Fourth in a series
Re “Sorry, You Can’t Have the Apartment We Showed You”
[img]2027|exact|||no_popup[/img]
Mirsa Lopez, with her son, her daughter and her husband’s wheelchair.
Dateline East Los Angeles – After the stunned Sebastian Lopez family firmly declined the shabby substitute unit at Wyvernwood garden apartments after the impressive first one they had inspected days before supposedly had been rented, the manager, at length, compromised.
Mr. Lopez and his 11-year-old son both are disabled, and accommodating their needs was crucial.
Recalling the scene from two years ago, Mr. Lopez said that when the manager opened the door to the third-choice apartment, he looked at his wife Mirsha, they paused and finally agreed it was “okay.”
Except, Mr. Lopez, no shrinking violet, added, “Both of the bedrooms need to be co-operative. And that really is where the language of ‘you people’ started coming in. He said ‘You people, you people, you people.’”
At first, Mr. Lopez did not know what the manager meant by that incendiary phrase.
This Is What He Meant
Assertively, he confronted his instant adversary. “I said ‘What do you mean by you people’? He said, ‘Oh, you disabled people. You think you are entitled to special treatment.’”
At that point, the second manager spoke up. “You are not being cooperative, you are not being helpful,” he scolded the bewildered, disappointed four Lopezes. “Where is your spirit of cooperation?”
The feisty Mr. Lopez, who speaks with authority, promptly swung back, verbally.
“I said ‘I need the carpeting because of my disability. When you guys talk about a spirit of cooperation, the problem is you tried to trick us. I know you did. You bamboozled us. Basically, what you did is fraud, and you know that.’ He said, ‘How about if we carpet one room?’”
Sebastian and Mirsha Lopez exchanged glances again. “By that time, frankly, I had nowhere else to take my kids,” Mr. Lopez said. “Our backs were to the wall. I said ‘Fine. Carpet one room, paint it, make it look nice and we’ll move in.’ The manager said ‘I’ll give you a brand new fridge, a brand new stove,’ which he did, and we said ‘great.’”
When father, mother, daughter and son moved in, their understanding was that Wyvernwood was rent-controlled. Nine months later, they found it was not.
“When we said we thought it was rent-controlled, they said ‘well, actually in the last three months of the first year of your lease, your rent is going to go up (almost 25 percent) to $1,012.”
That came as a shock to the couple. Hadn’t they signed a lease that would have included such a stipulation?
“We actually never signed a final lease,” Mr. Lopez said. “They denied giving us… We signed what was similar to a car dealership’s contract, like a purchase order kind of thing. It was something like conditional. We never actually got a copy of our real lease.
“If you ever see my real lease,” said Mr. Lopez, “you will see as whole bunch of ‘U.D.’s’ next to my signature. This is how you will be able to identify the real lease. U.D. is short for Under Duress.”
(To be continued)
