New lease season is here, and that means untold wonders for students. Group after group of… New lease season is here, and that means untold wonders for students. Group after group of giddy freshmen and jaded upperclassmen will pour out into the streets of Oakland to enter the pool of renters. They will make their marks on legally binding documents with all the eagerness of a new family and all the ingenuousness of colonial-era American Indians soon to have their possessions stolen by the very contract they ignorantly ratify.

Cell-phone networks will be flooded by calls to parents — ‘Mom, $2,000 a month is cheap right?’ — and Facebook will buzz with students trying to investigate the rental practices of landlords. However, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. Most likely, no matter how much research you do, you will end up with a lease that strips you of all civil liberties and forces you to spin straw into gold.

If my pessimism seems unwarranted, then you have never known someone who was charged $100 from their security deposit for ‘cleaning the inside of a dishwasher.’ A dishwasher, by all rights, cleans itself. In fact, if the dishwasher fails to clean itself, I have no faith in the ability of the appliance to perform its eponymous duty. This is but the tip of the asinine iceberg that is the fleecing of collegiates through rental agreements.

All is not lost, though. There are a few steps that you can take to safeguard yourself in the leap of faith that is living off campus. If the following advice comes off as bitter, good. Hopefully, it will give you a fair indication of what rental life is like. I, currently, have a wonderful landlord, but it is only by this exception to the rule that I am assured that only the most meticulous renter will spare himself the pitfalls of leasee-ship:

1.) A classic new renter mistake is renting a house with toilets that have weak flushes. Likely, you will argue that there are more important — although, perhaps, rarer — qualities necessary for a good home such as structural integrity and a location distant from gangland. However, walls can be rebuilt, and most of you will be old enough to purchase firearms. No college student, though, is a good plumber, and nothing is more demoralizing than a toilet you have to wrestle to flush. You will lose friends and be forced to have awkward conversations with future mates long before you ever want to have them. Try all your bathroom fixtures while touring, and trust the flush.

2.) If a landlord promises to put new carpet down, an air conditioner in, a roof on the house, etc., make sure that you get this agreement in writing. If the landlord fails to provide it, make sure they specify what year this renovation forecast is to go into effect. Also, demand that the landlord specifies whether or not a throw rug counts as replacing carpet and whether or not really big fans count as air conditioners. If possible, have your landlord build a tiny, exact model of the room that you are supposed to receive within the actual room.

3.) Once you have moved in, take pictures of every room in detail. Landlords cannot claim you broke your house if you can prove that it had been broken long before you ever occupied it. However, it will be unclear if the pictures are all from the same rooms. Therefore, you will want to compile said pictures into neat panoramas. However, there will be no way to verify when the pictures were taken. Therefore, you will want to seal these pictures in a time capsule with the date engraved and notarized. Bury this in your landlord’s yard and wait for the security deposit to roll in.

4.) The second most common way to lose a security deposit is when your landlord simply refuses to admit you paid all of your bills. Even if you have records that prove you are up to date on rent and any other utilities your landlord collects, you will be faced with tough questions such as, ‘Sure, you paid 12 months of rent, but why do we afford the number 12 special significance?’ Naive renters might think the answer is, ‘Because this was a year lease.’ However, your landlord is actually questioning how meaning develops through the use of language. It will be necessary to study Wittgenstein if you ever hope to get your security deposit back.

5.) Finally, it is not unheard of for landlords to simply disappear, thus vindicating them of security deposit responsibility. If your landlord seems like the skittish type, I advise that during one of your encounters you drug your landlord and implant them with a discreet GPS beacon. Tagging them like wild game might be the most effective and painless way of keeping them honest.

At times, these measures might seem excessive, but they are only so extreme as to match the absurd lengths your counterparts will go to rob you of your parents’ money. Good luck.

E-mail Erik at [email protected].