Million Dollar Improvements?
http://www.campbellrivermirror.com/community/326473591.html?mobile=true
I was so upset about what I read that I wrote a response to this article in our newspaper, online, as follows:
“This is all well and good, and I am very glad for those getting necessary replacements, but this is a huge expense for what basically amounts in some cases to “cosmetics”.
Our rents were raised across the board by $60 a month in July of this year, which is a real hardship for low income seniors. Some of us have lived with porch door problems and window draughts for a very long time in this building. Some had been replaced, others weren’t.
How can a person be struggling to heat a tiny bachelor apartment in the winter with a $90 heating bill, and still be wearing coats and blankets to try to keep warm? That has been the condition here for some of us. The rent raise felt like an added insult to those of us here who live on a very low income and were seeing no real improvements.
Now we are having an expensive cosmetic “upgrade” to porches and windows (some of which were more recently replaced already) while I feel that there are still interior problems that have not been addressed. The shoddy $20 thousand dollar painting job, which was mentioned in this article, is quite disgusting, but there are other things.
When new carpet was being laid on our hallway floors, I could not help but see some of what had been hidden underneath the old carpet. I was shocked to see cracked and distorted, undulating cement by the elevator and the cement flooring obviously pulled away from the surrounding walls in certain places. These things were likely the results of earthquakes over the years. I talked about it with the carpet layers who said that this situation was one that people in charge were well aware of and they were just going to lay new carpet over top of it. I was dumbfounded.
New carpeting that has been laid in some apartments fairly recently is of such an inferior quality that it is already showing wear and tear that should normally take a long time to develop. This is not a happy situation at all.
I have no doubt that current intentions are good and that these workers are reliable and will do a thorough job. I do see a lot of potential waste, however, as new and old are removed together for the sake of outward appearance. Our encased old style porches served as wind break and sun shade. They will be replaced by open work porches which will provide a lot less shelter from the elements.
To summarize, money is being spent and work is being done for a cosmetic appeal that in some cases (not all) is not entirely necessary, to create a unified outward appearance to the building, while, in my mind mind at least, other things are being left undone. I am more worried about the very real potential for structural damage by quake than I am about uniformity of outward appearance.”
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Said my piece! 😉
AJ
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