Not Dead Yet
When we heard that the MSA was hosting a forum on the couch ban, we wondered if it wouldn’t be better to let the idea die a quiet death, rather than get all of its proponents all fired up once again about the dreaded upholstered blights on the landscape — sorry, fire hazards. It did, however, elicit this very revealing remark from Leigh Greden: “[M]easures such as installing sprinklers in all rental units would be prohibitively expensive for landlords and costs would be passed on to tenants. But banning couches from porches doesn’t cost anything and makes students safer, he said.”
Chris Heaton, a Campus Management owner who bans porch couches in his leases but thinks that doesn’t go far enough, also spoke at the forum. You may remember Heaton from a letter he wrote to the News in which he characterized U of M students as effete, privileged snobs who “condescend to decent middle-class housing.” We’re not moving, but if we were, we’d be very hesitant to look at anything under the control of Campus Management.
Wait, the city that hasn’t cared to develop the housing stock/density to reduce the inflated rental/ownership market is now worried about the cost of a safety measure being passed on to students? You’ll forgive me if I declare Greden a total tool.
posted by Dale on December 9th, 2004 at 2:57 pmI’ll have to say that I and my former roommates were treated fairly decently by Campus Management. They took their time in getting our deposit back, but they are landlords, so I suppose that’s pretty universal. The curious thing: we actually had a porch couch, and we lived up past “Big City, Small World” (a perfect title for an Ann Arbor business, now that I think about it) on the corner of Spring and Hiscock (and if you want to joke, there was a comment section some time ago that dealt with the street names, so your joke might have been made already). None of them said anything, so maybe it was a recent policy of theirs. Or maybe they didn’t mind since our couch was a nice, well-upholstered vinyl number that a friend of ours had to rapidly discard. I’ve seen other porch couches, and ours definitely looked a lot nicer. How would they go further, though, I wonder, in reducing these unsightly tentacles of godless Communism and the threat they pose to Freedom?
posted by Lazaro on December 9th, 2004 at 4:22 pmI’m sorry to post twice in a row, but I just linked back to the April 6 entry when Heaton’s letter was originally mentioned, and I have to say that “R’s” comment on the entry was one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever read. It’d be wonderful if it was from an actual slumlord, but does anyone know if it was meant to be a parody, and who wrote it? I have a strong desire to buy the culprit a beer.
posted by Lazaro on December 9th, 2004 at 4:25 pmLong ago I had the pleasure of dealing with Campus Management and Mr. Heaton in particular. The shower in my hovel, by the landlord’s standards (and not mine), needed urgent re-tiling. I made an arbitrary (and somewhat liberal) calculation of $ lost (something like {days / 30} * rent * {% of rent that covered the shower}) and presented it in a fine, linear letter to CM. It was accepted without complaint and I got a check from them in a few days.
Still, I’m sorry to hear about that quote.
posted by Kevin on December 9th, 2004 at 6:33 pmseveral years ago, i lived in a campus management house. there were two bathrooms, situated one above the other (1st fl, 2nd fl). one day the toilet in the 2nd floor bathroom began leaking (from its seal in the floor). urine- and feces-filled water began causing water damage to ceiling of the bathroom on the first floor. campus management couldn’t be bothered to fix it until roughly 10 square feet of the ceiling came crashing down one morning.
campus management can stick a porch couch up their ass.
and the city of ann arbor should do the same. i can’t believe this is even an issue. can i have a habitable, affordable dwelling first? then perhaps address the horror of upholstered furniture exposed to the elements.
posted by tubby on December 9th, 2004 at 10:40 pmCome to think of it, I do remember that CM had a disturbing penchant of saying they were going to come do an inspection and then showing up one and a half weeks, and two hours, later then the time specified (obviously the difference varied in each case). I don’t really know what that was all about–did they want to sniff our underwear or something??
posted by Lazaro on December 10th, 2004 at 7:11 amAnyone know how many people attended the MSA Couch forum, and of them how many were actual students?
posted by remember2002 on December 10th, 2004 at 12:45 pmI’m sure that slumlords like CM do think that students are too demanding. They demand things like heat and hot water. If cold water was good enough for Abe Lincoln, it’s good enough for them.
posted by Anna on December 13th, 2004 at 10:04 amTo be fair, he probably means that the students who can afford Campus Management’s rents are generally effete students who condescend to what could otherwise be a decent middle-class house.
posted by js on December 13th, 2004 at 10:35 amTo answer remember2002’s question, there were maybe 30-40 people there, with about 5-10 non-MSA students.
posted by mcfo on December 15th, 2004 at 8:12 pm5-10? Seriously - if MSA did that kind of crap right, they could have hundreds bitching about landlords, making it look like a big popular movement that would actually move the admin - getting 5-10 means nothing needs to be done from their perspective.
posted by remember2002 on December 16th, 2004 at 3:17 pmWell the problem is that the students who got really upset about the potential couch ban last summer either think it’s over and defeated or just weren’t aware that the forum was happening…having it during finals didn’t help much, either.
posted by mcfo on December 17th, 2004 at 9:56 am