A new program on campus just might help students get that leaky pipe fixed.
Ohio University's Off-Campus Living Office has created the Landlord Information Sharing Program to both foster communication between renters and landlords and resolve their problems in a fair manner, office coordinator Jim Hintz said.
The City of Athens is home to 4,752 rental property addresses, with nearly 1,000 landlords, said Theresa Carter, an administrative assistant with Athens Code Enforcement.
Students can come to the Off-Campus Living Office and submit a form outlining the problem, and the office will initiate contact by sending the landlord a letter. It is a non-legal way to start a paper trail in case the student would want to take legal action in the future, he said.
The office started publicizing the service at the beginning of the quarter and has not received any submissions yet, but most complaints brought to the office in the past are maintenance-related, he said.
Other complaints commonly brought to the office in the past involved landlords entering homes without a 24-hour notice and not receiving security deposits, he said.
Code Enforcement handles complaints that involve the health and safety of residents, such as a house without heat or running water, Carter said.
Student Senate's Special Committee on Housing Improvement is devising a program for rating properties and hopes to have it running by the end of Spring Quarter, said Off-Campus Living Commissioner Morgan Allen, who also serves as the committee's chairwoman.
If you just knock on someone's door and look around
you don't know what the real problems are she said. The Web site, tentatively titled Pick-a-Prop for its likeness to the professor-rating Web site Pick-a-Prof.com, will have a series of drop-down menus rating everything from the bathroom to the refrigerator.
The goal is to raise awareness among students about which properties and landlords are better than others and to improve the quality of off-campus houses by putting more pressure on landlords, Allen said.
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Magen Howard
