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openspace4lifeI'm writing this from a new apartment, but in the same apartment complex where I was before. The landlords required that I move out of my old unit so maintenance could rip out the living-room ceiling, which is filled with asbestos and has been covered with mold for most of the last six weeks. I'm now wondering whether I should have decided to end my lease, pay the early termination fee, and move somewhere else entirely. Maybe there wasn't enough time. Maybe the costs would have outweighed the risks of continuing to live in these poorly-built structures. Then again, maybe not.
It all started about two months ago, when I noticed a small damp spot in my bedroom ceiling.I called maintenance and they came and painted it over. Don't ask me why they thought that was the right idea. Of course, it turned out there was a roof leak, which resulted in much more dampness and a drip from my living-room ceiling shortly thereafter--in fact, the place where it was dripping was exactly the same as last year, when there had been another roof leak. Or maybe it was the same one, poorly repaired and subsequently reopened. At any rate, I called maintenance and they supposedly fixed the leak, and the dripping did eventually stop, just like last year. I thought my troubles were over.
Then, of course, the mold showed up. There were four major patches, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, a little one in the closet, and one in the "den" (which had already had a lot of off-white spots on the walls, probably some kind of mold, that I had never bothered to report). I called maintenance and was home when the guy came in with a can of spray-on primer. I argued that painting things over hadn't worked before, but he said the product, evocatively named Kilz, would actually get rid of the mold. And contrary to the linked website, it seemed to work. No mold had returned about a week later, when I flew to DC to attend the mini-State of the World Forum and visit friends and relatives. But when I got back from that week-long trip, the mold in the den and living room was back with a vengeance. It turned out that the recent roof repair had been botched, which meant that some of the ceiling had failed to dry out, which meant that further attempts to kill the mold would be pointless--it would always come back until the moisture was finally gone.
From that point (March 6th), it took the landlords three and a half weeks to make a final decision to move me out. But when they finally did so, they wanted to move with some haste--an emergency transfer, they called it.The complex is incredibly full, but a true two-bedroom unit (the second bedroom having a door, unlike my "den") was opening up the following week; it was to be cleaned up and ready by April 7th (later pushed to the 9th) and I was given three days to move, starting on the 10th (as opposed to the usual 24 hours for non-emergency transfers). I did very little preparation and had to spend most of those three days shuttling back and forth across the complex with about sixteen loads of stuff in my little shopping cart. I also paid a moving company over $400 to move the larger items, two of which they managed to break in transit (but both were easily repaired). For my trouble, I got a $200 concession on next month's rent and am otherwise paying the same rent as before.
My new unit is much larger than the old one and has its own washer-dryer unit, but it's on the first floor instead of the third, which means I get footsteps overhead but am not immune from roof leaks, as I learned shortly before I moved.On March 29th I got a call at work from the landlord, saying they had had to enter my apartment to do emergency repairs to a leaking pipe, which as I understand it was allowing a big puddle of rainwater on the roof to funnel down into the first-floor unit directly below me, possibly causing significant property damage. They came in again on April 5th and 6th, when I was very sick and staying home, to finish the job; this required me to remove all the stuff from the hall closet so they could take out the shelves and cut open the wall, which hopefully was not filled with asbestos. I'm left wondering if this or a similar disaster will happen to me in the nine months before my lease term is up. (UPDATE: It did. One fine evening, the bathtub in the unit above me started leaking onto the floor of my bathroom, and I had to hold back the water with a dam made of towels while waiting for the guy with the water extraction machine to show up. He told me that he has to use it about twice a week in this apartment complex.) (UPDATE 2: I have now moved to a new complex with no asbestos in the ceilings and no record of recent water leak incidents. It's substantially more expensive and the road outside my window is noisy, but I don't care.)
So what's the metaphor here? Well, the opposite of a global-warming skeptic is someone so obsessed with the climate crisis that he/she focuses on fixes that are too specific to just that crisis (e.g. the Richard Branson prize for figuring out how to pull a billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere per year). Such a person ignores the fact that an unsustainable civilization such as ours will inevitably continue to produce such existential crises. We need to "move out" of this way of life and into one based wholly on technologies and behaviors that don't undermine our own resource base, destroy ecosystem services, etc. The landlady may give us a few more decades to make that move, but we had better not get too sidetracked by short-term fixes that might let us cling to business as usual for a little while longer. As shown on the diagram on the sixth slide of Paul Ray's presentation for the State of the World Forum, relying on such fixes to save us will probably just lead to a slow death for civilization.
It all started about two months ago, when I noticed a small damp spot in my bedroom ceiling.I called maintenance and they came and painted it over. Don't ask me why they thought that was the right idea. Of course, it turned out there was a roof leak, which resulted in much more dampness and a drip from my living-room ceiling shortly thereafter--in fact, the place where it was dripping was exactly the same as last year, when there had been another roof leak. Or maybe it was the same one, poorly repaired and subsequently reopened. At any rate, I called maintenance and they supposedly fixed the leak, and the dripping did eventually stop, just like last year. I thought my troubles were over.
Then, of course, the mold showed up. There were four major patches, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, a little one in the closet, and one in the "den" (which had already had a lot of off-white spots on the walls, probably some kind of mold, that I had never bothered to report). I called maintenance and was home when the guy came in with a can of spray-on primer. I argued that painting things over hadn't worked before, but he said the product, evocatively named Kilz, would actually get rid of the mold. And contrary to the linked website, it seemed to work. No mold had returned about a week later, when I flew to DC to attend the mini-State of the World Forum and visit friends and relatives. But when I got back from that week-long trip, the mold in the den and living room was back with a vengeance. It turned out that the recent roof repair had been botched, which meant that some of the ceiling had failed to dry out, which meant that further attempts to kill the mold would be pointless--it would always come back until the moisture was finally gone.
From that point (March 6th), it took the landlords three and a half weeks to make a final decision to move me out. But when they finally did so, they wanted to move with some haste--an emergency transfer, they called it.The complex is incredibly full, but a true two-bedroom unit (the second bedroom having a door, unlike my "den") was opening up the following week; it was to be cleaned up and ready by April 7th (later pushed to the 9th) and I was given three days to move, starting on the 10th (as opposed to the usual 24 hours for non-emergency transfers). I did very little preparation and had to spend most of those three days shuttling back and forth across the complex with about sixteen loads of stuff in my little shopping cart. I also paid a moving company over $400 to move the larger items, two of which they managed to break in transit (but both were easily repaired). For my trouble, I got a $200 concession on next month's rent and am otherwise paying the same rent as before.
My new unit is much larger than the old one and has its own washer-dryer unit, but it's on the first floor instead of the third, which means I get footsteps overhead but am not immune from roof leaks, as I learned shortly before I moved.On March 29th I got a call at work from the landlord, saying they had had to enter my apartment to do emergency repairs to a leaking pipe, which as I understand it was allowing a big puddle of rainwater on the roof to funnel down into the first-floor unit directly below me, possibly causing significant property damage. They came in again on April 5th and 6th, when I was very sick and staying home, to finish the job; this required me to remove all the stuff from the hall closet so they could take out the shelves and cut open the wall, which hopefully was not filled with asbestos. I'm left wondering if this or a similar disaster will happen to me in the nine months before my lease term is up. (UPDATE: It did. One fine evening, the bathtub in the unit above me started leaking onto the floor of my bathroom, and I had to hold back the water with a dam made of towels while waiting for the guy with the water extraction machine to show up. He told me that he has to use it about twice a week in this apartment complex.) (UPDATE 2: I have now moved to a new complex with no asbestos in the ceilings and no record of recent water leak incidents. It's substantially more expensive and the road outside my window is noisy, but I don't care.)
So what's the metaphor here? Well, the opposite of a global-warming skeptic is someone so obsessed with the climate crisis that he/she focuses on fixes that are too specific to just that crisis (e.g. the Richard Branson prize for figuring out how to pull a billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere per year). Such a person ignores the fact that an unsustainable civilization such as ours will inevitably continue to produce such existential crises. We need to "move out" of this way of life and into one based wholly on technologies and behaviors that don't undermine our own resource base, destroy ecosystem services, etc. The landlady may give us a few more decades to make that move, but we had better not get too sidetracked by short-term fixes that might let us cling to business as usual for a little while longer. As shown on the diagram on the sixth slide of Paul Ray's presentation for the State of the World Forum, relying on such fixes to save us will probably just lead to a slow death for civilization.
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Date: 2010-04-20 11:08 pm (UTC)