Rhodey, My Baby Boy

Three years ago I brought home this tiny ball of fluff. At six weeks old, he was covered in ringworm and looking for a loving home.

Typically I only adopt adult felines, ones which don't have any annoying phases of development that I have to deal with. But Pepper would not accept an adult so my options were limited.

Pepper was still unsure of me, and I needed to bring her out of her shell so I took a chance. Bringing this little adorable boy home did just what we needed, and Pepper is now a very loving and trusting cat because of it.

But one year after I brought him home our apartment was flooded, and Compass Housing Authority did nothing to complete the repairs for a very long time. During this time Rhodey lost two pounds, but was otherwise looking quite healthy.

The vet said it might just be the stress, which kept me at ease and I just tried really hard to find a treat he would love enough to eat all up. But a year passed and no change, so we went in for a checkup last month and they decided to do an in depth check.

Everything came back as "normal", except one thing, his kidneys were not functioning correctly. The vet found he was suffering chronic kidney disease.

Usually caused by exposure toxins, it reduces their life expectancy significantly. Toxins like mold and mildew caused by massive flooding of an apartment which we were forced to live in during his development.

I have been fighting my own brain to accept this, the tiny runt I had come to love so much, the runt I had hoped to get at least twenty years with, I will have no more than five or six years in total. Thanks to the vile monsters who run Compass Housing Alliance, the monsters who dragged the name Compass through the toxic mud.

Since I got the news I struggle every day to do anything, I struggle to keep a smile on my face, I struggle to get out of bed at all. I struggle to live. I will never forgive Compass Housing Alliance for this, may they all suffer long and painful deaths on the streets, forgotten and alone.

Fuck Musicians

I will never spend money on musicians again, ever. The reason for this is copyright trolls who act on behalf of these musicians, who only encourage the trolls.

This problem is destroying YouTube, and YouTube can't do anything about it. The only people who could do something about it are the musicians, yet as I stated before, they encourage the trolls.

To make it worse, things like parodies and using snippets in a vlog or some other video is free advertising, and yet rather than be grateful for this free advertising they attack people who do that for them. Since I lost monetization anyway, every video they claim I remove, no exceptions.

I will not give free advertising to a musician who employs these trolls, nor will I buy any more of their music. I have even gone a step further and started selling the CDs of the music from these musicians for a much higher profit than they got when I initially bought them because they are all collector items.

My favorite musicians are the ones who do not employ these trolls, the rest of you can just fuck right off.

Why Agencies Are Bad For Non-Profit Organizations

A non-profit's income should be very near zero, of course this is after administrative costs. For housing this is a very challenging point to get, maintenance alone can bring an apartment complex into the red and devastating failures caused by lacking maintenance can drop that even more, not to mention actual damages done by the residents.

There are many issues residents will face that will cause damage to units, often without intent from the resident but by the very nature of the medical problem. Let's take the example of surgery, a very common occurrence for vulnerable members of society.

The wounds caused by surgery will take time healing, during this time blood will be likely to come from the wound. This blood will get onto lots of surfaces, which inevitably cause stains which cannot be cleaned up.

Often surgeries will add even more challenges, and more sources of refuse which will inevitably cause damage. Now a good organization will have a manager on site for the majority of the week, and said manager would know what was going on at all times even when not on site.

All residents would know who said manager is as well as have multiple ways in which to contact this manager. Transparency would be nearly complete, communication lines would never be blocked or severed without notice, and whenever an issue arose it would be well documented and taken care of without anyone getting put out or harmed.

A management agency is a for profit business, they want their employees to move their company into the green as much as possible, and there is no obligation for them to take a profit loss even if they are hired by a non-profit organization. So they make promises to reduce costs, and you hire them for that.

Well now the costs include their administration, the business owners, share holders, CEO, etc. As well as their employees, all of them.

So how do they "cut costs"? They reduce the number of hours the manager is on site, and it's reduced to an insane amount.

Given a typical business, you will want a management staff or team on duty for at least 2 more hours per day than the business is in operation. An apartment is, essentially, a business that is open for 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.

That's 168 hours per week, which is the same as saying 168 hours work that needs to be done. Apartments are a laid back business, often the manager is only necessary for about half that amount of actual work, however to accomplish that they must be on call and ready to show up at the property every hour of every day.

Agencies do not accommodate that cheaply, for the typical landlord they can increase rent a bit to help pay for better services and most renters are more than happy to accommodate that increase. But for public housing, non-profit, such a method is not viable nor supported by the state.

So the management agency will reduce the number of hours a manager is on site to level which forces these managers to accomplish at least 80 hours work in about 2 hours. This saves the agency plenty of money, they are in the green because of the contract, but the organization which has hired them is suddenly dealing with major damage caused by neglect, tenants being unable to contact a manager when necessary, and a manager who often sells off the organization's property to cut even more corners.

The agency will stay in the green, earning a profit as that is what they are suppose to be doing, while the non-profit organization is in the red so much that they face having to declare bankruptcy. Regular maintenance is so vital to an apartment building, even if something as simple as pipe inspections are neglected can result in massive flooding damage which cascades into neighboring units all the way to the ground floor.

A simple pipe leak, which would be detected and repaired with simple inspections, can explode into millions of USD in expensive repairs. Without a reliable manager on site capable of ensuring such inspections occur unhindered, the massive damage becomes inevitable.

Ultimately not only are the residents made to suffer what is essentially a slum, the organization begins to collapse under all that debt, and the end result is more people back on the streets with nowhere to live. This is what we are seeing happen in real time at Compass Housing Alliance, and the management agency is pushing the blame onto the residents to add insult to injury.

Seattle Housing Authority is unwilling to step in to correct this, the city turns a blind eye to this volatile situation, and Compass is trying to pretend they still have everything under control when they clearly do not. If we want to fix homelessness, this is one of those practices that needs to end as it does not help anyone involved.