Quote:
Originally Posted by mpfunk
First off the price in the first place is significantly higher than it should be. I lived in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment. We were paying nearly $1000 a month between the 4 of us in that apartment. When I moved to SLC I got a 3 bedroom house in Sugarhouse to rent for less money. The plain fact that BYU restricts the housing market available to you, significantly drives up the price of housing. I have never had it cost more to live than it did in Provo. Currently the 2 bedroom house that I am living in here in Portland, would cost less for 4 people than the apartments I had in Provo. So by my count I was at least $100 bucks a month too much in rent.
One of my apartments would consistently schedule cleaning checks around midterms and finals. This made it not worth doing the cleaning check and just taking the fee. We were then charged a cleaning fee, this cleaning was never actually done. I think it generally was an additional $25 a month we were paying for cleaning that wasn't done.
In one of my apartment's we never once used the oven, not even for a frozen pizza. No one in the apartment cooked. The month before we left we were charged for oven cleaning. When we moved out we were charged for the oven not being clean, despite the fact it was not once used since the cleaning was done.
We had a mouse die in the pipes that led to the dishwasher, and it was an area we couldn't get to unless we kind tore things out. Every time we ran the dishwasher the place would stink. We informed the landlord multiple times about this problem and he refused to do anything. Also the heater when turned on would put out a stench and a little black smoke, so we couldn't use the heater (not that we really needed it often). We also informed the landlord about this and nothing was done about. We didn't have any of this fixed until we decided to withhold our rent. We finally got it fixed, but we were still charged late fees for our rent for that month.
There was a problem in the complex that caused all the ground floor apartments to have the toilets back up. Luckily it didn't involve any sewage. The apartment's solution to this was to come in take out the carpet and leave the floor bare for the last month we lived there.
So between non-existent cleaning fees, ridiculously high rent because of BYU's policy, and all the shit I put up with. Yes I would say that we were getting screwed by the policy, and I consider the money it cost me in increased rent prices to be at least $2,000 (and that is a conservative estimate).
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I'm going to have to agree with Funk on this one. I got screwed over by BYU-approved housing my senior year. A little mix-up left me without a place to live two weeks before Fall semester. I was scrambling to find a BYU-approved place to live. I had the opportunity live with some friends in non-approved housing, but that would require that I lied about my residence to BYU. I decided to "take the high road," and I kept looking for a place to live. I managed to get what must have been the last women's contract left just days before the semester started. It was a piece trash apartment, pretty far from campus and I ended up with potluck roommates. Two of them literally wallowed in their own filth.
In retrospect, I should have just lived with my friends in the non-approved housing. (I think it was short a desk or something. I am not totally sure why it wasn't approved.) I was 21 years old, almost graduated and engaged. Surely, I was grown up enough to make my own decisions about my living environment.