#landlord tears

[tangledinink]

you ever, like... live in a really lovely little apartment for four years and really enjoy it and are very happy there, but then your landlords abruptly tell you they're not renewing the lease next month due to reasons' outside of anyone's control, so you and your roommate scramble in a mad panic to secure adequate housing for the coming year while stressed out of your minds, and then you do find a nice new apartment but then when you get the keys on the first of the month when your lease begins you go in and discover that oh hey the dishwasher that the realtor assured you was in perfect working order prior to you signing the lease when you explicitly asked them about it? no actually it is busted to hell and back and filled with expanding foam and mold and steel fucking wool for some goddamn reason??? and sealed shut with metal brackets and silicone, and also the prior tenant left open unpackaged food in the cabinets and now there's a severe ant infestation, and also oh hey the stove is broken, too, so that doesn't work, and also oh hey, the shower is broken, too, so that doesn't work, either, and you look inside one of the lower kitchen cabinets, which you didn't get to look at during the showing because the unit was tenant occupied at the time, and actually the entire thing is filled with mold and has such severe water damage that it is partially collapsed and visibly the wood is rotting??? and then you immediately contact the new landlords like "yo what the fuck this needs to get fixed IMMEDIATELY" and they just flat out ignore you??? and now you're spending a lot of time reading up on the city's municipal code and tenant rights???

yah haha me neither. that'd be, like... crazzzyyyy tho, right???

[pricegouge]

Sometimes all I need is dick. Or Gillian Anderson.

(How’s life going?🫶🏻)

-🦌🍷

or a lobotomy 🙂‍↕️

and life is going like this:

[hiraethwrote]

best believe im watching haikyuu tomorrow to feel better

[trans-yllz]

having to restrain my rage when I see a video about someone's vile soulless pointless horrible grass lawn, empty of biodiversity and devoid of any real use, purpose, or benefit to anyone

[mooifyourecows]

our outdoor unit went caput right before a snow storm wow amazing the universe wants me dead but i will not let it take me before you know who

[senseiwu]

the fact that someone is going to tear down my childhood home, the house I've lived in for twenty odd years, that my GREAT GRANDPARENTS built in or before the 1940s... makes me freaking sick

[jackednephi]

Hey, Vann, why do you feel like Job sometimes?

Glad you asked, buddy. Our finances have been a hot mess for at least 5 years now. First from the pandemic, then from baby expenses, and the latest issue has been my husband losing his job right after we relocated for it and then falling through a fucking roof! Damn near lost his leg! This is after my grandmother passed, my daughter was kidnapped, and then my father passed all within the span of 8 months

We've been relying on workmans comp to make ends meet but they've been undercutting his rate and it's been a mess trying to fight them for every penny. Thank god for the lawyer at least. Then they sent private investigators to make sure my husband wasn't faking his injury. Like congrats on stalking a man with a cane! And following him as he conducts private and personal affairs!

But now even the undercut comp seems to have stopped completely. This means they're expecting to arbitrate rather than get him in crane school or whatever. Cool because this nightmare is almost over EXCEPT

We have exactly $81 in the bank, the credit card is maxed out from trying to make ends meet, and I don't get paid until Wednesday and then on Friday because I'm still working two jobs to make ends meet. Hell, I'm on day 13 of 19 in a row so I haven't had a single day off in two weeks

So gee! I wonder!

[jaqdawks]

I’ve got the best landlord ever I swear. I accidentally got the flat back of my earring stuck inside of my earlobe and she’s gonna bring medical instruments from her work to help me get it out. She’s so nice I rlly don’t deserve her

[obi1archive]

🤡

[bellshazes]

discovering the grocery closure i'm still mad about happened literally 7 years ago. so long an article on the topic cites a nearby winn-dixie in the neighborhood. what if we blew the city up

[itsalmostavengers]

SOOOOO MUCH HATE IN MY HEART THIS MORNINGGGG

[bratzboykai]

Whoever buys the house next door is genuinely going to get scammed and me and my neighbors keep trying to warn perspective buyers and the real estate lady hates our guts aoskdkkflsldll

[kitteneyejo]

so mad at the way shit works in the world rn i think it should all change drastically immediately with no negative consequences or periods of upheaval

[vitupera]

Philly has a program to provide stuff to manage storm water, from free cisterns up to subsidized (and installed) rain gardens! Check what your municipality offers for home improvement programs and the like.

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

[purpledragon18]

Yoooo I’m talking to some of the other residents about issues with our landlord and this is actually gaining some traction. If we can present a united front or, god forbid, unionize, I’m buying myself a cake.

[lawofficeofryansshipp]

How To Properly Handle Security Deposits In Florida (Statute 83.49)

Florida Security Deposits Hi everyone! I’m Ryan Shipp, your trusted Florida real estate attorney. Today, let’s talk about a crucial topic for landlords who own residential rental properties in Florida—security deposits. ⚖️ Security deposits are frequently an area of concern for landlords because of the specific requirements set out by Florida law. Proper handling of these deposits not only…