell, this was a set of parents who probably didn't manage their money well and it caught up to them.  I can't be sure, but that was the impression I had.  

I judge nobody for being a tough landlord, and I judge nobody if they decide that isn't for them.  It's a complicated business, and hard decisions have to be made.  I may be at the beginning of that road, and I'm not sure it's one I'm up for.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are in my prayers.

No advice but lots of sympathy.

Despite being well educated and in full time work as a lecturer I can only afford to rent a room because rents are crazy. A bedroom with just enough room to fit in bed, wardrobe and desk with kitchen shared by 9 rooms costs nearly half my take home pay.  I was only going to be here a year so thought as a temp measure it would be OK....somehow I ended up staying longer.  Renting a one bedroom apartment within an hours drive to work would be nearly 3/4 take home pay without bills. But I spend more time at work than home, its warm, its safe and private, so counting my blessings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can't give you any advice but I have been homeless twice in my life so I know what you are going through kind of. I ended up living on a boat at one point I don't recommend that it was grim.  I am kind of weird though and occasionally sleep rough because I enjoy it, I always end up going home after a couple of days though at least for a shower.

 

I will pray for you though. 

Edited by Junior
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
 Share