Daily Trojan USC.edu

Issue date: 2/21/07 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Liz Belfer | Daily Trojan

I have the best housing in the University Park Campus area. My roommate and I each have our own rooms and bathrooms, plus gated parking and a five-minute walk to campus-and we pay about the same as when we lived across the street in a one-bedroom hellhole owned by Conquest Student Housing.

My building was one of the best-kept secrets of the neighborhood. It was managed by a family who had resisted Conquest's land-grabbing for decades as it tried to remain financially viable amid Conquest's funeral procession of Benjamins.

Then, this past weekend two nondescript people in matching, polo shirts - clipboard, camera and tape measure in tow - invaded our haven and declared: "You are now Conquest tenants."

For such a decidedly somber message, these words were said with an unsettling perkiness.

I remember my Conquest experience clearly, and I don't have any interest in a sequel.

For my sophomore year, I signed a lease on an apartment I was not allowed to tour beforehand - a huge mistake on my part, but also super sketchy of Conquest. My roommate and I were moving into one of its older buildings, but always being the thoughtful bunch, Conquest said we would move into one with a newly renovated interior.

And how! The inside was so new, in fact, that when we moved in one week after our official move-in date, the bathroom was still under construction. As winter came, we discovered our heater didn't work properly. Repeated "fixes" left us with the option to leave the heat blasting at 90 degrees when we went to bed or to sleep through 40-degree nights. When our stove needed replacing, it was done promptly, but the installer turned on the gas and left the pilot light unlit - a gas-leaking time bomb we discovered ourselves days later.

My experience was nothing compared to that of expectant Tuscany residents in August, but since Conquest couldn't touch up an existing building in three months or competently maintain it throughout my lease, I have little confidence that my current situation will be any different.

Come June 1, Conquest will begin converting my building into "luxury" apartments, give it an Italian name and tack on at least a 185 percent rent increase, which I was told will steadily skyrocket as the move-in date nears. The rent hike was conveniently omitted from the notice (considerately taped to the door, two days after Conquest employees invited themselves over), but the eager beavers have already boasted their conquest of this building online.

When I wanted nothing more than to get out of Conquest, I was frequently reminded that time was running out to renew my lease. But now, when all I want to do is stay in my apartment, Conquest has given me the boot.

Unlike other existing Conquest tenants, I now have only two days to decide whether to renew my lease through some private arrangement before Friday, after which prospective Conquest tenants will find out if they received their housing of choice.

Or, I "have the opportunity," as the notice states, to wait until everything is filled up and then meet with Conquest a week later to see if I can be squeezed in anywhere.

Wow, Conquest. Do you mean to tell me I can have my pick of overpriced, overrated housing this week or wait to be bamboozled next week? Gosh, what attractive options!

Thanks, but I think I'll pass. Finding non-university housing is admittedly more difficult outside of Conquest's tidy online file number system, but the results are infinitely better. I pay less for more, and I actually feel as if I have a home - a rare, if not impossible, feeling to have under my new housing-monger landlord. My outgoing manager knows my first name and says hello whenever I see him. If I need anything fixed, I just go knock on his door, and he grabs his toolbox and heads over, right then and there. With Conquest, on the other hand, I'm addressed by a flier on the door as "Apartment #1" when I live in No. 7. And I don't think I have to get into maintenance again.

I don't yet know where I'll live next semester, but it certainly won't be where I am now. And if you're thinking of leasing my soon-to-be-available apartment, please reconsider. Conquest is giving the building's lackluster exterior a new facade, but that's all Conquest really is: a facade for housing that's just not worth the ordeal.

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Joanna Lin is an American studies junior from Lafayette, Calif. Carlo Romero's column, "The Tonic," will return next Wednesday.

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