Incompetent Landlord
Gloria Simpson works as the landlord for Grace Mary Manor & later took over the position of landlord for the Counterpoint apartments when Kelly Benson retired (at least this is the story we're being given; I'm not entirely sure that Kelly retired on his own free will), which was later change to the Murray apartments. The Murray apartments is considered as Valley Mental Health housing as only people with disabilities can live here. The problem with these apartments is that you don't get to choose who your roommate is, once is chosen for you. I got an idea of just how bad landlords can manipulate a situation when they are in control of your living situation.
Over the years, I made a number of complaints to Gloria, most of which were completely ignored. The majority of the complaints were based on the fact that people were smoking inside where the lease specifically stated that you could not. A number of tenants smoked inside, some of them even using illegal drugs (anywhere from marijuana to spice). Regardless of how many times I tried to bring this to her attention, she continued to ignore the complaints every time. There were at least 7 people who lived here in the time that I lived here that ignored that rule & Gloria ignored my complaints about it.
In another issue, one of the tenants by the name of Arthur Zargoza moved his girlfriend in illegally. She continued to ignore this allegation until maybe 6 months later when she finally told him his she needed to leave. Obviously, this sparked a conflict between me & Arthur.
In other issues, one of the friends I made while living here was Jack Allen. Jack got a total of 3 bad roommates, where I was continuously trying to help his with these bad eggs.
The first one, Jerrel, used to steal money, cigarettes & food from Jack & lock Jack out of the apartment every chance he got. When he wasn't getting his way, he would slam doors at night to show he was mad, keeping most of us awake at the apartment (4 apartments, 2 people per apartment). It got so bad that we eventually were having to call the police nearly every night due to noise disturbances.
Jack's second roommate was Arthur Zargoza, who turned out to be a real con-artist. We found that he was telling Jack that he could be thrown in jail if he didn't do what Art told him to do. This basically meant giving him money, cigarettes, food & allowing him to order pay per view on his cable (which was supposed to be blocked, but apparently they kept calling Comcast until they got somebody that would allow them to remove the block). He apparently used this same power-play to get Jack to be quiet about him illegally moving his girlfriend in. Shortly after she was kicked out, he moved out along with here. Yet this guy still had the balls to keep coming back & conning money out of Jack. Eventually a restraining order was placed against him.
Jack's third roommate went by Kent. When Kent wasn't getting his way with Jack, he would be verbally abusive with him to the point of making physical threats against him. To make matters worse, he was smoking spice directly underneath me (I had the bedroom above his) & making me ill in the process from the secondhand smoke. I eventually got fed up with the smoking inside & Gloria not doing anything about it that I decided I would take matters into my own hand. I started stomping on the floor when I smelled the smoke. Eventually he came up & yelled at me about it & I explained that I was giving him an ultimatum, if he wanted me to stop stomping, he needed to stop smoking inside. This unfortunately did not make him stop. He eventually moved away after giving himself a number of seizures from smoking spice.
Jack didn't get a forth roommate. He eventually got put in a care center being deemed unfit to live on his own. I can't say I disagree with the decision. His family didn't want him to be put into a care center, but every roommate he ended up getting manipulated him & pretty well did want they wanted with his property. He neighbors & family was unable to help him as Gloria would not listen to either of them (including myself), so the inevitable ended up happening for his safety.
Then there was the issue of Marvin Begay. He lived up front & was another person smoked inside regardless of the rules. To top that off, he had been known to smoke marijuana & spice as well. Gloria never did bother with my complaints about Marvin, so this was another issue where I took matters into my own hands. I called the police a number of times to catch him in the act when he was doing it, but apparently the police would never go to his room, so they would never smell it & the police reports would show up as bogus. Marvin eventually ended up dying from a heart attack. I used to watch him smoke & the way he huffed in the smoke, I'm not surprised it happened.
Sometime after Marvin's death, my roommate had a nervous breakdown. Apparently my roommate's mother decided to pin the blame on me. She made an exaggerated complaint against me to the landlord that was exaggerated to the point that it could be considered as slander if I decided to take it to court (I probably still will if I can find a lawyer to take the case. The interesting part about this is that after all the complaints I made to Gloria that just got ignored, she jumped right on this one & I has a written warning without her even bothering to find out if there was any truth to the complaint. Was there truth to the complaint? I'll admit yes, but the majority of the complaint was extremely blown out of proportion & one part of it was completely slanderous. If she had bothered to follow up on the complaint & find out just how accurate it was however, she would have seen that half of what was said was not accurate.
A little later, I got a new roommate. The day after moving in, he was doing drugs & drinking (causing himself to have a seizure by smoking spice). He was brought in immediate with a warning with the landlord about it. Interestingly enough, he is still doing drugs & drinking in the apartment (despite what the lease says). I can say from experience that this was the first time I realized just how bad alcoholics could be & the delusions he got from the drugs made him impossible to talk to. On top of that, I found my self having to clean up his urine regularly. After complaining to Gloria about this a couple times, I got notice that she wasn't going to let me renew my lease. So it has become apparent that at this point she was actually using my own complaints against me.
Aside from my new roommate & his countless problems, a new tenant (Damian) had picked up the smoking inside habit, also. There had been problems with others smoking inside before, but Damian was the only remaining tenant that refused to smoke outside. The interesting thing her was that he apparently wasn't even trying to hide it. If you went into his apartment, you could clearly smell it throughout the entire apartment. This one tenant was worse than all the other ones combined as he smoked inside all day, every day ever since December of 2012. I refused to take the issue to Gloria as I knew she would use my complaints against me, so I tried to work it out with the case manager (Independant Living Program employee). Eventually it came to the case manager talking to the landlord & being told that I should be complaining to her instead of the case manager. I didn't trust her anymore at this point & for the most part avoided having any kind of conversation with her because of what had happened in the past. There was no way in HELL I was going to take complaints to her after the way she's decided to handle management in the past. So now I was in a struggle between trying to get the case manager to do something & the landlord trying to tell the case manager I needed to talk to her directly; it was a losing situation anyways & I had already been given a 60 day noticed to vacate.
Rolling this whole ordeal back a bit, Gloria told me before not to speak to the other tenants about the smoking issue & that she would deal with it, although that never happened. Her explanation as to why I shouldn't was because she was saying that I was violation of 33.h.6:
The interesting part to this accusation was that she could not see my side of it. I was miserable every day because of the smoking inside as I have asthma & could barely breath in my own apartment (not even my own room, where the smoke was the worst) without having to go outside (where I would ran right into where the lease-abiding tenants were smoking. Who ever heard of somebody having to go outside to get away from pollution? Not that that helps anyways in Utah with the poor air quality.
Then there's the matter of her not following her own guidelines:
As you can see here, I should have received 1 written warning & 3 fines before an eviction was processed. I received 1 written warning, then a denial of lease renewal. Even through her rules are on paper, she decided that she does not need to follow her own rules. This, along with ignoring almost everything I told her, as well as jumping at the chance to take action against somebody without properly checking out the situation before actually taking action, shows that she had something against me & as I see it, is unfit for any management position. If actions made because of inaction is punishable by law, then perhaps law is what needs to be reformed. This is just one of those many cases where the renter has been wronged by the landlord & I am making myself heard so that things will change in the future for the population that are forced to be in situations like this.
