Across the hall and one door down, there was a convicted arsonist but he was alright. The biggest problem I had was the bed bugs. Nobody seemed to care about that except me. I guess if you smoke 'P' every day, you're scratching and itching all the time, and would probably think it was normal to have itchy skin. So the bed bugs were fully grown. Nobody asked to have their room sprayed, I had to complain constantly until the useless landlord finally got tired of hearing about bed bugs every day (landlord isn't on site, and may have lived in another city). As I left, they were spraying some of the rooms to reduce the bed bug population.
I was bitten in the night by very small ones and it's bloody concerning that they were in my bedding. Around the time I left, there were large bed bugs crawling across my floor, from the room above or below me. I'm lucky that they didn't move on my belongings and contaminate my next rental! Once they make themselves at home it's impossible to 100% remove them, unless you can heat an entire building complex to around 55 Celsius. Which means lost profit for the landlords of course, lol. They can get into any gap, so your PC, laptop and phone have to be thrown away if it's contaminated with bed bug eggs.
Once I walked down the hallway and a guy came out of a door ahead of me, from the left side of the hall. He looked to his right and saw me, then he walked left, the same way I was going. This guy reeked like P.
Some of these tenants had been to prison before, because a couple of them were obsessed with rules. I went to the lounge one evening to see what channels they had. When I picked up the remote and changed the channel, some guys near the entrance way told me that I couldn't do that. I didn't realise they were watching because they were off to the side, not really in the room. They waited for me to touch the remote and then they spoke. Maybe they're not allowed food in the lounge, except for on the table near the entry hall where they sat? Anyway, these guys seemed to take the rules rather seriously than what I'd normally expect. They must have learned this in prison with the lockup times etc.
One time I got a newsletter from the lodge in which they said that a tenant had died. I later found out he had hanged himself in the cupboard. Some tenants were so poor that they washed their clothes in the communal kitchen sinks.
This place is 15 Sioux Avenue, Wigram, Christchurch and it shouldn't exist.
An ex of mine lived in a place like this too, Pickled Parrot Lodge on Coromandel St in Newtown, Wellington. Mingy little rooms and people in quiet desperation. Strippers, prostitutes, meth addicts, parolees, LGBT+, and abused kids rejected or runaways from their families, forced to try to be adults.
The place is still around. Don't know how it's run these days, but if you bundle all these people together by necessity without providing on-site social, mental and physical support services, you're asking for suffering if not disaster. There should be a medical room, with doctors, psychologists, social workers on a scheduled rotation. There should be a security guard and common-area cameras. There should be SPRINKLERS, it's ultrahigh-density housing, current-level safety shit is a MUST. But that's not what's in the regulations, because the landlord lobby is STRONG.
:(
Drugs and prostitutes? Sounds like any reasonable motel, anywhere in New Zealand. I went to Timaru for one night a couple of years ago and I was shocked to see that the motels were full of WINZ clients. I thought that only happened in a few parts of the country, but it's universal. It was a nice motel too! I asked if I could get a discounted rate somehow, but they told me they already had WINZ paying the full nightly price.
Your description is insightful, these places are garbage. They should be knocked down and have purpose-built state housing built in their place. Someone should sneakily try to introduce regulations for this situation, specifically for housing that attracts people at the bottom of society. Make it mandatory to provide social services on site, and if landlords can't afford it, just force them into selling it ROFL xD
It's the market, my dude-bro, if you don't like it, just sell and invest money in something else :-)
Of course Nicola Willis and David Seymour would hate this, but they don't believe in a free market anyway: they control the trickle of zoned land, and they also control the floodgates of immigration. The market is rigged. These politicians shouldn't be talking about "the market". Supply and demand is 100% controlled by government. Only a landlord would say otherwise.