Kyle Mitchusson noticed something was off as he walked through his newly rented one-story home last year.
The smell had grown more apparent, the white walls noticeably darker, as if something rancid lay beneath layers of paint. As he climbed into his attic, he noticed the walls were covered in black mold, a condition unknown to Mitchusson and his roommates when they moved in.
“They were big black circles, some a foot and a half wide,” Mitchusson said. “It wasn’t noticeable at first because they were painted over.”
Three weeks after Mitchusson moved in, the UF exploratory junior and his roommates left. Two of them later contracted strep throat.
Mitchusson said the landlord knew about the mold when he drew up their lease. The former landlord, Jim Weaver, said he does not remember whether he got requests from the city to come in and test for mold.
“(The tenants) informed me (of the mold),” Weaver said, “but, like I said, there was maybe some mold in the bathroom, but that’s kind of normal if it’s not cleaned that well.”
In Gainesville, landlord-tenant disputes are common, and many affect UF students.
Jon Adcock, the director of UF Student Legal Services, said he deals with at least one case per week regarding these disputes.
“Landlords often take advantage of the lack of knowledge that students have about their rights as tenants,” said Miguel Valdez, the coordinator for the Alachua County Labor Coalition.
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Eventually, representatives of the city of Gainesville went to the house, located at 5 NW 28th St., and condemned it unfit for residence, Mitchusson said. Weaver said the tenants may have contacted the city themselves to come in and inspect the home, but he said code enforcers did not contact him.
Mitchusson said the city asked Weaver to pay back two months’ worth of the rent his roommate paid, but he refused, arguing Mitchusson still owed him his first month’s rent. When Mitchusson’s sore throat later developed into strep throat, he asked if Weaver would pay his medical bills.
Again, he refused.
“To be honest,” Weaver said, “he may have asked me to pay, but I don’t really remember.”
Mitchusson tried bringing his case to a small-claims court but decided he didn’t have enough time to go through all of the legal work, he said.
Jason Fults, a co-chair of the ACLC, said many people wind up in a similar situation.
“Your only real remedy for that is to get a lawyer or go to a small-claims court,” he said, “which a lot of students and low-income people aren’t going to go through.”
Last month, the social- and economic-justice advocacy group held a meeting to inform tenants about their rights.
The meeting, which came after the ACLC was battling its own landlord over its renter’s fee, was also a way to gauge whether there were enough people having issues with their landlords to consider it a citywide issue and to begin an advocacy campaign. More than 50 people — landlords and tenants alike — showed up to the meeting. After the initial meeting, Three Rivers Legal Services Inc. began offering to help low-income tenants with landlord disputes, he said.
The coalition is now looking for help developing a cost-effective way to deal with landlord-tenant issues outside of a courtroom.
“Our goal would be to establish some sort of local establishment where people could go to the city or the county if they feel like they’ve been treated unfairly and they could get some relief,” Fults said.
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Since suing her landlord two years ago, Lexi Rodriguez has accrued nearly $2,000 in legal fees.
After signing a lease with Union Properties of Gainesville when she was 17, the UF marketing senior continues to battle the company over charges she calls unfair.
It all began when Rodriguez and her roommate moved into their three-bedroom apartment, which she chose not to identify. Their landlord said she would find a third roommate and that they were not responsible to cover the cost of the vacant room, but Rodriguez later discovered that was not the case, she said.
“I realized they were charging me $40 to $50 extra a month for rent for two years,” Rodriguez said. The discovery came after Rodriguez was evicted from the apartment after her financial-aid money came late.
When Rodriguez moved out of the apartment, she made sure it was clean. They barely had any furniture to begin with, she said.
That’s why she was surprised when she and her roommate only received $40 of their $700 security deposit back, she said.
A spokesperson for Union Properties declined to comment, and asked that the name of the company not be used in the article.
The yearslong dispute has left Rodriguez worried and unsure of how long her finances will allow her to litigate. But the hope for retribution keeps her going, at least for now.
“They manipulate college students who don’t have a clue,” she said.
