Senator Warren Introduces Legislation to Prohibit Employers from Requiring Credit Report Disclosure

[KansDem]

57. When I started out in life and needed to find a place to live...

...I would drive around a neighborhood until I found an apartment house I liked. I knocked on the manager's door and he or she would show me the available apartment. If I liked it, I paid a cleaning deposit and the first month's rent, sometimes the first and last month's rent. Then I moved in.

When I wanted to move on, I gave 30 days' written notice and moved out on the date indicated.

No problems, except one time when an "Entrepreneur" bought the apartment house from a corporation that owned it while I was living there. When I wanted to move out, I did the usual 30-day written notice. I also cleaned the apartment which was my standard practice.

The "Entrepreneur" decided to withhold my cleaning deposit as part of the "return" on his "investment." I took him to small claims court and won: "Entrepreneurs" can't keep the cleaning deposit as part of the rent. This fucker didn't know what he was doing except that he had an "investment" that he wanted a "return" on.

If he wanted to play with other peoples' money then he should have got into Wall Street (this was before the repeal of Glass/Steagall so he couldn't have gone the crazy-bank route). But the long and the short of it is: the apartment owner was way over the line in trying to keep money due me.

So I have a tough time accepting the "save the poor apartment owner from deadbeats" argument.