The days around Aug. 14 inspires shivers of dread from any Madisonian who knows what to expect. Called ""move-out weekend,"" it's enough to make a grown woman want to cry. The 14th is the most common day for downtown and campus —area leases to end, and the 15th is the day most new leases to begin. Tenants are given the boot all over town with no place to go for a full 24 hours. Streets jam up with moving trucks and curbs are barely visible under piles of old tenants' worldly possessions.
The origin of having a standard ""move-out weekend"" is unknown, even by the rental agencies. Nearly everyone who has signed a new lease for the year is homeless on the same night, resulting in no one being able to offer a temporary roof to friends. In addition, people can't help their friends move, because everybody is tending to their own move-in. During ""move-out weekend""people have so many items to haul that friends and family must drive in from out of town to help. The insanity surrounding this weekend only increases with the influx of traffic into Madison—and traffic backed up in our city is only joyful when it's game day.
While the 24 hours in limbo poses a serious challenge to renters, the time frame is equally overwhelming for rental agencies. Some large agencies have 500 apartments or more to clean and repair in one 24-hour period. Many companies hire temporary staff to stay up all night to clean their apartments. A representative of a major Madison rental agency confirmed the stress and frustration of this time crunch. And while few students will have sympathy for rental agencies, there are the well-meaning property owners out there—something I can attest to. It must be recognized, however, that the common perception of rental companies stems from what seems to be an across-the-board nonchalant attitude toward renting properties to college students. For the prices paid, tenants should be able to expect more than an inch of grime on surfaces and urine-stained carpet. Take the example of a university student moving into her new apartment only to be welcomed by two ceramic plaques from the previous tenants still glued to the wall, and an obviously un-swept and un-mopped floors. The walls were covered in tape, cracks, peeling paint, nails, command hooks and dirt, despite the property owners having specifically promised that the cleaning staff and painters had come and gone. There are limitless other examples of this negligence around the downtown area.
One current solution is variations of what some call ""early occupancy agreements,"" which tenants can sign to move in early. It's one of the cheapest and easiest ways to avoid being homeless for a night. It is also rather disgusting because it means tenants accept the apartment as is, forgoing their right to any cleaning done by property owners. Landlords are more than accommodating when it comes to this option, because it means less work for them. Considering it seems some companies have become comfortable blatantly lying about an apartment having been cleaned, rental agencies don't really need help cutting corners.
Rental agencies face the same challenges everywhere you look. Some handle it better than others, but even those with good intentions sadly get a bad rap right along with the rest when it comes to ""move-out weekend."" The 24 hours of homelessness that feel like a lifetime to us, seem like the blink of an eye to them in comparison to the stress of cleaning all their properties in 24 hours. Its a difficult situation for both parties involved.
It doesn't need to happen again. If property owners in the city coordinated their efforts, a solution could be reached. If even the largest five or six rental companies staggered their move-in and move-out dates over one week, tremendous improvements would be seen. What would result would be a rotation of friends staying with each other for a couple of days, as opposed to all of the storage units and hotel rooms in the city being booked a month out. Every time a group of people was scheduled to move out, another group would be ready to house them or help haul their belongings.
Staying with friends wouldn't be everyone's top choice, and there would certainly be some trailers and help coming in from out of town. Even if the amount of traffic doesn't decreased, spreading it out over a few more days would help the congestion.
Granted, there would be a percentage of tenants that would be between leases for a full week. If the rotation was planned and coordinated, they would know this ahead of time. They could research options to prepare for it, exactly as we do for the current 24-hour period. These options could include the classic couch-surfing. Especially adventurous tenants could potentially embrace the silver lining and designate that week as a vacation week, heading back to their hometown or off on a road trip. Of course there would be some grumbling among people in this position, but the decreased stress on the general population would be worth this small percentage of extra trouble, a sacrifice only slightly worse than what is commonplace now.
A coordinated move-in and move-out date rotation would also make it possible for landlords to have larger windows of time for required maintenance. This would ease the strain on landlords and also provide far fewer excuses to those that tend to be negligent. Tenants and rental agencies alike would greatly benefit from this staggered moving schedule.
Heather Heggemeier is a junior with an undeclared major. Do you agree that changes to the move-out process would benefit students? Please send feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.
