Third in a series
Re “The Lopez Family Is Well-Schooled in Practicing Parsimony”
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Mirsa Lopez, with her son, her daughter and her husband’s wheelchair.
Dateline East Los Angeles – The first sign of trouble the Sebastian Lopez family encountered with owners of the Wyvernwood garden apartments came on the day, belongings in hand, they were intending to move in.
“We were prepared to move into the apartment they had shown us on the first day we talked,” said Mr. Lopez, who, along with his creative 11-year-old son, battles a major disability.
Although he was using a cane on this day, Mr. Lopez, injured in a car-bicycle accident at the turn of the century, normally travels by wheelchair.
“The apartment we had inspected was shockingly beautiful,” he recalled. “I told them my son and I both needed carpeted flooring. I have a hard time walking on hardwood floors. They showed us an apartment in great shape, newly painted, thick carpeting, spotless.
Too Late?
“When we said ‘we will take it,’ one of the managers said, ‘I am sorry. It’s no longer available. You will have to take another.’
“That was okay because we thought it would be like the one they had shown us. Oh, no. It was a disaster. Peeling paint, no carpeting, it was filthy and disgusting. We said, ‘we’re not going to take this.’
“That’s when the manager named Marcello spoke up. ‘Tough luck,’ he said. ‘Then you don’t get your deposit back.’ We said we had signed an agreement for the apartment originally shown to us. We had not signed an agreement for the one they were trying to force us to accept.
“Bait-and-switch is what I would call it,” the victim said.
Once a strapping young man, Mr. Lopez, now 48 years old, said the fee was “hundreds of dollars,” and walking away would have been a hardship. Out of options, the family unpacked and settled in, committed to paying $888 a month two years ago.
Mr. Lopez described their home as one-bedroom zoned for four people, including the Lopez’s 9-year-old daughter Amalay and her brother Aeylias.
The Lopezes had selected Wyvernwood, which he said was built in the 1920s, as an attractive place to land while driving through the neighborhood on a home scouting mission.
If only Mr. Lopez and his wife Mirsha, a graduate of U.C. Irvine, had known the chain of nightmares that would follow:
Uninterrupted months of stress-sparking, ugly confrontations, broken-down and manager-ignored appliances, eviction threats, lawsuit threats, repeated harassment.
(To be continued)
