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Whenever there is an easy buck to be made, people will take advantage of it. Take housing assistance. My mother manages an apartment complex, and since they started working with the housing program the same thing happens over and over again. A young woman, most of the time black, will get an apartment with housing assistance. She will have been working at an entry level job at a fast food restaurant or dollar store for about a week - you are required to have a job to get housing assistance in Texas. They move in, and stop going to work - you are not required to KEEP the job. Her boyfriend moves in, and people start coming to the house all hours of the night, and usually a few relatives and friends move in as well. Usually it is less than a month before they do something that gives my Mom grounds to evict them (usually loud partying or conflicts with neighbors), but it usually takes a few months to get them out. Even though taking people on housing lets my Mom keep her occupancy levels high she hates it, because more and more of her paying tenants are driven off, and invariably the apartments are trashed and take a couple of weeks of work before they can be rented out again. She is able to keep the complex somewhat respectable, since she now has a reputation across town as being a tough landlord (she is always going to court to get restraining orders or to get people forceably evicted) and she has the cooperation of most of her older tenants, but many apartment complexes in my town have been reduced to terrible conditions like the one I live in.
The apartment building I live in used to be a hotel - it is 3 stories, but the ground floor has no apartments. It was a great place to live - although they qualified for housing, the previous manager was, well, a bigot and if a black person came around looking for apartments, they were all full. Most of the people who lived there were old or received checks for mental illness, although there were a few people who worked minimum wage jobs who lived there as well, especially people who worked nights since it was so quiet. All bills are paid, and we had great central air so in the summer the apartments were always cool. The place looked pretty damn nice considering how cheap the rent was - it still had plenty of paintings in the halls, artificial floral arrangements, a TV room, etc.
Well, the old manager moved to California, and the new one will rent to anyone. The place seems to be where people who cannot qualify for housing go to live, since there is no lease or credit check of any kind, you just pay the first month's rent and you can move in. That is all that most pay. The lobby is always full of people sleeping on the couches, the TV room is permanently locked now because people kept vandalizing it, stealing the TV and destroying a vending machine. ALL the hall decorations are gone, including the large mirrors at the ends of the halls that used to startle me when I first lived there. Gang members (mostly Crips) are always coming and going since crack is being dealt out of more than one apartment (unfortunately for me, nobody who deals weed lives there). Most of the older residents have either moved or stay in their apartments all day - they used to hang out in the lobby and TV room and I enjoyed talking to them about the good old days, but they are scared now - I would be except I am fairly well known to some of the bigger drug dealers in my town and I guess I'm protected, although I did have one confrontation a few months ago. It is almost June and the air conditioning has not been turned on yet (they usually switched it on towards the end of April). I talked to the manager about it, and she said less than a third of the rent is being paid, and she had to borrow money to pay the electric bill two months ago and she can't afford to turn on the central air. This is stupid, I think, since you can see from outside about half the windows have stolen window unit air conditioners in them (you can tell their stolen because they are spray painted pastel colors like pink or blue, I had some friends who were in the stolen A/C business some years back) which are probably using more electricity than the big central air conditioner would use, which is one of the old-fashioned evaporation type. Luckily for me I usually go to sleep before the sun comes up, so it is still reasonably cool and I can sleep through the heat. The place is going downhill very fast and I have been planning to move for some time, but stuff keeps coming up to prevent it - when I get my stock money I should be able to afford it, though.
The place has gone to hell because we have a system that is trying to provide for the needy and is being abused by those who do not care about anything but themselves. There's not much that can be done about it - yes, the manager could start paying for background checks and that would get rid of some of the worse residents, but you would still have people on housing. In an ideal world when someone refused to pay their rent, or made enough noise to get their neighbors to complain, they could be thrown out immediately, but it takes 90 days at least to evict someone - people pay one months rent, stay for three, and then move out - and then move back in with someone else who hasn't been kicked out before. There are people living there who have been evicted 3 times.
I don't know if we CAN find a system that will help those who really need the help yet not cause problems like described above. But the system we have now is not working, and it is making me VERY angry and frustrated with the world. Maybe we have to accept a little injustice to make the world more fair in the long-run. I don't know. But I just had to rant. Sorry.
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