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Wednesday, September 17, 2003 More Landlord Woes Just when you thought it was finally over… actually, we’d been anticipating this ever since we moved in to 530 S. Fourth Ave. last August, and even more so in the last few weeks. My roommates and I moved out from the epitome of the phrase “student ghetto” during the third and fourth weeks of this August, and we knew our landlady, Jun Zhang, was going to have a field day with our security deposit. Nevermind that she didn’t actually clean the house before we moved in and my room stank of cat urine, she barely fixed anything, her husband removed the bedroom door from Evan and Joe's room during Spring Break and never replaced it because the room was in violation of fire codes, and the “furnished” house contained mostly unusable furniture (for example, what passed as a dresser in my room was a little cardboard 3-tier drawer) that was promptly relocated to the basement (also scary, and when the laundry machine didn’t work when we moved in she actually wanted to charge us a monthly fee to replace it). She tried to charge us $440 for a late fee on a check that bounced—not only illegal because late fees cannot be punitive, but ridiculous because according to the Ann Arbor Tenants Union an exorbitant late fee runs around $60—even though she was warned by Elise that the check was going to bounce before she’d caught the problem herself. So the latest: she took $800 out of our security deposit. Unbelievable. And for what? Half was for the late fee she’s still illegally trying to collect, the rest (we're assuming, since the charges were listed but not itemized with prices) for damages resulting from the normal wear and tear of crappy (literally, Elise sat on her bed and it broke, and she put her foot on the footrest and it broke) furniture that was older than old. After putting up with so much, especially in the condition of the house when we moved in, I can’t believe she’s pulling this on us now. Why doesn’t anyone do anything about Ann Arbor landlords? Elise is heading (again) to Student Legal Services—who’d originally laughed at the thought of someone trying to charge a $440 late fee—so I’ll close this blog with a quote from Joe Sievers: “And how many hundreds of dollars does it take to Lysol a mattress? That's like saying ‘someone left an old slice of pizza in the fridge. I'm charging you $200 because I had to throw it away. Oh, and the toilets had been crapped in and the floor had been walked on.’” ^ Top | 4:01 PM | | | 
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