Outraged renter

As long as there is a credit system there will be renters. People who make bad choices with their finances will be forever beneath the shadow of bad debt and therefore ineligible for decent mortgage rates. There are of course other reasons for renting, such as short term stay situations, bad real estate markets or transitions between purchases and of course low income or student housing as well as just like renting to have someone else take care of all the problems and work associate to owning property- I may fit in multiple categories. In my four years of renting a place after emancipating myself from my parent’s fourth bedroom, I have seen bad to worse renting situations and most are attributed to living south of BYU campus. I have experienced and heard of countless horror stories of landlord neglect, price gouging and immoral deposit compensation, enough so to take a stand and begin at least a citywide renting awareness group to perhaps fix some of the problems that renters face. My dream, if I ever had the money, would be to buy up a bunch of properties and fix them up to livable standards and actually take care of them on a case-by-case basis. I would also assess and fix damages caused by previous tenants and not charge the next guy for problems they didn’t cause. I would clean the carpets if I charge each tenant 25$ for carpet cleaning each semester I lived there. Affordable and nice student housing doesn’t really exist here in Provo because students are so accustomed to living in a dump and don’t really know what to say or do to get anything fixed. BYU has really tied our hands making an approved zone for housing so the dirty 500 sq ft sardine cans can make an upwards of 1700$/mo. That is more expensive than Chicago, New York and Boston for the same size apartment and they live in Boston, Chicago and New York.