looking for an apartment right now isn't the struggle i thought it would be; it's something different altogether.
i was expecting that the problem would be the 1% vacancy rate, and supply is certainly a problem, but not in the sense i imagined. there are apartments available in windsor, but they are either (1) in big corporate buildings, which are overpriced and mostly going to require a guarantor, or (2) too renovated.
too renovated?
so, take an apartment i would want to rent in windsor c. 10 years ago. it probably has older appliances, ratty floors. drafty windows...it's fine. it's big. it's cheap. sign me up. the units coming on the market have new appliances, new floorings, new windows and cost twice as much as they would have, which is either pricing me out or pulling it up to the very top of my price range. i don't care if the fridge is new, i care that the fridge works. i'd rather have a 30 year old stove than a fancy new burner top. etc. i want cheap and run down and spacious, and what the market is throwing at me is expensive and shiny and fancy and new...and cramped. the units have been cut in half. it's the torontoization of windsor, and it's staunchly unwelcome. these property management companies should go back to fucking toronto, and give me back my big, run down spaces for cheap. i don't want your stainless steel fridge.
worse, though, is this issue of credit scores.
on it's face, it seems reasonable enough to demand some entrance requirement around credit scores, but not if it's a rigid rule and there's no independent thought around it. the credit score is being interpreted by almost everybody as a magic number, rather than what it actually is, which in context is a rating of how well an individual pays off credit card debt.
nobody applying for bottom-of-market housing in windsor has ever had a mortgage, unless they've recently defaulted on it as a part of a divorce and few applicants have ever even owned cars in their lives. the exceptions would be the retirees. 90% of applicants have never had or ever will have mortgages and have never had or ever will have cars. so, what informs their credit score? credit card debt.
what is this number, in the context of somebody that only has credit card debt? it's a measurement of how frequently you pay down credit card debt. but, in order to have this score actually function, you'd have to frequently take out debt, and frequently pay it back down.
it follows that a low income person with a high credit score is somebody that constantly borrows large amounts of money via credit card debt and always pays it down, which could only make sense in context if they are extremely risky with their money. the riskier you are, the higher your credit score; the more risk adverse you are, the lower your credit score.
what having a good credit score means, then, for low income people, is that you have a gambling problem, or you're a drug addict, and also that you have some alternate source of income to pay your debts down, like selling drugs or prostitution. you couldn't get a good credit score unless you were constantly pushing yourself into debt, and you couldn't be constantly pulling yourself out of debt unless you were pulling in money under the table. therefore, you're really not low income at all, you're just a middle to high income criminal.
that is what having a high credit score would almost necessarily imply in the socio-economic class that is applying for these apartments - the applicant is a drug dealer or prostitute. insisting on a high credit score as an entry requirement weeds out the honest applicants and elevates the dishonest ones. then they wonder why their applicant pool sucks.
most people in my socio-economic class will have a credit score that looks something more like this:
i have never had a mortgage.
i have never owned a car.
i have never had a credit card and could not get one because my income is too low.
i have never missed a payment, but i've never made a payment on time, either; i've never had a payment to miss or make. therefore, equifax cannot assign me a rating. that should be the norm amongst the type of people applying for the type of housing i'm applying for - no credit history, because they're poor. credit histories are a middle class entity. poor people don't have credit histories because they don't have access to credit because they're poor.
now, why should property managers ask for credit reports? they should attempt to determine if the applicant has a large amount of debt from a previous tenancy, owes money in court or has a history of missed payments. it's reasonable on it's face. but when somebody does the check and it comes back as "this person has never borrowed money, has no liabilities and no assets", that should be seen as the best possible result, at least in this income demographic. i have no debt! no liabilities! that should be ideal.
they don't - they look at a score, analyze it binary and pass or fail. that's what the guidelines written by somebody in toronto say, and they expend no thought on it, they just do it.
as a result, i've actually seen an increasing number of properties just sit on the market, because the property managers refuse to rent to anybody that applies for them. 100% of the applicants get rejected, and told to sleep in a shelter, while these units sit empty, because they don't have a credit history. this is housing that should be low income housing and that can't attract middle income applicants. like me, many of these people can show years and years of rent receipts. i have 6.5 years of rent receipts, but they won't look at my application because i've never qualified for a credit card because i've spent my life poor. these are run down 300 square foot basements in windsor that only a poor person would ever apply for. it is absurd.
the way out is to find somebody that isn't a retard and actually knows what a credit score is and how to apply it, rather than just mindlessly follow instructions sent from head office, without understanding what they are.
i found a great spot out in amherstburg but the guy insisted on a verbal lease, and i wasn't interested in taking the risk. i tried to write a basic lease, and he...he didn't get it. he thought that not having a lease would give him the right to terminate a tenancy without a court, and that's wrong. i've found a few things that are overpriced and too small and thought about but pulled back from. i've found apartments that i've been apprehensive about moving into because they smell like ashtrays, and appear to mostly have drug dealers and prostitutes with good credit scores living in them. i've also found a couple of big wood apartments that are exactly what i want, but have owners that don't want musicians, or don't want odsp recipients, and that are still sitting on the market, weeks later - these picky owners want to wait and take their time to find their perfect imagined candidate, which is likely an astronaut that speaks ten languages and works part time as an ambassador to the united nations. i've been very frustrated by all of this, as it's a consistent lack of reasonableness that i'm encountering, mostly at the managerial stage. these useless capitalist bourgeois middle men are just sitting in between the tenant and the landlord and causing unnecessary problems. get out of here; go back to toronto. let me talk to the owner, dammit. i don't want to talk to you, and i don't want to pay your salary in my rent, either.
that said, i think i might have something lined up for monday, and it's actually exactly what i want, albeit a little out of the part of town i'd like. it's in a trendy or hip part of town, whereas i've been focusing on the region near the new bridge, which is close to the student district. the distance on a bicycle in the summer is not very substantive. the place is fairly central, really. i've been reminded of how bad that part of windsor smells this week, as the sewers finish their spring melt and clear out. the place i'd like to move into this week should smell a little less bad and a little more like fermented yeast, as i'm back in the range of the whiskey factory (where i was when i first moved here).
if it works out, i should be out of this hotel in a day or two. if it doesn't, may is going to be a long month for me. i tentatively have a temporary room lined up in a basement, if it flips over into may.
property managers need to be more realistic about what a credit score actually is and how useful it is for low rent applicants. there's a price point below which the concept of a credit score becomes extremely unhelpful, and everything i'm applying for is well below it. if somebody has a very bad credit score, that's one thing. but, if somebody just doesn't borrow money at all, they shouldn't be penalized for it they way i am being. ask for rent receipts instead - they're more useful than a credit score for this socio-economic class, which never has and never will borrow money, except to pay for drugs.
