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No, I fuckin' hate college town landlords too. Just absolute scum, some of the most evil people in existence. Like landlords that lease to actual adults suck too, but at least they know they have to fix shit somewhat because their tenants aren't as guaranteed as college kids are. Like when I was in college I had a room that flooded immediately and they didn't ever really fix it, it kept flooding the entire time I was there.
I remember when I was looking for a place there too, I met easily one of the most evil people I've ever met: a live-in landlord. It was a student who claimed he worked three jobs, but one of those was a landlord so I have no doubts the other two were bullshit as well. It was a terrible place too, very far from the campus but priced similar to places closer to it. The basement and garage were completely unfinished rooms, utilities weren't hooked up. He said we'd need to give two days notice if we were having friends over. At the end of the tour, by which point even dumb kid me who had only lived at home and in dorms knew I wanted fuck all to do with this place, he told me he already probably had someone else lined up. So he was wasting my time just to brag about what a hustler he was and to show off his shithole, horrible house he inherited. This was a 22 year old who had already full on became an evil landlord.
College landlords are the lowest of the low, they know they can get away with slumlording because the students have no other options. My friends had a landlord who would just walk into their house randomly (which is illegal but when has that ever mattered) until they screamed at him because he walked into one of the girls rooms while they were home alone. The amount of illegal separations and fire hazards in these houses is insane, at least twice a year there'd be some student house that burned down and soon it'll be a house made for 4 people that now houses 12 without the proper fire escape standards.
A college landlord in the town I live in got “busted” in a sex in loo of rent scandal. He was in the paper but I don’t think he faced many if any consequences as he was still a landlord after. He was eventually arrested for soliciting a prostitute
love to get charged $1850/month for this shitty 3br house that my landlord bought up, among other properties in the area, in the wake of the 2008 recession/housing crash - but when I ask them to simply consider fixing the goddamn river that flows downhill from the backyard and washes away the driveway gravel into the road (not to mention it fucking floods the entire front yard and warps it into a lovely pit of mud) every-time it rains more than an inch, they send the property manager out with two dudes and they spend a week digging a literal trench in the backyard and then proceed to leave the piles of dirt/random pieces of brick sitting for months before sending a snippy email one day in May about the backyard needing to be mowed. To be fair, at this point the grass was genuinely like a foot high but I wasn't going to try rolling a lawn mower over what essentially was a minefield of hard clumps of soil and random chunks of brick.
When I replied and asked if they were ever coming back to...finish their work (they started in like early Feb, disappeared til late May but at the time I was forgiving since it was the height of the coronavirus) they said "it is finished, but we will send someone to remove the dirt"
The front yard still floods every time it rains, but on the bright side we essentially have a lap pool for the birds stretching horizontally across the middle of the backyard. :agony-turbo:
this is why burlington vermont is a cluster of run down, drafty colonial housing.
I had a landlord that had to be harassed to get things fixed. By the end of my lease they wanted to raise my rent by $300. I said "nope". But the sad thing is that was one of the cheapest places to live I could find without subleasing.
Meanwhile, the college and its (often wealthy) students are clearly the main sources of revenue for the surrounding area, so naturally the city as a whole looks poorly maintained.
