to rent or to buy?

there comes a time in most individuals' lives where they have to decide whether to rent or to buy a living space. as this is not a financially small decision, many people take to making lists to delineate the pros and cons of each domestic situation. this list can often grow to be quite long as there is no shortage of considerations.

for example, if you have no idea what you're going to be doing a year from now, buying a property is usually ill advised. if you are part of the fortunate few who do have a clue, then now is a great time to screw a current homeowner who is looking to sell for reasons that could only be described as incredibly desperate*, given the market.

another issue many people consider when drawing up their little two column lists is maintenance. many people who are disinclined to maintain their property and/or born with hooves for hands often place maintenance (or, rather, the lack thereof required of them) in the pro column for renting.

while this is a popular notion, it is, at times, a false one. while renters often enter the agreement thinking that maintenance will be sooo not their problem should a situation arise, the landlord is often a professional at dodging maintenance. it’s like buying a car: the buyer is toast from the get-go because they’re going up against someone who screws people all day for a living.

so, given the terms of the lease, the landlord needs to be a little suave in their maintenance dodging. they can’t just come out and say “you live there and now it’s broken; that sounds like a personal problem. fix it your damn self.” (this is, incidentally, a large part of why i don’t ever foresee myself as a landlord...) what they can do, however, is make it *seem* like a big deal to clean and repair the gas stove that makes your apartment smell like gas when you turn it on such that when the pilot light gets too low to turn on half the burners and the smoke alarm goes off every time you turn the oven on, you don’t call them. it’s easier just to brainstorm desserts to bring to the party that don’t involve your oven.

or they can be so rude and unpleasant that when your kitchen sink completely backs up and all the Nastiness from the disposal is backing up into the adjacent sink, you decide that you would rather take apart all of the pipes below the sink, have filthy water spraying everywhere (including but not limited to into the bucket you placed below the pipes), clear the algae-esque Nastiness out of the pipes with your own hands, walk to the store to buy two bottles of harsh drain clearing chemicals that you don’t believe in (including “foaming pipe snake” – woohoo!), and then, only then, when 24 hours have passed and one sink still backs up with filthy water when you run water into the other sink, do you call the maintenance guy that works for your landlord (who is also, incidentally, a big jerkface).

and then there are the blamers. the blamers are the landlords that blame the tenants for anything that goes wrong, regardless of how preposterous the assertion is. for example, if a rickety old wooden fence is found disheveled on the ground after a particularly gusty windstorm, then it must have been that the 24-year-old young professional women that live in the house were playing on the fence and that’s what brought it down. clearly.

so next time you find yourself with pen in hand, scratching out a list of pros and cons, do be careful as to in which column you place seemingly obviously categorizable attributes, lest you find yourself fanning the smoke alarm with algae/last night’s dinner flying off your fingers wishing, “if only i could call the repairman myself and have someone competent take care of this once and for all!”...

*addendum: or a result of phD-induced psychosis, apparently...