UPDATE 11/4/25: Good News!
After an exceedingly long. drawn-out process, the inspection for our new place has been scheduled for the 8th, and we should get the keys by the weekend. An abbreviated version of how we got to this point is below:
After going back and forth with Housing for...way too effing long (this whole process started on October 3rd, a move shouldn’t take more than two weeks to coordinate), we decided to start looping the Housing Authority director into what’s been going on. We hear nothing from anyone for about three days, and I figure that the assistant director got her hand slapped for drawing this out. About an hour ago my mom gets a call from the leasing agent for the new place, she finally heard from the person in Housing and they scheduled the inspection!
I’ll update the main diary with a timeline of this whole comedy of errors when I can sort it all out, the incompetence is mindboggling at times. Our moving date is the 15th we hope (that’s when the last month’s rent runs out).
The leasing agent and owner have been amazing, the agent didn’t have to hold the apartment for us but she did.
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We’ve been thinking about finding a cheaper place for awhile now, and our landlady kicked things into overdrive.
We actually found a cheaper (and nicer!) apartment a few weeks ago, and the owner badly wanted tenants. She had to do a couple financial checks, which Housing handled for us as they already have our income info, credit history, etc.
While looking for the new lease info to notify Housing, we (I) discovered that our landlady had converted our lease into a month-to-month...that requires a very specific process and consent of the tenant (which obviously never happened….hmmm). Housing won’t deal with month-to-month leases, so I suspect that this was a ploy to get us kicked off the program so she could then file eviction proceedings.
I’ve been trying to find the previous lease to find out when it changed, but we never got a copy of that (or can’t find it). I suspect that the lease was actually converted last year going by how twitchy she’s been about getting the full rent. (IIRC by law a tenant must receive a copy of a lease within 30 days after signing, which didn’t happen last year...we didn’t get it until May, which makes me wonder why she sat on it so long).
That’s the impetus we need. So we send a Notice to Vacate to both the landlady and Housing, get started on packing and contacting movers, etc.
Almost two weeks go by with no response from Housing; then we are told that our previous caseworker retired over the summer (wow, thanks for letting us know) and rather than pass our case to another case manager who actually deals with rentals, the assistant director has taken on her cases.
Another week goes by with nothing from Housing. Cue today, when the assistant director emails us saying she has not received our “paperwork”. What paperwork? The only thing that we needed to do as per her was supply the landlord with a signed, dated notice to vacate and notify Housing of our plans, which we did. She informs us that they cannot process our “request” for November 1st as our “new” lease doesn’t start until December 1st. That’s not what she said a month ago...when the new building owner ran the checks, Housing had to have known we were planning to move.
Director sends us a copy of the paperwork meant for the new building owner….which we probably weren’t supposed to see. (I printed and kept a copy, all the emails in this odd chain are going into a file to fully document the madness).
We re-send a copy of our signed, dated notice to vacate...which is sent back to us and the current landlady as “undated”. No it’s not. Right there on the scan next to the respective signatures is the intended move date: November 1st. Both us and the landlady reply to that effect with a polite “you must have misread things”.
Director doesn’t respond directly to that, but instead sends us a packet of...certification paperwork, as would be completed for the initial Section 8 application. Not the recertification that we should be getting. So we have to fill that all out again before the inspection for the new place can be scheduled (interestingly, we didn’t have the inspection on this place until after we had been here for a month).
We have a good friend who used to work for this housing authority, and she said (as we had already assumed) that the assistant director should not be handling rents at all. I suspect that more people retired or left than we know of...this housing authority is one of the “worse” ones in terms of paying for vouchers in non-HUD properties. The HUD buildings here are famously crappy (in various ways), and while the town is building more the majority of units are one-bedroom.
The prevailing assumption is that this town is “rich”, so there’s not a need for vouchers...so the local authority probably doesn’t get the funds it should. Or they do but it gets reallocated...somehow over the summer the town ‘lost’ $8 million which was already earmarked for continuing education.
Our local housing authority probably isn’t the only one in such disarray.
So, to the ask: The mover’s estimate for this is between $5000 and $8000. That seems really high compared to last time, but I know that everything’s gone up. The plan (my plan, anyway)—assuming we can get the keys on 11/1--is to move as much of the “small” stuff (boxes, kitchen stuff, light ‘nonessential’ furniture, etc) by ourselves as labor is the biggest cost.
We budgeted for $5000 and are trying to scrape together as much as we can without running up the credit cards again. Anything helps; once this happens we'll be in a much better financial situation. Paypal/Zelle is istafurik AT gmail.com
