April 16th 2025. I reported my landlord to housing inspections, then I told the other people invovled, except for one person who ratted me out.
I was quite surprised, although I should have known better. Naturally, I wanted to get back at the person who ratted me out, but couldn't think of any sensible way to do this.
Then I had an inspiration to make some platform where people could rate and review each other. I would rate him a 0/10 for trustworthiness. I looked a bit into the history of similar apps (and they were incredibly toxic).
Anyways, somehow rateanybody.com was available for $10 so I bought it, and vibecoded it in an afternoon.
I'm storing all the data on Arweave, where everything is stored permanently and immutably. Even if I take down my site, the ratings and reviews of people can still be accessed, as long as they use the right queries to find them.
The "clever" thing about using arweave is that I shouldn't be on the hook for anything, since I only help people search for things stored on their blockchain or whatever, and don't have any control over the data.
How I found myself living here was strange. When looking for housing, my roommate was losing patience. On the side I was trying to find another roommate but was unsucessful. At one point I found another person but he bailed on berkeley to do a phd at eth zurich.
Eventually there was this one place that caught my roommate's eye because it had a garden. The landlord runs his own law firm, and used to be partner at some established firms and went to harvard law school and cal for his undergrad. My roommmate found his place on calrentals, and it was advertised as being much nicer than it was in reality. The pictures were completely inaccurate, and the description of the place used flowery language. The landlord's background seemed very prestigious, and he did some bonding by telling stories of his time at cal as an undergrad and what not. I was under the impression that he would be good to us. Despite me wanting to, we didn't do a video tour because they were supposedly on vacation and my roommate insisted on how a video tour was unneccessary, while they kept pressuring us by sending lots of emails and mentioning how all these other people were interested and how great their place was. Under my roommate and their pressure, I eventually gave in and signed the lease. I figured it couldn't go wrong since the landlord seemed to be quite trustable. Of course I would be completely dumbfounded when I arrived and when I brought up how his place was not as advertised he intimidated me and how I would be on the hook for rent while his place was vacant. I didn't question his abillity to come after me and get it.
2 months earlier I tried to report my landlord through the berkeley rent board and the person on the phone was quite supportive and said how they could help me and I gave them my contact and info and all and said they would reach out to me, but didn't. Then after failing through the phone a few more times I went by email, and entered a correspondence with one of their officers which took about 2 months for them to decide on anything. I was too careless and use the wrong wording to describe the issue in one of my emails and they immediately assumed a stance of having to go through these certain procedures for it which would take another few months, and not being able to help at all otherwise, then ending their communications with me. To file another case and get another first response would probably take another month or so, then the followups and what not would probably take another month on top of that, and they might still point me to the same processes, so I decided to go another way.
I also stumbled upon some document online of a complaint to the city council by somebody who tried to go through the whole housing inspection process and it took her like a year of back and forth for them to do nothing until she tried to escalate it and also fail at that.
In hindsight, I have some kind of new sense of how a lot of regulations and procedures and what not aren't followed and theres a ton of people and places in these organizations where the rules can be bent. To really get anything done people should take matters into their own hands without doing anything too outrageous. Given that I was in Berkeley and California of all places, what I actually should have done was simply not paying the current months lease, then bailing and letting the landlord take the security deposit as rent, and only bringing in all these players like the rent board and housing inspections and what not if he tries to sue me, which he probably won't be able to if he can't find me. Of course, that is what I am about to do now.