Nobody's Fault But Mine

I have been homeless for about a year, through nobody's fault but my own. Mostly.

Home Sweet Former Home

There is my jerk of a landlord who evicted me after living there 13 years, but I understand that. I got a new job, based on commission, which didn't pay as much I had hoped. I should have worked even harder. Also, there was a lag between when I started working and when I started getting paid. I should have known that.
Several of my neighbor called him a slumlord years before he evicted me, and there is a lot of truth to that description. Still, I was late a couple months in a row with my rent check. I had hoped after 13 years he would cut me some slack, but landlords aren't in the slack-cutting  business, they are in the rent-collecting business. I get that, and it was entirely my own fault.

Still, there are two main reasons why I call my landlord a jerk:
First, he served an eviction notice, tacked to my front door, when he knew I was working out of town. The first eviction notice was a 30-day notice. I told my supervisor at work, who could do nothing to help me, but I wanted to give him a "heads up" on my situation. I tried to work even harder, thinking I could earn enough to fix the situation.
I came home from working out of town to discover a new, 7-day notice to vacate. This came with the warning that a Sheriff's Deputy would show up, lock me out, and arrest me for Trespassing if I stayed. I had to cancel several appointments I had made and began packing frantically.
Much of the stuff belonged to my brother, who had died a few months earlier. It had been hard going through all this stuff since his death, partly because I was working so much. I didn't want to just throw away my brother's life and all his memories. He had died of AIDS, and my Mormon family had been too eager to flush him down the toilet like a diseased goldfish. Besides, some of our belongings were actually worth money, and I didn't want to be forced to throw it all away or donote it to a thrift store.
So I had to cancel opportunities to make money to throw away our belongings that were worth money. The second, 7-day eviction notice cut almost three weeks from my original packing schedule.

The second reason I call my landlord a jerk is because he put our house up for sale. Even before my brother's funeral I had expressed an interest in buying the property, which had a second rental unit in back.
At my brother's funeral I told our landlord I would like to buy the property, and he told me to my face that he had no plans of selling it. Over the next few months, almost every time I mailed my rent check, I said I was still interested in buying it for sentimental value. I explained that brother and I had both moved around a lot growing up, and after 13 years this was the only real home my we ever had. He never responded, except to cash my checks.
By evicting me, after renting there for 13 years, he placed a dark mark on my credit, which made it next to impossible to buy the house. Whether or not I actualy had the cash flow to buy the house, my 13 years of stability would have helped arrange some sort of creative financing. By giving me a 7-day eviction notice, it created a number of unnecessary hardships on me.

Now that I am homeless, my househunting is hampered by listing which state, "If you have ever been Evicted, don't bother applying here."

So, while it is my own darned fault for not having a higher-paying job, my landlord is still a jerk for serving a 7-day eviction notice, then selling the house from under me. But if I was as stupid and ugly as he is, I would probably be a jerk, too.