Student digs are a mixed bag. Eamonn Marra recalls the rickety Wellington flat where he once laid his head, and the oddities he left behind.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
Between 2012 and 2014 I lived on Vogel Street in Mount Victoria, Wellington. Mount Victoria is quite a wealthy area, probably because it’s more or less the only suburb in Wellington that gets the sun. It’s definitely the richest area I’ve ever lived in. It has decile 10 schools, and $800k, $900k and million-dollar houses, which doesn’t mean anything in Auckland but in Wellington that’s rich.
Then right in the middle is Vogel Street, a shitty broken street with mostly run down houses, overgrown gardens, and cracked footpaths. It’s largely inhabited by students.
I say ‘Vogel Street’, but there was no actual street. Vogel Street was just 200 stairs that went directly up a hill, and my house was at the very top, backing onto the beautiful Wellington Town Belt. Because we were at the top of this innocuous staircase, almost every day we would get confused tourists in our backyard asking us ‘iz zis ze way to ze lookout’, even though they had walked past our letterbox, gate and house before realising that maybe they weren’t supposed to be there.
Because we were at the top of this innocuous staircase, almost every day we would get confused tourists in our backyard asking us ‘iz zis ze way to ze lookout’.
The evening after I moved into Vogel St, having carried everything I owned up the 200 steps from the nearest road access, I came across Colin, who lived a couple of houses down Vogel Steps. Colin was a grey haired, frail looking man, and he was wheezing away, pushing his bike up Earls Terrace, the street that lead onto Vogel. On the handlebars of his bike were two giant canvas sacks stuffed with belongings. My first reaction was ‘Oh my god, can I help you?’ - so my flatmates and I lugged Colin's sacks and his bike to his front door and went home, then looked out of our window where we could see Colin wheeling his bike back down the Vogel Stairs.
He did this several times a day, every day for the three years I was there. I don’t really know what he did with this stuff. There were rumours he was fundraising for his church. What I do know is that after helping Colin out every day for a couple of weeks, you lost all sympathy for him. Colin, you are bringing this on yourself and I cannot help you anymore. And that made me seem like a dick whenever I was with friends going to my house and just powered past Colin who’d be struggling his way up the hill.
You know when you go on a date, and your date spends the whole time talking about their ‘crazy exes’? Then you know they’re probably the one with the problem. I think the same is true for landlords: When we first moved into Vogel St, the property management spent the whole time talking about how terrible their other tenants were and how much money they had spent doing up the house. We should have known then that our landlord would be shit.
I read an article recently that said property investors were upset the price of rent wasn’t increasing at the same rate as the housing market, and here is my response: ‘I don’t care about the complaints of property investors.’
Our landlord owned all the houses on Vogel St, as well as about 100 other properties around the city. He was this sort of slumlord who was extracting as much money out of these properties as he could while putting no work in. He also owned the property management company that looked after these houses, which was frustrating, because when they tell you ‘We’re just trying to get hold of the landlord so he can sign off this maintenance,’ you know he is right there in the office with them. This came to be a problem when, 18 months into my tenancy, the retaining wall between my flat and the flat in front of us fell down, and our path started collapsing into our neighbours' property.
When they tell you ‘We’re just trying to get hold of the landlord so he can sign off this maintenance,’ you know he is right there in the office with them.
The property management said ‘We’re trying to get in touch with the neighbours’ landlords to discuss how to fix it,’ and I said, ‘We know that - the same landlord owns both houses!’ They never responded to that email. So for the next 18 months I lived at this house and despite appearing on Campbell Live about it, nothing was done. They eventually started referring to it as Earthquake Damage, which it wasn’t, but I didn’t have the energy to fight it.
The landlord didn’t care about the house at all, because he had these plans to build apartments along Vogel St. But there was one problem: my neighbour Paul and his family.
Paul’s house was the only house on Vogel St not owned by my landlord. The house had been in Paul’s family for years, and currently belonged to his son and daughter-in-law, who lived on the floor above him, and they had no interest in selling it. Paul was such a nice guy; he did basic maintenance work on our house and shared the path without being asked. He was the perfect neighbour.
Paul and my landlord had a long and complicated history. Paul had laid complaints about my landlord's lack of maintenance on their shared path, and the landlord left Paul vaguely threatening letters. Their relationship escalated every time they crossed paths and it all came to a head when my landlord tried to run over Paul at the dairy at the bottom of the steps. Paul yelled at him, then my landlord attempted to lay a complaint with the police. But when the police came to talk to Paul they left shaking their heads and told them both to not talk to each other anymore.
One day we received a call from the property company urging us to stay on as tenants for the next year. As an incentive they were only going to increase the rent by $50. The path was still broken, the house was gradually falling apart and there was no chance of any work being done to the place.
So we left Vogel St. Apparently the people who moved in after us left after a couple of weeks and the house has been empty since. About a month ago I googled the property management’s name to see how they were going, and they’d gone bankrupt. Hopefully this means my landlord is going broke too, but I doubt it. People like him get away with anything. There is no three strikes law for crappy landlords.
I’ve moved to Newtown, and I live near the Salvation Army, and sometimes I look out of my window and see Colin sifting through the stuff left outside at night, wearing a high-vis vest and filling up his giant canvas sacks.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Lucy Han
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