Bedbugs swimming in Puddles of Water: Housing Nightmares Continues

By Leroy F. Moore

From public section eight housing in Berkeley to graduate housing at University of California at Los Angeles no matter where I go housing nightmares are reality. I thought I'd escaped my bad landlord that we had to sue because of a broken elevator in 2019. Although we won that case, the apartment complex continued to go down quickly with theft of our mail, the complete stop of maintenance of the property and what got me out was when it was taken over by bedbugs. At that same time, because of the bedbugs thus I was forced to sleep in the bathtub for temporary escape. I thought I was blessed by an offer from the graduate anthropology department at UCLA.

After a month of living in a hotel and house sitting for friends to escape my bedbug section eight apartment, I received the official offer to be a graduate student at UCLA with housing included. I didn’t know at that time, but the housing nightmares hopped in my suitcase and popped out in LA as soon as we drove up on campus. Firstly my apartment was not ready, so my family and I had stay in a hotel, then a friend’s house. Finally after like three days, my apartment was ready. We drove up to find my UCLA graduate apartment was in a middle of a hill on a street that you couldn’t stop on. So my sister and my nieces and nephews had to carry my stuff up a hill. Kiss my family bye, first thing I did was call housing and complain. Their answer was to show me a dorm that my scooter didn’t even fit inside so I shut up and made a home in my UCLA graduate housing in the middle of the hill for almost four years.

Now in 2024 it will be four years living in UCLA graduate housing in Westwood and in those four years I have had a toilet pipe exploded flooding my bedroom and living-room, UCLA housing workers using their own key to get in although I was at home and told them I didn’t need their help, hiding in the bathroom, to my refrigerator leaking for months, to the recent pipe bursting in the apartment above me sending water in my apartment at 2am on June 27, 2024 and had to wait until 10am for UCLA housing workers to show up. Through all of the above, I continue to pay my $1,530.00 monthly rent until this recent incident of pipe bursting sending buckets of water through the ceiling and walls and because of that I’m asking a month of free rent. However when I told a housing employee who came out with the workers to investigate that I wanted a month of free rent, she replied in a sharp voice, “withholding rent is not a good idea.”

Today, on June 28th, 2024, UCLA workers have a big air purifier in my living-room and they finally replaced my refrigerator after a month complaining of it leaking on my kitchen floor. On June 27th when the UCLA housing workers were cleaning up the water, the chemicals that they were using was so bad that I had to go to a café to get rid of bleach taste from my mouth and to relieve my headache.

As I follow what society’s equation for success i.e. a freaking highest degree, a Ph.D., still as an older graduate student I am faced with consistent housing nightmares that hunts me on a daily and at age 57 and I see no way escaping it even though I have worked in non-profits, started an international network called Krip-Hop Nation, been published in the New York Times, Bloomberg News and authored four books plus awarded an Emmy but all of my accomplishments can’t fight with the ongoing housing nightmare that I living right now as the noise from this big air purifier in my living-room becomes normal as I close my eyes to take a nap because in my sleep my housing nightmares are not in my dreams.

Leroy F. Moore