State College landlords, PSU tenants are butting heads over rent. Can either side find a solution?
Not a single day has gone by where Penn State junior Alexis Marchioni, a kinesiology major, hasn’t worried about rent.
The 20-year-old bartender, who’s putting herself through school, worked three nights a week during the spring semester. And she usually takes a full-time waitress job during the summer. Or, at least she did — until both businesses closed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, like thousands of other Penn State students and parents, she’s not sure what comes next when the rent comes due. And she’s not sure if anyone can help.
“I have maybe a month or two left in my savings, and then I don’t know,” said Marchioni, who pays $900 a month for her part of a four-person apartment in The Retreat at State College. “Hopefully, it’s over by then. I don’t know. It’s definitely stressful.”
Marchioni is part of a growing chorus of concerned students and parents who have lost jobs, businesses and financial security as COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has raged throughout the country. While many struggle to make ends meet, the bills remain due and rent is no exception — even for the students who have been asked not to return to campus.
Many have reached out to their off-campus landlords for a deferment or discount — “compassion and fairness,” some advocates call it — only to be met with no response or a reply that ultimately ends with the same message. We’re sorry, but we need the money, too. Rent’s due on the first.
Penn State mom Robyn Kusner, who helped organize a petition with nearly a thousand signatures in support of rent “fairness,” knows that all too well. While she remains financially secure for now, she knows many others are not.
She’s heard their stories, through a private parents-only Facebook group. She’s listened to students who can no longer support themselves. She’s bent her ear toward parents who have lost jobs and can’t afford an apartment that amounts to “an expensive storage unit.” And she’s heard, time and time again, sometimes through tears, how landlords either can’t or won’t help them.
“They’re in a business, and it’s their revenue and they need to make their money — I get it,” Kusner said. “But we’re all sacrificing right now. This is an unprecedented moment. There is no rulebook for what’s going on right now. So why not work together? Isn’t that the Penn State way?”
Seeing it from both sides
Twice in the past two weeks, Penn State mom Rhonda Bastian has felt the room spinning — before calling a friend to talk her down from an anxiety attack.
She operates her own business, a travel agency, out of her Lehigh Valley home. She’s the landlord herself for a single property in Bethlehem. And she’s the mother of a 20-year-old Penn State junior who lives in Beaver Terrace, in a $2,500 apartment split four ways.
“When people say you’ve gone through worse and you’ll get through this?” Bastian said. “No, we haven’t gone through worse. For many of us, this is the worst we’ve had to endure.”
The tenants in Bastian’s building, students at Moravian College, can’t pay their rent because their father lost work as a painter. ”And you can’t get blood from a stone,” Bastian said, so she set up a payment plan so they can pay when they’re able.
The problem, Bastian said, is she uses that income to pay her son’s rent. And while she has enough savings to last at least two months, she’s not sure what kind of future she faces. So she could use some relief herself — especially from an apartment that sits empty, ever since Penn State moved to online-only classes March 11 during spring break.
“I guess I just want a glimmer of, ‘We understand what you’re going through and we’re going to give you a discount,’” she said. “I don’t expect them to waive the rent. That’s unreasonable.”
The Centre Daily Times reached out to more than a dozen landlords, apartment complexes and property-management companies to see how they’ve handled such requests. Two responded: Herlocher Properties and Associated Realty Property Management.
According to communications director Sharon Herlocher, Herlocher Properties — which oversees several buildings — has tried to take such requests on a case-by-case basis. Herlocher recently worked out one payment plan with a New Jersey bartender and father who lost his job, but said other parents are calling for discounts not based on need but based on the fact their children aren’t using the apartment.
Only about one-third of her apartments are currently occupied but, with real-estate taxes upcoming and mounting expenses, she can’t give everyone a rent-free month like multimillionaire celebrities Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard.
“I truly feel like we’re all in this together right now,” Herlocher said, before adding, “Many times your heart and your checkbook don’t equal.”
ARPM President Mark Bigatel, whose company manages the properties for more than 300 owners, said “almost all” of their tenants paid rent April 1. He said any requests made by the tenants due to financial hardship would be forwarded to the owner, and it’s then up to the owner to decide whether students and parents receive a discount, deferment — or nothing at all.
“Some of our owners can do something, while others cannot,” Bigatel said. “We have several owners who are in financial hardship situations.”
In one case, Bigatel said, an owner chose to defer half of a non-student’s rent and to take that over the next three months, in time for the stimulus check. But many others such as Bastian — whose son lives in a property managed by ARPM — have received no relief, and some haven’t received a response outside of a form letter.
Four other parents, who have not suffered severe financial hardship, also told the CDT they either received no response from ARPM or the property owner declined to offer a discount or deferment.
“Nobody expects anyone to give you free rent,” Bastian said. “But they do have to do something to work with these people that say, I can’t pay you now but maybe when I get my tax return.”
Added Bigatel: “I think all the landlords we’ve talked to are trying to do anything they can to help. That’s been the overwhelming sentiment of our owners. Everyone is trying to do whatever they can to help in this situation.”
The petition
Sharon Mayer, a nurse and Penn State mom, just wanted someone to listen.
Sure, with a husband who’s also a nurse, her family is financially stable. But with him recently experiencing a fever, and with the future unknown, Mayer took to the 16,000-plus member Facebook group “Penn State Parents,” to express her frustration with ARPM — specifically O’Brien Place, two blocks off campus — over the fact common areas at the property were closed, her two college-aged kids were at home under the advisement of Penn State and she was still expected to pay full rent.
She didn’t have to wait long before the responses started rolling in.
Robyn Kusner, who lives just outside Philadelphia, chimed in. As did Mark Naidoff from Illinois. Within two days, parents with similar issues at other properties shared their experiences and Mayer organized a conference call with Kusner and Naidoff — all three strangers — to discuss how to proceed.
They decided on organizing a petition asking for “fairness” from all State College landlords. If most properties are sitting empty and utilities are included in some rents, shouldn’t those savings be passed on to the tenants? And if common areas like study halls, gyms and hot tubs are closed — which have already been paid for — shouldn’t that also constitute at least a small discount?
But, above all, after listening to some parents sob between talking about job losses and others sharing just how anxiety ridden the past two weeks have been, they opted to focus on those who needed the most help. Maybe everyone deserves a discount, or deferment, but those who need it most should get it most, they said.
“We all know we signed leases and that we have an obligation,” Naidoff said. “We’re not trying to get out of that. It’s about a deferral or discount and helping those who are having a really tough time.”
Hundreds of parents have already added their names to the petition. Numerous students have also signed their names, after another petitioning group — organized by Penn State special education major Jillian Puglisi — combined forces.
Above all, the groups are at least hoping to raise awareness. As of Friday afternoon, the office of Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, said it received just a single inquiry regarding the issue.
The Facebook group is hoping to soon send the petition to local landlords and state leaders so the issue is no longer overlooked.
What’s the answer?
There is no answer. At least not yet.
At the local level, there is little the university or the borough of State College can do. Although Penn State has offered refunds for on-campus housing and meal plans, it has no control over off-campus rent. Likewise, State College has no legal authority to assert rent mandates or legislate mortgages with local landlords.
The best the Borough Council can do is offer a resolution, largely a ceremonial gesture, on how owners treat their tenants. Council member Evan Myers said that’s under consideration for the April 13 meeting.
“It’s a bad situation, and we all need to accommodate one another,” Myers said. “We all need to figure this out and being harsh, being draconian about it, is not a solution.”
A Penn State spokesperson said the university remains in talks with landlords but ultimately cannot force their hand. The university does have a Student Emergency Fund that can be used in rent situations but, typically, the amount awarded does not exceed $1,000.
At the state level, there might be even fewer answers.
In a statement sent to the Centre Daily Times, the office of state Attorney General Josh Shapiro emphasized three points: The state Supreme Court has issued an order prohibiting evictions until after April 30, the federal stimulus package should hopefully assist people, and the PA Cares Program should offer relief to students and others in Pennsylvania.
But most students and parents aren’t concerned about evictions — most would welcome an early termination, if it didn’t impact their credit — and most will not be helped by stimulus checks. If parents claimed their college-aged children as dependents, they will not receive a $500 credit like they would with children ages 16 and younger. And, if claimed as dependents, college students will also not qualify for a $1,200 stimulus check.
On top of that, the PA Cares Program helps those with financial hardship pay their utility bills. But many downtown apartments sit empty, or utilities are included in the rent.
A spokesperson for Corman was much more succinct about the issue.
“I don’t know what, if any relief, is going to be available out there to them,” spokesperson Jennifer Kocher said. “Unfortunately, those are private contracts between themselves and a private owner, so I don’t know what type of options are out there.
“It’s not something that has come across, as far as any of the fiscal relief that we have considered to date. Right now, the thing we’re trying to do is to stop the bleeding in places like those hospitals, where they’re losing significant amounts of money.”
When asked how the state might handle the issue in the future, Kocher acknowledged she wasn’t sure. Financial aid would likely have to be made directly to the tenants but, with tax revenues for the state having “fallen off a cliff,” such a program would be difficult to pay for.
In the meantime, it’s up to individuals to find relief in other ways — whether that means signing up for unemployment, delaying mortgage payments, seeking help from nonprofits or finding lenders with low- or, in some cases, no-interest emergency loans.
In the end, though, Kusner said it comes back to the same message she preached at the start. If you can’t afford rent, the Penn State community should pull together and help.
“We can all get through this,” she said. “There’s no need for anybody to have to suffer through this. For the landlords to expect that their revenue stream is not going to be affected is crazy to me when the rest of us are dealing with that.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, so people are looking for some fairness and some compassion — and that’s basically our goal. People need some financial relief.”
This story was originally published April 5, 2020 at 7:36 AM.
