An Imbalanced Relationship

{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

Sarah 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 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 Allegra Hall their rent late or host parties in the apartment. However, sometimes she and her roommates feel uncomfortable going about their routines because the apartment is situated above her landlord’s office. For example, Hall tends to avoid showering during the day in case it is audible below. Additionally, her landlord sometimes makes comments conveying pressure for them to leave – “It’s just sort of a weird relationship that we have with her,” Hall said.

Entryway of Francis Street apartments

And whenever Hall approaches her landlord with a problem, instead of working to resolve it, her landlord brings up issues she perceives Hall and her roommates to be causing. When, for example, Hall asked that the garbage disposal be fixed, instead of confronting the issue, her landlord accused her and her roommates of smoking inside.

“There’s always something that you need to do first, it's always a sort of conditional thing,” said Hall. “She will have a problem with us, or we’ll do something wrong… I think she just feels badly about our existing there.”

Many students move off-campus specifically so they can enjoy the independence of managing their own affairs. Miles Johnstone (A23), like Lieberman, rents an apartment from Rita White. His unit is on King George street, and he expressed general satisfaction with his landlord’s hands-off approach. He feels he has the liberty to cook, smoke, and host friends without interference. As a whole, his relationship with his landlord has not been hostile.

“I think it’s mainly positive,” he said. “Our landlord more or less lets us alone.”

Lieberman and Hall likewise express their appreciation for having a landlord who is mostly uninvolved in their day to day life. But the lack of attentiveness is both a blessing and a curse.

“She’s largely removed,” Hall said of her landlord. “Which is my praise and my criticism. It’s helpful in some ways, and detrimental in others.”

Often, young tenants such as Hall and Lieberman are navigating renting and living independently for the first time, which comes with a unique set of challenges regarding the relationship between landlord and tenant—a sentiment which Hall expresses.

“What I’ve found most, with myself or with my friends, is just being taken advantage of, whether it’s monetarily or [the landlord] just sort of expecting that you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hall said.

Lieberman shares this feeling.

“Being a first time renter—and I think this is something that King Properties takes advantage of… that they rent to so many first time renters—I don’t really know what’s owed to me as a renter,” Lieberman said.

The Gadfly reached out to Rita White regarding her relationship with her tenants, but she declined to comment.

As first-time renters, tenants such as Lieberman and Hall feel that they do not necessarily have the life experience to know what is owed to them from their landlords, nor do they have the money or power to retaliate in circumstances where they are not being treated fairly.

The gas leakage and black mold in Lieberman’s apartment both caused significant health risks to her and her boyfriend. Hall’s landlord tacking on gas prices to the electricity bill was contrary to their agreement. For both of them, there was always a lack of response—or long wait for a response—regarding issues that need to be fixed in the apartment. And, on top of it all, the general sense that the landlords were irritated by them and their needs as tenants. Hall voices frustration about the seemingly inherent imbalance, or even exploitation, of this relationship.

“They know you have no power, and they know you have no money, and so they don’t care to do anything for you,” Hall said.

Housing and the cost of living in Annapolis are issues that afflict many members of the St. John’s community, and not just students. Tutor Hannah Hintze relays some of the struggles she and other tutors face to find affordable housing. According to Hintze, the school has done studies which show that the rental market is “very far out of the range of tutor’s salaries.”

Street view of King George Street apartments

“It’s actually quite difficult for tutors to find housing,” Hintze said. “When tutors decide to teach here, they can’t expect that they will be able to afford housing.”

The difficulty to find adequate, affordable off-campus housing, a burden for both upperclassmen and tutors, can present itself as an impediment to the academic environment which the college strives to foster. This has not always been an issue, however. Hall highlights some of the changes that have occurred in Annapolis between the time the New Program was founded in 1937 and now.

“They chose Annapolis because it was sleepy and it was cheap,” Hall said. “And now it’s become this King Properties dominated hellhole.”

To Hall, these circumstances are not only suboptimal, but also unjust.

“I’ll say it: housing is a right,” she proclaimed.

Hall believes that it will ultimately fall to the college to make real improvements in the housing situation for students. She feels that the way the college administration handles housing sometimes pushes students off-campus or prevents them returning to campus from an off-campus apartment. She supports the idea of having college-owned off-campus housing, or increased housing capacity on campus.

“I think St John’s should invest some of their money in real estate in Annapolis, close by,” she said. “I don’t know how it would work, I’m just a little guy, but it feels to me like we gotta break up the monopoly that is Rita [White].”

Lieberman simply expressed the desire to have a landlord who cares about their tenants.

“Having a landlord that was more attentive… someone who you can trust to help you out when situations arise, I think would be wonderful,” she said. “I have no idea whether or not [White] is going to slander me to the next person I rent to, or how she’s going to perceive how I behave in her property.”

In spite of the many grievances and difficulties associated with off-campus living, there is perhaps a light at the end of the tunnel. Taylor Waters, the Director of Student Services, has plans in the near future to gather resources for students wishing to live off-campus, as well as to designate someone as the go-to person for students to seek counsel about renting, living offcampus, and signing contracts. And, there are options—albeit limited ones—for tutors to live in off-campus housing rented by the school.

Due to a need for more time, funding, and planning, there are no current plans to expand either on-campus or off-campus housing for students. Still, though, Waters outlined some of the plans to improve on-campus living, including upcoming renovations to Campbell, Pinkney, and Paca-Carroll Halls.

“Our primary focus right now is to make what we have better,” Waters said. “It’s deferred maintenance that we haven’t had the funding to take care of, and now we have it, so we’re going to build that into the next couple of years, to make the dorms better.”

In the meantime, Waters encourages seniors who are leaving Annapolis next year to share information about their apartment on the housing bulletin board in the Assistant Dean’s office. She also noted that the college does their utmost to provide on-campus housing for any student who requests it, though priority is given to students already on campus.

As a whole, the off-campus living experience is a mixed bag. It offers the independence that many students crave as they enter adulthood, but comes with the challenges of navigating an entirely new business relationship. These triumphs and woes are something Lieberman is familiar with.

“For the most part, my life is very lovely and very manageable,” Lieberman said. “I don’t want to scare any underclassmen from…getting an apartment that would be wonderful for them. But…know what you’re getting into. Don’t expect a lot.”

Elias Christian, roommate of Allegra Hall in front of their Gorman Street apartment