Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series investigating Athens rental housing.
Four roommates returned from winter break in January to find some of their belongings piled in the living room and the door to their basement boarded shut.
During the break, a work crew from University Off-Campus Housing entered 70 N. High St. to build new bedrooms in the basement of the property, according to court documents. The rental company, owned by John Wharton, did not inform the tenants about the construction project before it began.
“I arrived home to a surprise,” said Corey Callahan, an Ohio University senior and one of the tenants of the house, during testimony in court. “(The rental company) had physically moved (our property) upstairs to the living room without our permission.”
University Off-Campus Housing ceased construction after a tenant’s parent complained but restarted work on the project once the tenants sent in their final quarterly rental payment at the beginning of February, according to court documents.
Wharton declined to comment for this article. His lawyer did not return repeated requests for comment.
“We had thought this was resolved,” Callahan said. Once construction resumed, he added, the property “was basically in unlivable condition. If it wasn’t the noise, it was the fumes … from the construction.”
Callahan and his roommates are now suing Wharton and University Off-Campus Housing for $25,000 in damages, but this is an atypical route for student tenants to take, said Melissa Greenlee, a Center for Student Legal Services attorney representing the tenants.
Liz Yocom, an OU senior who lived at 78 N. Congress St. last year, said she and her roommates considered taking legal action against Wharton after numerous problems throughout the year but decided against it.
“By (the end of the year), we were just kind of done with the whole thing,” Yocom said. “We’d been through enough with (Wharton), and … at that point, we just decided to cut our losses.”
Yocom claimed she moved into the house last June to find mold in the upstairs bathroom and a door missing from a bedroom. University Off-Campus Housing converted the dining room of the house into an additional bedroom and did not install the doors by the start of the lease, Yocom said. Additionally, there was no armoire put in the room as promised so that the tenant of the new room, Katie Maxwell, could store clothes.
“It wasn’t worth the headache to pay (court costs) to take (Wharton) to court,” said Maxwell, an OU senior. “It didn’t seem like it was worth it to take action unless it was super serious.”
This revolving door of college students renting houses or apartments for a year or two and then leaving Athens can make taking legal action against landlords difficult.
“A lot of people don’t come to us,” Greenlee said. “College students are very busy, and sometimes unless (a problem) is really disruptive to them, they just don’t have the time or don’t want to bother with it.”
Others might be unaware of the Center for Student Legal Services or not know that it is available to students who need help with civil as well as criminal matters, Greenlee said.
In 2005, Brandon Epp, then an OU junior, lived at 116 N. Congress St. When he was gone for a weekend, part of the ceiling above his bed collapsed. His roommates told him that a leak in a ceiling pipe caused the damage.
“I was really upset, but what are you going to do as a kid in Athens?” Epp said. “Am I going to get a lawyer? Probably not. They know that. This all happened toward the end of the school year.”
Prokos Rentals, the company that owns the property, fixed the part of the ceiling that had collapsed and replaced the carpet in the bedroom after Epp contacted the Office of Code Enforcement, he said.
An inspection report from Aug. 16, 2005 — the day Epp sent an email to a Code Enforcement officer with pictures of the damage — details 29 code violations for the property.
The violations include mold around a bathtub, deteriorated support beams in the kitchen floor, and a hole in the wall of one of the bedrooms. The property has failed seven inspections since 2003.
Demetrios Prokos, owner of Prokos Rentals, said a bathtub’s overflowing on the floor above Epps’ bedroom caused the ceiling to partially collapse.
“It was not a leak,” Prokos said. “It was a tenant or a visitor of the tenant causing it.”
In cases where there are conflicting statements, Greenlee said it can be challenging for tenants to make a case without sufficient documentation.
“It’s difficult when it’s one person’s word against another person’s word,” Greenlee said. “The more proof and evidence people can get … helps me help them.”
pe219007@ohiou.edu
