Adventures In Apartment Management
I am sitting here with armed police officers on both sides of my house looking for a suspect who is considered ‘armed and dangerous’ in the apartments.
He is drunk, very drunk, and has at least one knife. He was loud, and making threats which resulted in the call to the police. There was a single shot, but I don’t know who fired it, and now they can’t find him.
The tenants have been forced out of their apartments, with no idea when they will be allowed back in. I did not go towards the sound of the shot, because I don’t want to show up on YouTube shooting someone, and don’t get paid to do that sort of thing anymore.
This has not been a very good week.
16 comments
Adventures in apartment management, indeed.
Now you know why my landlord has set my rent several hundred dollars cheaper than market rate for this area. A steady professional who’s going to stick around for years beats a steady stream of crackheads or illegal Indians on expired visas who disappear with no notice at market rate any time of the year. There’s always a steady stream of people looking if one of our units come on the market, and the management lady always chooses the most stable and professional to rent the units rather than trying to extract every last dime possible. Because the latter just isn’t worth it in the end.
Raising the rent is not the equivalent of receiving the money every month and it is expensive to rehab an apartment when people move out. The problem in this area is finding stable jobs, because the tourist economy supplies a lot of seasonal jobs in the warm months, but jobs disappear when the season ends.
This problem was probably an attempted ‘suicide by police’. They still haven’t located him, but I think they may find him when he floats to shore in a few days.
What I don’t “get” is why the corporate apartment complexes around here don’t “get” that. Granted, they are owned by soulless investment funds whose very business model is the extraction of every last dime possible from the economy, but you’d figure that they could do the math on how expensive it is to turn around apartments too. But they don’t. They just hike the rents until nobody shows up to tour the apartments, then have a “sale” to bring the rent back down long enough to fill it. Then hike it again next year, and half the people move out, but they’re all like, “just the cost of doing business.”
Ah well. I’m just waitin’ for a recession so I can afford to actually buy a house at the bottom here…
911, hospital stay, now a crazed armed and angry drunk… what on earth do you do for excitement, Bryan?
Stay safe, please!
If you raise the rates to a certain level, the renters expect a certain type of condition and service from the landlord, and if they don’t get it, they leave. It is expensive to raise the rates too high, and people make a hell of a lot less they thought they were going to make renting condos out during the tourist season. A friend with a condo rented out during the winter, and hasn’t raise the rate for the 5 years to the people who live there. He said it has been the only time the property has ever turned a profit for him. Investor-owned properties are on the fast-track to being slums. Being empty is the worse thing that can happen to a place in this climate.
The drought will probably supply you with an opportunity, Badtux.
Trust me, I would love not to have any more excitement for a very long time, Ellroon.
The drought mostly affects 2% of the economy of California, the farmers who use 80% of California’s water, plus some isolated communities in the Central Valley where the aquifers are running dry. Here in the Bay Area, Hetch Hetchy was at 100% full at the end of last summer’s snow melt, and there are two other reservoirs that are also at 100% full that are being prepared to be brought back online (they haven’t been hooked up to the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct for several decades due to lack of need and the fact that unlike Hetch Hetchy their water needs treatment, so they’ve just been used for hydropower in that time).
There’s going to be another recession though, because the economy has turned bubbly again. We have a dot-app bubble here in the Bay Area. When all those companies go bust, a bunch of money is going to evaporate from the economy and drive the country into recession, much like when the dot-com bubble went bust. Same old, same old…
– Badtux the Watery Penguin
No one ever feels the need to actually deal with the problem of bubbles, because they think they will be smart enough to escape at the top before the bubble bursts. The larger economy is barely moving while Wall Street is soaring.
SoCal doesn’t have the resources of northern California, and the Central Valley is in even worse shape. The ag sector is drying up like it did in the Imperial Valley when Arizona claimed its share of Colorado River water in the 1980s. I lost a couple of large clients in the Valley. They move their operations to Arizona because they depended on the cheap water.
“I did not go towards the sound of the shot, because I don’t want to show up on YouTube shooting someone, and don’t get paid to do that sort of thing anymore.”
Sorry m8, but I had to laugh! 😀 We think the same way on that. 😉 😀
Yeah, weeks like that happen. It’s the power of the evil “3” my gran told me, and she has sadly been proved correct more often than I care to remember! What is is with that “trouble comes in 3’s” anyway? It’s definitely one of those ‘old sayings’ that I wish was dead wrong. *SIGH* Still, hopefully your run is done and things will be better for awhile. 🙂
I just got an email for some WP news and alerts, don’t know if you’ve seen them, so I’ll post links:
FBI Alert I-040715a-PSA:
ISIL Defacements Exploiting WordPress Vulnerabilities
WP Tavern has ways to secure WP sites from the exploits:
FBI Warns of ISIL Defacement Attacks on WordPress Sites
WP Tavern – A WP Super Cache plugin exploit:
Persistent XSS Vulnerability Discovered in WP Super Cache Plugin
And the big news for WP 4.2: “WordPress 4.2 will introduce subtle refinements to the default admin color scheme.” Aha…
And this was interesting: “Stack Overflow Developer Survey Ranks WordPress as the 3rd Most Dreaded Technology”
Well… I need lunch & coffee. Had no running water the past 2.5 days. Kitchen hot water tap started dripping and got faster. Filled a 2l bottle in under 5 min’s! Had to turn the water off @ the mains. Plumber couldn’t get here before this morning. I had flashbacks to living in some remote military camps! LOL Anyway, was nice to have a hot shower again. 😀
Oh! What do you guy’s think of this?
Microsoft: An Open Source Windows Is ‘Definitely Possible’
More of the usual M$ FUD? 😉 😀
Then again… If they do release an OS OS (couldn’t resist)… It’ll probably be based on W95 (or even Win 3!) LOL
Right! Lunch. 😀
Nah, Kryten. If Microsoft releases an “Open Source” OS, they’ll do like Apple and just release core kernel and driver source, leaving the rest of Windows copyrighted. Cynical? yeah, but Microsoft tends to copy Apple a lot, and actually having core kernel and driver source would help developers a lot because currently driver development for Windows is a PITA and drivers tend to be buggy as hell due to lack of decent example drivers. Having the whole core OS driver set there as examples would definitely result in better drivers for Windows.
As for WordPress, I had to hack WordPress to do a theme for our Jeep club. No thank you. There’s a reason why my blog uses the hosted WordPress.com with a stock theme. WordPress is a PITA.
Super Cache causes problems with a lot of other plug-ins. It provides speed, but it tends to be flaky. There have been XSS, feed, ping problems forever. I have blocked access to the module on my site, just like I have blocked log-in. There is a lot of code involved that was written for ‘ease of use’ without any thought of security or documentation.
My host has a WP blog and alerts about problems they see, and solutions, so attacks are short-lived, but I don’t make many changes beyond updating the WP software and the plug-ins I use.
Yes, having access to the kernel really would make life easier for developers, as they wouldn’t have to deal with mistakes made in the upper software by M$ if they could directly deal with the lower level. Drivers would be the most important example, most non-M$ software could benefit.
I really can’t see M$ giving up their cash cow totally, that’s not who they are. It will be limited open source.
Agree about M$. Dev’s have been pretty vocal for a long time about access to core code. Major developers with deep pockets have had access with very restrictive NDA’s. Some of that code has been leaked over the years (someone released most of the source for W95 some years ago). *shrug*
One of the reasons I got a Gold Developer account with WPMU DEV was because of all the trouble I had trying to get a couple PHP based plugins I created working with without problems! Was a real PITA! Fix one problem & create 2+ others! The guys @ WPMU DEV really know their stuff and I’ve had a couple hairy and seemingly unrelated issues pop up that they helped me work around within 24h. 🙂 Probably would have taken me days. Plus they are a local (Melb.) based company which is nice for a change. 😀 The real benefits of being a member with come when I get serious about WP Multisite & maybe BuddyPress.
Anyhow, I hope all is well with y’all! 😀
I hope you aren’t being affected by that mess in NSW with the tropical storm that can’t be called an official tropical storm.
Trying to debug PHP is a real PITA, especially when there is no common programming style from module to module. Open source is great until you need to fix something. Having more than one set of eyes looking for the problem is always good, especially if it turns out to be a typo rather than a logic problem.
Stay dry, m8.
Hi Bryan. 🙂
No problems with the NSW storm here. 🙂 But it has been getting damned chilly! Had to break out my winter doona (down filled quilt to you) and use the heater in the evenings. So much for trying to keep the bills down! *shrug* Also have to wear winter clothes when i go out, especially early morning. The wind is damned cold! I don’t normally have to any of that until mid-late May!
Only had a few days rain (showers really) the past few months. So dry is easy. Warm is the problem! 😉 😀
I finally got to make my fave pasta dish for the first time in a few years! Yummmmm! LOL I posted the recipe a while back. 🙂
You too m8… stay comfy! And stay safe and healthy. 🙂
It is hard to plan ahead when the climate is shifting. You expect certain things at certain times and it doesn’t work like that any more.
Actually the cooler weather is good for a heartier menu, including hot pasta dishes and casseroles, so there is that benefit, but no one needs the utility bills.
At this point I’m just trying to finish up with doctors and get back to real life.