{student life}
An Imbalanced Relationship
The Struggles of Off-Campus Living in the SJC Community
story by Meliha Anthony '25 and Zara Brandt, '25, photos from Ella Harell, Sarah Lieberman, Sachin Stanislaus, and Grace Calk
S
arah Lieberman (A23) loves living off-campus. Nestled above the shops on Francis Street, her apartment is walking distance to campus, and Lieberman enjoys having her own space. “I just love my apartment. It’s really beautiful and there’s a lot of open space,” she said. The option to live off-campus and abandon the dorm life is an enticing one for many rising upperclassmen. Currently, nearly 30 percent of students at St. John’s College live off-campus. But between a stressful rental market, poor living conditions, and the difficulty of navigating the landlord-tenant relationship, the dream of living independently as a student in Annapolis is not always a reality. Lieberman and her boyfriend, Keaton Jahn (A22), discovered these challenges shortly after moving into their apartment. At 4am on one of her first nights in their new one-bedroom unit, Lieberman woke to discover a cockroach crawling over her face. Upon noticing the hole in the seam of the wall through which insects could enter the apartment, she called to request permission to seal the hole. Her landlord, Rita White of Annapolis King Properties, was unresponsive. In the end, Jahn caulked the hole himself. About a month later, in the early hours of the morning, a man knocked on Lieberman’s door claiming that he was an exterminator sent by their landlord. He insisted that he enter the apartment. According to Lieberman, she and Jahn were not yet dressed, but the man ignored their efforts to turn him away, barging into their apartment and spraying chemicals
without permission. “We have cats, so we didn’t get an exterminator on purpose because it’s toxic for our cats … We didn’t ask for this, we didn’t want this,” she said. “It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever been a part of.” Lieberman has dealt with many similar issues during the two years she’s been renting her apartment. Along with mysterious water leakages from the floor above, Lieberman has encountered legitimate health risks including gas leakages and black mold in her air conditioning unit. In all cases, her landlord has been slow to respond, and the repairmen they did eventually send behaved unprofessionally and did not resolve the issues. Lieberman’s experience is not an isolated case. Allegra Hall (A23) and her roommates rent a three-bedroom apartment off of Main Street. Hall describes it, with half-ironic affection, as an eccentric, wood-paneled bachelor pad with “mirrors everywhere and absolutely no locks on any doors.” Similar to Lieberman’s case, when
Allegra Hall
Entryway of Francis Street apartments issues have come up in the apartment, Hall’s landlord is often unresponsive or ‘ineffectual,’ as she puts it. The garbage disposal in Hall’s apartment, for example, has been broken since she moved in, and remains out of commission. “It’s full of mold and it smells like death,” said Hall. “We’ve just been living with it.” In addition to these issues, effective communication with her landlord has been difficult for Hall. She says that she and her roommates pay an exorbitant amount for gas, although her lease stipulates that they only cover the cost of electricity. The issue has been a cause for conflict, and, according to Hall, her landlord has taken no decisive action. “She’s insisting that electricity and gas are the same thing,” said Hall. Hall has also found some of the pressures from her landlord to be intrusive. She admits that her landlord is understanding when she and her roommates occasionally submit
the Gadfly / λόγος / May 13, 2022
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