Safety in Question

Kevin Cloud, senior psychology major, rents a house on North Mantua Street. The house is split into two apartments, a one-bedroom upstairs and a two-bedroom downstairs. Cloud rents the upstairs portion of the house.

Kevin Cloud looks up at the ceiling that is bowing in his living room. His landlord already had to fix the ceiling that caved into the bathroom. {larger}

He has experienced a handful of problems since he and his friends moved in this past August. The upstairs kitchen sink and appliances are all unusable, so Cloud has turned his kitchen into an office.

“If we didn’t share this whole house, I wouldn’t live up here,” Cloud says.

Cloud has had the same experiences as other students with the gas bill. He says the bill is usually $150 to $250 a month during the winter. They turn the heat down at night and when they leave the house.

“The bill is up to $680 because we can’t keep up with it,” Cloud says. “We think some walls may not even be insulated. I told my landlord, ‘We’re not going to be able to afford this.’”

The roommates also have covered the windows with plastic to try and lower their bill.

“The houses are so old,” Cloud says, “let alone that they won’t even insulate the windows.”

But it gets worse than just a pricey gas bill.

One time Cloud and his roommates smelled gas coming from the furnace in the basement so, he says, they called the fire department.

“They looked at the furnace and said it was so rusted it needed fixed immediately,” Cloud says. “They said, ‘It’s a dangerous furnace.’ The fire department was floored.”

“Maybe three weeks later a maintenance worker came to fix it.”

Cloud says his landlord told him he didn’t know anything about the furnace.

Sam Bonsignore, Cloud’s landlord, owns two rental properties in Kent. He has been renting out properties for 21 years. He says when tenants notify him of a problem, he sends a maintenance man to take care of it.

But Cloud says the repairs are not made in a timely manner.

“Maybe three weeks later a maintenance worker came to fix it,” Cloud says.

The fire department also noticed there were no smoke alarms or fire extinguishers in the house and told the tenants to get some, Cloud says. He told his landlord, but none had been installed at the time of the interview.

Bonsignore says he is not required by the health department to provide smoke alarms so Cloud bought one for the upstairs, but there still are none downstairs.

Ferlito, the health commissioner, says that houses divided into three or more apartments or lodging four or more unrelated people need to be licensed by the Health Department. The health department requires smoke detectors and fire extinguishers in those houses, but because only three people live in Cloud’s house, it is exempt.

The furnace and smoke detectors were not the last of Cloud’s housing woes.

In the downstairs bathroom, there is a rectangular patch visible on the ceiling. The patch is there because at one point, the ceiling collapsed, leaving a hole in its place.

The heating ducts in Kevin Cloud's basement lead into an exposed hole in the wall. {larger}

“We couldn’t use the bathroom until they cleaned it,” Cloud says. “The carpet smelled the whole house up. It took them a month to tile the floor. From the time it (the ceiling) collapsed to the time it was completed was two to three months. But it only took a day to fix it.”

Before Cloud and his roommates moved in, they were told the bathroom was going to be remodeled. It wasn’t.

Ferlito says students should make sure the apartment or house looks good before they sign the lease.

“Be careful if they (landlords) say they’re going to fix it up,” Ferlito says, and make sure repairs are made before moving in.

Bonsignore says Cloud’s house is 80 or 90 years old.

“Old for a lot of people is good,” he says. “They like the character.”

But older houses can cause problems with maintenance and upkeep, he adds.

“We just want to get the hell out of here. It’s pretty much to the point where it’s a joke.”

The ceiling in the living room is in bad condition, too, Cloud says. Part of it hangs at least half an inch lower than the rest of the ceiling.

“We put pressure on him (Bonsignore) when the ceiling collapsed,” Cloud says.
Water sometimes leaks out of the gap. He attributes it to a leaky pipe in the ceiling.

“He (a maintenance worker) came out and said he couldn’t find anything causing the drip,” Cloud says.

He says he and his roommates want to move out before their lease is up.

He also thinks repairs sometimes take too long to fix.

“We just want to get the hell out of here. It’s pretty much to the point where it’s a joke.

“We want to try to get out of it in May. But we signed a lease. What are we going to do? We moved in here with the understanding the house was in good condition.”

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