landlord scum

ggrrrrrrrr! I hate landlords. I especially hate landlords that are lawyers. OK, that's pretty harsh - I have a nice landlady now. Well, I have 2. One bad and one good. The good landlady is in CA, my new home post-hurricane. My bad landlord is in New Orleans, and he's a LA lawyer to boot, which should have been a big enough warning sign for me to know to stay away from him to begin with.

Today I am flying back to New Orleans to assess damage and collect my things. I have to miss school, pay tons of money, and fight with my landlord lawyer scum. AND it's my birthday this weekend.

Here's the situation: when Katrina hit, we all left the city with *maybe* 4 or 5 days of clothes. I haven't been back since, and for good reason - the city has been closed. It was closed for over 30 days. Now that the mayor has opened up my zip code, my landlord is looking for us to pay him rent. My lease is up Nov 30th. He wants rent for September, October and November.

In the 30+ days of being essentially homeless, I had to find another place to live. You would too, right? I mean, how long can one live in a hotel or on a friend's floor? Really. At what point does a lease become void - after 30 days of the place being uninhabitable? 60? 180? When is it, exactly? And what of September? NO ONE could live in the city. How he thinks we'd owe rent for that is beyond me. Completely beyond me.

Now, I know many a corrupt landlord in New Orleans has been evicting tenants and throwing their stuff out on the front lawn. The Governor has issued a halt on any evicitions until Oct 25th. So the rat bastard can't evict us - but nothing has been said about those who need to get out of their leases. What is fair? Who will the Governor protect, given my problem? Remember, this is Louisiana. Napoleanic law. Crazy backwards.

I lost my jobs. My grad school closed. I had to move. Yet no one, not Tulane (thanks for nothing President Cowen, but it's good to hear that you're enjoying Tulane football games and feeling inspired), not the gov't has said a word to protect renters. My landlord scum thinks I am supposed to give him my FEMA money. For real.

Scum: "What have you done with your FEMA money?"

Me: "What have you done with YOUR'S?"

Scum: "That money is for you to pay to me, to cover your rent."

Me: "FEMA left me a message on my voicemail saying 'This money is to be used to find a new place to live.' You want to hear that message?"

Scum: silence

The kick of it all is that this jerk could cut our lease (we would all agree to that) and rent the frickin' place at triple the cost, like the rest of the corrupt landlords in New Orleans. One of my roomies thinks he wants to live there, but he wants to get us to pay for it - how would we even know if he moves in? We are 2 in CA and one in the Republic of Georgia. (If you don't know where that is, you know it is damn far away.)

I have a not-so-secret hope that the place is ruined (no one has been inside yet), crawling with mold and smelling to high hell. That way it's a wash. No one can argue with that kind of condition. Plus, I've all pretty much forgotten about all of my shit by now anyhow. I'm used to having 2 pairs of shoes to pick from. The hand-me downs aren't that bad. Who cares if I don't have a week's worth of underwear? Really, we all have too many things to begin with. Ok, so I wear the same outfit every Monday. It's like having a uniform. It's not so bad.

waaaaahhhhhh!