Some Advice
So Renee and I have found a few places in Eugene we can start applying for, and while filling out the application, we're not quite sure how to handle the year we spent living in the ghetto and would like some advice from the Livejournal Braintrust.
For people that don't remember or weren't here, the leasing company we dealt with there were practically slum lords that didn't take care of the place at all. When we moved in there were a bunch of things they were supposed to take care of but never did, there was a sewage leak in the basement a week after we moved in and almost two months later we had to threaten legal action if they didn't get it fixed now - which they then did but they never sent anyone in to clean it up. By then we were used to our phone calls not being returned, promises about getting someone to look into that that somehow never happened, and that one famous incident when we were calling about a potential gas leak and the guy didn't listen to what we had to say but instead screamed at us for daring to call him on a Sunday and then hung up. There were doors in that place we couldn't close because we wouldn't be able to open them again if we did (the knob was broken), the tub didn't drain for eight months, the downstairs toilet was busted almost the whole time we were there, we didn't have hot water for about three months, I could go on and on.
And if somebody in Eugene were to call them, we frankly have no idea what kind of bullshit they might tell them, and we have every reason to think they might start making shit up. Once we gave our thirty days notice there, the actual owner of the house started showing up making all sorts of threats and accusations. Kept insisting that all the stuff that was wrong with the house was fixed shortly after we moved in, the sewage was cleaned up and she knows it because she was there (which was funny, because we had never met her before then). If it was all broken again, it was because we broke it ourselves (indeed, we somehow managed to break all the same things that were broken when we first moved in in the exact same way that it was broken when we officially complained about it, I know I would be impressed too). Some of her bullshit was half truths, like how we never paid the water bill, we didn't but that was because we were told the home owner was going to do that and since a water bill never came to the house we had to figure it was being done, but she claims she wasn't doing that anymore and yet we were never told (and she never bothered either having the water bill sent to us directly or having it forwarded to us or whatever). Our neighbors there also seemed to love filing complaints about us to the city since we were not well liked there for no good reason; again these were never forwarded to us until after we gave noticed and then all twenty of those fines were dropped on our doorstep with some expectation that we would just pay it all, including late fees and everything since some of them were quite old (which we were not going to do, holy shit the ones that were actually legitimate (and a lot of them weren't, some were the neighbors throwing all their trash in our yard, which they did very deliberately, then calling to complain about it, fucking pigs that they were), like the grass which we didn't take care of right away because its not like we had to means to do so and we weren't going to talk to the neighbors because they were just so fucking nasty to us and we had a lot of stress and health problems at the time; if the first complaint had reached us we would have gotten on top of it right away and there would have been no more, as it was we had no idea it was a problem and nobody bothered to tell us anything).
Then there were some of the real batshit insane accusations the woman made. Like how we never gave her a security deposit (uh, yeah we did, and we have proof that we did, signed by the leasing company, try again, psycho). She even accused of us having like seven people living there (those would be the people helping us pack our shit on the day we moved out, they were all living with us the entire time don't you know). And she was going to take us to court and get all sorts of money from us and blah blah blah, yap yap yap, crazy crazy crazy.
Of course none of that ever came to anything, for all her bluster after we moved out we never heard from them again (and last we heard like six months ago, our old house there is listed as abandoned). But because she was threatening to take us to court we held on to a lot of our paper work from them just in case we would have to disprove their bullshit claims. So we can certainly prove that we gave a security deposit, that we paid rent every month, that we complained and threatened legal action over the condition of the place and that they received our letter and acknowledged it. Though they can probably make up other shit it would be harder for us to defend against.
Our current landlord will give us a good recommendation, and the lardlord we had prior to the ghetto will as well. One would think its logical to assume, if we were good tenents before and after, that if there was a problem, the problem might have been with the landlord/leasing company, not with us. But I've learned never to count on people's logic shining through. When we moved in here we didn't include the ghetto house in our contact list even though we were freshly moving out of there, we had met our current landlord in person and explained we were having problems in our house and that's why we're moving out, and its not like Bill isn't familiar enough with the city that it all rings true to him. But I don't know if that will happen again, and out of state no less.
Preferably, I'd not include them. But if the management company we're applying with now could by chance find out that we were leasing with another place during that time (and I don't really know how this background check actually works, what they can and can not find out, how much digging they would really do) then we would be rejected out of hand, and I don't want that to happen. Should we try to explain what the situation was?
Has anyone here dealt with a similar situation? What do you recommend doing?
For people that don't remember or weren't here, the leasing company we dealt with there were practically slum lords that didn't take care of the place at all. When we moved in there were a bunch of things they were supposed to take care of but never did, there was a sewage leak in the basement a week after we moved in and almost two months later we had to threaten legal action if they didn't get it fixed now - which they then did but they never sent anyone in to clean it up. By then we were used to our phone calls not being returned, promises about getting someone to look into that that somehow never happened, and that one famous incident when we were calling about a potential gas leak and the guy didn't listen to what we had to say but instead screamed at us for daring to call him on a Sunday and then hung up. There were doors in that place we couldn't close because we wouldn't be able to open them again if we did (the knob was broken), the tub didn't drain for eight months, the downstairs toilet was busted almost the whole time we were there, we didn't have hot water for about three months, I could go on and on.
And if somebody in Eugene were to call them, we frankly have no idea what kind of bullshit they might tell them, and we have every reason to think they might start making shit up. Once we gave our thirty days notice there, the actual owner of the house started showing up making all sorts of threats and accusations. Kept insisting that all the stuff that was wrong with the house was fixed shortly after we moved in, the sewage was cleaned up and she knows it because she was there (which was funny, because we had never met her before then). If it was all broken again, it was because we broke it ourselves (indeed, we somehow managed to break all the same things that were broken when we first moved in in the exact same way that it was broken when we officially complained about it, I know I would be impressed too). Some of her bullshit was half truths, like how we never paid the water bill, we didn't but that was because we were told the home owner was going to do that and since a water bill never came to the house we had to figure it was being done, but she claims she wasn't doing that anymore and yet we were never told (and she never bothered either having the water bill sent to us directly or having it forwarded to us or whatever). Our neighbors there also seemed to love filing complaints about us to the city since we were not well liked there for no good reason; again these were never forwarded to us until after we gave noticed and then all twenty of those fines were dropped on our doorstep with some expectation that we would just pay it all, including late fees and everything since some of them were quite old (which we were not going to do, holy shit the ones that were actually legitimate (and a lot of them weren't, some were the neighbors throwing all their trash in our yard, which they did very deliberately, then calling to complain about it, fucking pigs that they were), like the grass which we didn't take care of right away because its not like we had to means to do so and we weren't going to talk to the neighbors because they were just so fucking nasty to us and we had a lot of stress and health problems at the time; if the first complaint had reached us we would have gotten on top of it right away and there would have been no more, as it was we had no idea it was a problem and nobody bothered to tell us anything).
Then there were some of the real batshit insane accusations the woman made. Like how we never gave her a security deposit (uh, yeah we did, and we have proof that we did, signed by the leasing company, try again, psycho). She even accused of us having like seven people living there (those would be the people helping us pack our shit on the day we moved out, they were all living with us the entire time don't you know). And she was going to take us to court and get all sorts of money from us and blah blah blah, yap yap yap, crazy crazy crazy.
Of course none of that ever came to anything, for all her bluster after we moved out we never heard from them again (and last we heard like six months ago, our old house there is listed as abandoned). But because she was threatening to take us to court we held on to a lot of our paper work from them just in case we would have to disprove their bullshit claims. So we can certainly prove that we gave a security deposit, that we paid rent every month, that we complained and threatened legal action over the condition of the place and that they received our letter and acknowledged it. Though they can probably make up other shit it would be harder for us to defend against.
Our current landlord will give us a good recommendation, and the lardlord we had prior to the ghetto will as well. One would think its logical to assume, if we were good tenents before and after, that if there was a problem, the problem might have been with the landlord/leasing company, not with us. But I've learned never to count on people's logic shining through. When we moved in here we didn't include the ghetto house in our contact list even though we were freshly moving out of there, we had met our current landlord in person and explained we were having problems in our house and that's why we're moving out, and its not like Bill isn't familiar enough with the city that it all rings true to him. But I don't know if that will happen again, and out of state no less.
Preferably, I'd not include them. But if the management company we're applying with now could by chance find out that we were leasing with another place during that time (and I don't really know how this background check actually works, what they can and can not find out, how much digging they would really do) then we would be rejected out of hand, and I don't want that to happen. Should we try to explain what the situation was?
Has anyone here dealt with a similar situation? What do you recommend doing?