T he basement in your house is flooding, and the roof is caving in. You're homeless or living out of the backseat of your car. And the scary person sleeping in the room next to you, with more piercings in her left eye than you have all over your body, is a complete stranger. What sounds like an awful nightmare or even a modernized chapter in Dante's Inferno, describing a new realm of Hell, is better known to us all as simply "living in college."
The college experience can be full of surprises and is consistently unpredictable. On and off-Grounds living at the University is no exception.
Moving into new apartments, out of old houses, changing roommates and dealing with temperamental landlords or student housing companies are only a few of the obstacles Virginia students face.
With different apartment housing companies in Charlottesville in addition to on-Grounds housing options, students often find a gap between the beginning and end of leases. In the case of third-year College student Stephanie Everett, the gap left her homeless for several days.
"Before I could move into my new apartment, my friend and I were sleeping on the floor of our old house because the electricity at my new place hadn't been turned on yet," Everett said. "One morning, the girls who were moving into my old house unexpectedly came with their parents to move in, waking us up and scaring us. So we were kind of kicked out, and basically I was homeless for a week or so."
Third-year College student Jessy Morgan was forced to live in three different places in less than two months.
"I had to move twice and was almost left without a place to stay for an entire month," said Morgan, shaking her head and rolling her eyes.
Moving into a new place is never an easy procedure. For the average college student, it can be expensive to hire moving companies or rent a truck.
"First of all, the heat and also the rain in the summer makes moving close to unbearable," Morgan said. "The day we moved in -- and remember we only had a couple hours on only one certain day to move like five rooms worth of stuff -- one of my roommates decides to go work out and is nowhere to be found. My other roommate and I could barely finish the job of moving our stuff across town as it was pouring outside."
Many students staying in Charlottesville stay to take classes or to work an internship, so dealing with housing issues adds unnecessary stress to an already hectic schedule.
"During the summer especially, one of the last things you want to have to worry about is housing problems," Morgan said. "It's kind of stressful dealing with all that on top of taking nine hours a day of summer school, working if you have a job, and just trying to relax because the summer is for just that."
To cope with the expensive rent rates of Charlottesville, many people sublet or rent out an empty room or house for the summer months. At the end of the spring semester, bulletin boards and bathroom doors are littered with flyers, advertising sublets. Assistant Property Manager of Woodard Properties Kathy Howery said that they try to be very accommodating to their tenants.
"We try to help as best we can if the tenants want to find a new place," she said. "We keep a list in our office for those who wish to sublet during summer months or during the school year. If someone comes in or calls, we refer them to those tenants on the list."
While some choose to find a room to rent for only a few months, second-year College student Abbie Klinghoffer devised an alternate, cheaper living situation. Klinghoffer was a leader with the VISTA Outdoor Orientation Trips, so she regularly spent four days at a time on camping trips with incoming students.
"It didn't make sense for me to actually pay rent anywhere for the two days a week that I would be needing a bed to sleep in, as opposed to a tent," she said. "I just e-mailed all of the people I knew who would be in Charlottesville for the summer and asked if I could stay with each one of them for a different two-day period. That way, I wouldn't have to pay a dime. Pretty cheap, I know, but it was fun and a great way to hangout with my friends."
While finding a place to stay is difficult, dealing with maintenance and other problems can be even more challenging. Charlottesville offers a broad range of brand-new, but often expensive, apartment complexes; on the other end of the spectrum are the older and usually cheaper houses. According to third-year College student Michelle Salmiery, older houses sometimes can harbor a collection of maintenance projects.
"I don't even know where to begin," Salmiery said, shaking her head. "My roommates and I have experienced everything possibly you could imagine. Our basement flooded, our toilets broke, our roof is caving in above our kitchen because the shower upstairs is leaking into the space above it, the porch is rotting -- oh yeah, and a room on the side of our house will probably fall off somewhere in the near future."
Many housing companies such as Wade Apartments, CBS Rentals and Woodard Properties offer maintenance services to their tenants. Woodard Properties offers free maintenance with a 24-hour on-call service for emergencies.
"Maintenance is free if the problems aren't caused by negligence of the tenant," Howery said. "We also do informal inspections and give the tenants the opportunity to fix any damages done before we charge them for any work we have to do."
Dealing with landlords is yet another problem for University students. Some students complain that landlords or management companies are unfair or unaccommodating to the students' needs.
Fourth-year Commerce School student Lisa Krolikowski had to deal with a lease contract change by her apartment management office that occurred while she was not in Charlottesville this summer.
"They blatantly did a poor job in communicating with those of us who were conveniently unavailable this summer so that we would be stuck in our old leases for the year and they would benefit," Krolikowski said. "I'm seriously considering talking to a lawyer."
As the summer comes to a close and students return to Charlottesville to their old or new apartments, hopefully the rooms will not be in disarray from a summer sublet, the yard overgrown from a careless landlord or a contract discrepancy causing unexpected increased expenses. Clearly, going to college is more than simply attending classes and going to football games; it is dealing with more than just papers and tests and learning how to live on your own.
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