Page One

Students slam landlord for alleged violations

By David Olson Special to the Daily Planet
Saturday October 28, 2000

Everyone at the Piedmont Lodge near the UC-Berkeley campus seems to have horror stories to tell about the conditions there. 

Roger Pao showed the red spots on his arm that he said were caused by bed bug bites. Joseph Enayati told how it was sometimes difficult to open the front door because of trash piled up in the foyer. Jordan Epperson said when he complained about his poorly functioning toilet he was told to throw used toilet paper in the garbage can. 

Five residents of the Piedmont, 2434 Piedmont Ave., took their complaints Wednesday to a campus meeting of a City Council-Rent Board Joint Task Force on Housing. 

City Councilmember Dona Spring listened to the complaints in disgust. “It sounds like a slumlord,” she said. “It’s really appalling that people should live like this.” 

The next day, city housing code enforcement inspectors were at the Piedmont. The city investigation is in its early stages, because as of Friday afternoon, inspectors had not been able to enter most of the residents’ rooms. But the inspection so far has found that some smoke detectors either had dead batteries or no batteries at all, and that the heat had been illegally shut off, said Carlos Romo, the city’s supervising housing inspector.  

Other city departments are also scheduled to inspect the rooming house. The fire department will inspect the building to respond to allegations of loose cables, blocked entrances and a faulty fire escape, Romo said. Planning department inspectors will determine whether rooms were illegally subdivided, he said. Housing inspectors counted five more rooms in the building than city records indicate existed only a year ago, he said; the subdividing was “possibly” carried out without permits, Romo said. 

More than 30 people live at the Piedmont, said building owner Barbara Lee (not to be confused with another individual of the same name who is a Bay Area congresswoman.) The rooms are small, there is only one kitchen, and most tenants share bathrooms, but rents – usually $880 for a room with two beds – are lower than at apartment buildings. 

Some Piedmont residents – most of whom are UC-Berkeley undergraduates – said they knew beforehand of the substandard conditions at the lodging house, but said that the Piedmont was their only housing possibility in the extremely tight Berkeley housing market. 

“Everyone is desperate in Berkeley for housing,” said Irshad Alam, a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies who has lived at the Piedmont for more than a year. “I want to move out but I can’t find another place to live.” 

“The battle in Berkeley is not just finding quality housing: it’s finding any place at all where you can sign a lease,” said Nick Papas, external affairs vice president for the student government. “Once they find that place, students are often willing to overlook deficiencies.” 

“They feel if they complain, they’ll get kicked out,” said City Councilmember Linda Maio. “We have a certain number of unscrupulous landlords who are willing to take advantage of that. There’s a lot of money to be made.”  

But tenants at the Piedmont finally realized things would not improve unless they publicly complained, said Gurpreet Sandhu, a first-year extension student. Residents posted leaflets advertising Wednesday’s meeting on their doors; one leaflet had “Stop Barbara” written in red marker. 

Sandhu showed a photograph of an arm covered in red marks. The marks are from the bed bugs or mites that bit her, she said. 

“I started my first week in school with hideous welts on my face” as a result of bug bites said Sandhu’s roommate, Guelda Voien, a first-year extension student. 

“My daughter called me one day crying, saying she had gotten bitten all over her body,” said Catherine Ro, mother of Jennifer Ro, a first-year student who lived for a month in the Piedmont before breaking her lease because of the conditions there. Lee suspected the bugs were living in the wooden bed frames and eventually replaced them with metal frames, apparently solving the problem for most students. But 

Roger Pao, a freshman extension student, said he still has a wooden frame and got bitten for the first time earlier this week.  

An unannounced visit by the Berkeley Daily Planet after Wednesday’s meeting confirmed many of the residents’ complaints. 

A television cable lay loose across the second-floor hallway at the foot of a stairway and on the path to the bathroom; residents said they have tripped over the cable. A water hose draped the top stairs of the fire escape on the third floor. The bottom vertical ladder of the fire escape itself protruded several inches above the railing and appeared difficult to climb on to. Sandhu said she took it for granted that she would not be able to climb to safety if there were a fire. 

Plastic bottles and other objects propped up windows that do not stay open by themselves. The three washing machines – one of which was broken – had rust stains. 

Residents said the basement laundry room regularly flooded. The back stairway to the building was dark because no light bulb was installed. 

Until about two weeks ago, a desk in the building foyer was practically surrounded by trash, said Joseph Enayati, a second-year student in molecular cell biology. “There was so much, it was hard to even open the ( outside) door,” he said. “Nobody knows how it gets there. The worst thing is it smells like sewage.”  

Residents said their rooms were dirty when they moved in. “It was filthy,” said Jeanne Phung, a first-year student in history and ethnic studies. “There were used sheets on my bed, (used) socks in the drawer and flies in the kitchen.” Several residents complained of toilets that clog regularly and do not flush easily. 

Lee said residents share some of the blame. Trash does sometimes pile up in the foyer, but that is because the residents put it there, she said. 

Lee acknowledged that the laundry room floods. “I don’t know how that can be done (repaired),” she said. Lee also acknowledged that the back stairway was too dark. “Maybe I should have put a bulb in there, huh?” she said. 

The toilets regularly clog because tenants “put too much paper in there,” she said. “If they have too much paper, they can just throw it (the used toilet paper) in the garbage can,” Lee said. 

Lee denied the fire escape is unsafe – “I don’t think anybody would have a problem” climbing on to the ladder, she said – but she acknowledged that the hose “shouldn’t be on” the steps. “Yeah, I’ll have to get that organized,” she said. 

Lee said she attempts to keep the Piedmont as clean as possible, but admitted that perhaps the rooms “collected dust over the months” before new tenants arrived in August. 

Residents repeatedly complained about power outages that ranged from a few minutes to a few hours. But Lee said that is tenants’ fault for “overloading the electricity” by using too many appliances at the same time. 

Jennifer Ro, the student who broke her lease and moved out after a month at the Piedmont, said she is happy to have found a place in the university residence halls. But she and her mother are still trying to recover the three months of rent they paid Lee. Catherine Ro said she paid Lee $1,720 – for rent plus a security deposit – and that Lee had verbally agreed to return all the money. But Lee sent a check for only $300, she said.  

Lee, who denied she promised to return the $1,720, said the $300 covered most of the security deposit – $100 was deducted as “application” and “processing” fees, and to cover long-distance calls to Ro’s Torrance home – but said she will not return the rest, because Ro had broken her lease. 

A building owner does have the right to collect rent for the entire term of a lease if a tenant breaks a lease and the owner “makes an effort” to find another renter, said Tom Brougham, senior management analyst with Berkeley’s rent stabilization board. But, he added, “the landlord has a responsibility to deliver to tenants a safe, habitable and peaceful enjoyment of the property.” 

If a tenant breaks a lease to escape poor living conditions, the owner must return the rent payments, he said.