University Heights has a lot of problems. A popular destination for students moving off campus, the Heights have always been home to a great rift between the residents and their landlords, with neither seeming to be in better standing than the other.
Year after year, students complain about landlords who don’t do enough to provide them with the services they require, while landlords aren’t even those answering the phones. Many landlords in the Heights area live in far away places, hiring a management company to care for the tenants while they collect rent.
Add to that a community that is visually deteriorating due to decades of neglect and a police force that’s becoming more and more frustrated, and the University at Buffalo has a housing crisis—right at its front door.
While the situation is a community issue by itself, for many students the problem begins with the apartments that they rent, which are often near uninhabitable. For Chris Sica, it was a matter of a troubling leak that wouldn’t go away.
“There was sewage all over my basement floor,” the UB junior said, “The entire house stunk, and the landlord didn’t even look at it for a week.” A sewage pipe had broken in Sica’s rented house and plenty of fecal matter was spilling onto the floor. Sica’s house is one of an entire district full of sub-standard dwellings falling apart from the inside out.
The University Heights is an area well known by any UB student as party central. Inevitably, the houses have taken ample damage over the years, mostly due to the negligence of UB renters. Landlords have to spend large amounts of money to fix these damages. However, many problems go unfixed and houses are left in disrepair. House managers and property owners have often been accused of promising to make these repairs for incoming tenants, but failing to do so.
There is plenty of housing off campus in the city and surrounding suburbs. However, few have the appeal that the University Heights area possesses to those who wish to be closer to the drunken shenanigans on Main Street. The huge houses, banging parties, and close proximity to South Campus make it attractive to many UB students. “Most of my friends have moved down there,” said Joanna Sanzone, a junior nursing major. “Plus, all my classes are on South, and the social scene is great.”
Like many others, Sica was excited about the possibility of living in the Heights. “The house looked like it was in good condition,” said Sica, “There were some things that were wrong with it, but the landlord produced a list and we made a verbal agreement that he would get the things on the list fixed.” Sica and his two roommates never thought to get a signed contract. As it turned out, Paul, their house manager, fixed very little of what he promised. “He basically lied to us—the washer and dryer didn’t even work the entire time we were there,” Sica said.
In addition to these problems, Sica had to endure the sewage pipe breaking and leaking into his basement for over a month. “After the landlord came and looked at it, he had some guys come clean up the mess, but it didn’t fix the problem. A few days later it was leaking again,” Sica explained.
Sica and his roommates leased their house through Miranda Real Estate, but David Ysupov, a resident of Long Island, owned the house. Nancy Miranda, who was in charge of managing the property, has no memory of the sewage problem, and does not remember the tenants by name. The roommates believe that the sewage problem lasted so long because the property owner lived on Long Island.
Miranda Real Estate owns and manages a large number of houses in the University Heights area and has been doing business around Buffalo for 29 years. According to Nancy Miranda, part owner of Miranda Real Estate, they also own various storefronts and commercial properties in the Heights area. “We have rented to all sorts of students, including foreign students and fraternities. In many cases things turn out fine, but when fraternities rent a large house with five or six bedrooms, that becomes the frat house,” Miranda said.
Landlords will place an ad in The Spectrum that attracts students in droves to their particular house, leasing it at what they perceive as fair rates. When looking at houses, naïve students are often rushed into leasing by eager landlords who make empty promises. Although Miranda said they put an addendum on the lease listing all the major repairs that need to be done and fix them, many landlords do not. The problem isn’t always just a broken ceiling fan or some shingles missing off the side of the house. Many of these century-old houses have extensive damage. Often, a student may have caused the damage in the first place.
As freshmen and upperclassmen both struggle with on-campus living, alternative housing is often times a favorable substitute. Saadia Khan and four of her friends are currently renting a house on Winspear. “When we saw the house, it was in decent shape, and we were impressed with the size. Another group of guys were there looking at it too,” said Khan, a sophomore speech and hearing science studies major. “We immediately went to the bank and put a deposit on the house after we saw it.” Khan had decided she wanted to live off campus because of the independence it offers.
The house they chose had some work that needed to be done. The upstairs bathroom leaked down to the room below and many of the window locks were broken. In one of the tenants’ rooms, the ceiling fan had been ripped down and all that remained were some wires dangling from an ugly wound in the ceiling.
When Khan spoke with the landlord in March, he promised to have the repairs done before they moved in. When June came and none of the repairs were completed, contacting the landlord had suddenly become difficult. Eventually Khan contacted the property owner, Sheldon Milo, to get repairs done.
When asked about the situation in 117 Winspear, Milo was defensive. “The young ladies knew what condition the house was in before they moved in.” said Milo. He spoke of having to house a UB sports team for a year, who tore the house apart. Milo went on to explain that the tenants produced a list that had some repairs they wanted done and a date of August 15 was given to him. To his knowledge, all of the requested repairs were completed by that date, and he claims he has spent over $4,000 doing it. He denied knowledge of the bathroom continuing to leak in the house, but did recognize that there was a plumbing problem.
Sheldon Milo, just like David Ysupov, lives on Long Island and hires people to show and manage his houses here in Western New York. This common situation in the University Heights leads to the question: how effective can these property owners be when they live that far away?
Saadia Khan and her four housemates pay $270 a month. According to the City of Buffalo website, the estimated value of her house is $65,000. These houses are dirt cheap, and are often bought in groups. It would only take the landlord five years to begin making money on his investment. Most of the houses in the Lisbon area are listed as being worth less than $60,000.
Stephanie Simeon, court liaison and community director of the University Heights district, handles cases in which tenants decide to take legal action against their sub-standard landlords. Students who decide to sign a lease on a house and then demand repairs later without getting a written contract can’t expect much from the landlord. “Everything has to be done in writing,” said Simeon. “However, if the house is deemed inhabitable and they are living in a condition of squalor, they can call the inspection office, file a complaint, and the inspector will come to the house. After that, the landlord has 30 days to make the needed repairs.” If the repairs aren’t made, that is when Simeon is contacted and the two parties go to court.
Landlords have a number of ways to make more money off the property they own, and it isn’t by just raising the rent. “Property owners will buy up a bunch of houses, chop them up, and charge large amounts for rent,” said Simeon. Two large bedrooms can be made into four smaller bedrooms, and the landlord’s income will double. “International students are also put at a disadvantage,” said Simeon. “They come here earlier than most of the regular students, and need a place to live quickly. The slumlords see the money, they move in, and that’s when the drama begins.”
Heights property owners live all over the country, as well as in Canada. “It’s much harder to work with people that do not live in New York,” said Simeon. “They don’t know our state laws. They hire managers to take care of the houses, but all they do is collect the money, and don’t do repairs.” Some young landlords will buy up a number of properties from an auction and fix them up nicely once. “They get a large sum from graduation, buy up these houses, fix them up, and put tenants in them. Sometimes the tenants destroy their houses, and the property owner doesn’t fix the problems the tenants created. Then they rent the houses out to other tenants, leaving them with the problems,” explained Simeon.
“In most cases, all it takes is a four-man cleaning crew to paint and clean up the place before it’s ready to rent again,” Nancy Miranda said, “Although, there has been instances where the sink or the toilet have been ripped off the wall, and we have to put in a whole new bathroom.” Installing something like a new bathroom can cost up to $15,000 and erases any profit made by the landlord or property owner. In those situations, Miranda usually does the repairs before showing the house.
Brian Hayden is the building inspector for the University Heights district. He is the person who comes to your residence if you call in a complaint to housing authority and sends out the letter of violation to the home owner if required.
“Going to court is essentially a mission of failure,” said Hayden. “We try to settle the dispute out of court and get the violations cleared.” Hayden said that the city handles roughly 4,000 housing court cases a year. It usually takes a minimum of two months to even get a warrant served. “Sometimes landlords will play a game with us and file a false address, which is a violation itself,” said Hayden. “Any attic bedroom being rented is basically a violation. Kids, particularly males, don’t care, as long as they have a bedroom and are close to the action.”
“Many colleges own their own homes so they can monitor them,” Hayden said. “Here, the university has no control over that.” Unlike Canisius in the Hamlin Park area, UB doesn’t provide houses for students to live off campus.
This is an interesting idea. With as much space in the Heights area at extremely low prices, the university could easily invest in housing.
Joshua Hancock, UB student and president of the Inter-Fraternity Council, couldn’t agree with Hayden more. “The school ought to invest in the Heights. It would create a central community,” Hancock said, continuing that students could live in a sort of community if the university were to build on a certain plot of land between Niagara Falls Blvd. and Englewood Ave. “It would give kids a better reason to be there and as a result, you won’t affect the permanent residents.” He said that at SUNY Geneseo, Main St. is divided between families on one side and fraternities on the other, and attributed the school as the origin to many of his urban planning ideas.
Hancock has cited parties of the past years to be a legitimate cause of concern. Police have used questionable force in the past, but mainly because of the frustrations of their jobs. “[Police] district E accounted for 37 of the 62 murders in Buffalo last year,” Hancock said. He said that when police came to break up parties, they’d come in angry, mainly because they had somewhere else to be, fighting real crime. Hancock was worried—“it could end in someone getting shot.”
Starting small, Hancock has already made progress. “We proposed to give the police contact lists for all of the university’s recognized fraternities. This way they can just send one car, and no one gets arrested.”
Vincent Clark, Director for Community Affairs at UB, stated that despite the recent murders, crime isn’t as prevalent as it may seem. According to Clark, the University Police does not have the authority to patrol the Heights area unless the Buffalo Police Department asks them to. This hinders any ability the university has to prevent the crime that is happening.
President Simpson recently announced plans to increase the size of UB by 10,000 students. UB dorms are already filled to capacity, and some students are forced to set up residencies in motels close to campus. When asked about Hancock’s idea for off-campus housing, Clark said that it is the right time to begin that sort of thinking. Clark, a resident of the University Heights district for ten years, said that the University Heights is an area that is important to the university, and vice versa. The UB Home Loan Program guarantees mortgages of houses in the University Heights district to faculty and staff members at UB. “Now is the time to look at what works best,” said Clark, “We are in the infancy stages of expanding the university.”
Houses in the Heights are a short, convenient walk to Main Street bars and local frat parties. You also no longer have to worry about getting 25 hours community service for puking and passing out in an Ellicott hallway. But, when it comes to living conditions, you don’t know what you’re going to get.
“Look at a number of different houses before you make up your mind,” Sica said. Living in the Heights area definitely has its perks, but you may also end up wading through a pool of your own excrement to get to your mysteriously defunct clothes washer. After an experience like that, 25 hours of community service may not seem so bad.
“It doesn’t matter what we do with the police if the residents are still angry. Hopefully, if we can get people in front of each other working together, we can diffuse the other problems,” said Hancock.
