Well, today is inspection day. Actually, it's inspection day for the next two days. What my mother and I were told yesterday was we have Bed Bugs. Now we have almost to do what is called a “make ready” because of that. For those that don't know what a “make ready” is it's the means of getting a unit ready for someone to move in. Yes, you read that right the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) calls the duplexes, triplexes, and stand-alone homes “units” and not homes. That means to HUD the tenants are not tenants. To HUD tenants are inmates or military personnel. That also means to HUD Public Housing Authorities are prisons or military bases.
You may be asking why I personally feel this way. It's a fair question to ask. Let's go with the fact I'm living in the same unit for going on 17 years now. Let's also go with the fact that after 4 of those years, we would get told we have failed the HUD inspection. Now mind you we would get told this years after the inspection has happened and it would always be stated as “general housekeeping” and nothing more. This has been ongoing since then and no matter what we do it's never been enough for HUD. It has gotten to the point that I started to threaten to do a “make ready” to the housing authority I live at along with apologizing to HUD for not meeting their standards of a clean prison cell or barracks in my own little way.
What makes things even worse is the questionable neighbors that we keep getting paired with in the connecting unit. They either bring in some problem or happen to be the problem on some level most of the time. Case in point we had one neighbor that thought they owned the housing authority. Another case in point is the current neighbor for a while had a questionable boyfriend come around banging doors in and causing all sorts of stress for both units. So as you can see living in HUD subsidized housing is not for the faint of heart. It's also not all that safe either. One has to be willing to deal with all sorts of shit and that includes HUD constantly going back and forth between standards. That's not even including the constant threat of eviction in one form or another being pushed by again HUD's constant going back and forth between standards by HUD.
I can only wonder if HUD even wants to understand this is what they are doing to the tenants. I can't be the only person in HUD-subsidized housing going through these kinds of problems when it comes to HUD. I'm most likely the only person willing to bring it up though. After all, not everyone is willing to bring up such problems to HUD due to various reasons. That includes not wanting to be homeless on some level which in itself is another problem that HUD fails to understand. That being said it is what it is and all some of us tenants can do is make do with what we have until we can get into a safer and somewhat less stressful environment that doesn't involve HUD in some way.