In a nod to an increasing number of off-campus burglaries, junior ASWC  Senator and President-elect Carson Burns and junior ASWC Ombudsman and Vice President-elect John Loranger are establishing a living off-campus orientation to educate juniors and seniors. The event, officially approved in an ASWC senate resolution last week and scheduled for Sept. 7, 2010, will include talks by Dean of Students Chuck Cleveland, the Safety Coordinator from the Walla Walla Police Department, a security officer and a landlord.

Burglary is a problem Burns is well-acquainted with; his off-campus house was broken into three times this year. He has also dealt with a negligent landlord. Burns hopes to help other students avoid these same difficulties and believes his experiences could provide students who have never lived off campus with valuable information.

A brief discussion with Burns reveals he and his housemates have had a poor renting experience.

“One time my housemate was home alone when he heard  noise downstairs. He went to investigate and found a homeless Vietnam veteran  sitting in our dining room.”

Burns said that the man did not cause any trouble.

Break-ins such as this one may have been enabled by Burns’ unresponsive landlord, who failed to fix house necessities: such as door locks: despite a month of requests.

Burns says he has learned from these experiences. Among other things, he now knows that landlords are obligated to provide a certain level of home security for tenants, and that if landlords don’t perform house repairs in a prompt manner, a tenant can withhold rent until the repair.

One of the best things Burns thought students could do to ensure the security of their homes was to ask the police to keep an eye on the property if there was a history of break-ins. Burns and his  housemates  did this after their house was broken into. Apparently, the police listened.

One time, at about 3 a.m., one of Burns’s housemates returned to the house from the library. When he had difficulty finding the appropriate key to let himself in, a spotlight switched on and a police officer confronted him.

“The cop gave him a hard time,” Burns said. “And my housemate had to prove to the cop that he lived there. But it  was great. The cop was doing his job, and if he were a burglar, he  would have been arrested.”

Burns wants to share this and similar information with students.

He and Loranger also want to give the panel they have assembled a chance to share its advice with students. One focus will be renters insurance.

“Someone is going to talk about renters insurance,” said Loranger. “People don’t even know about renters insurance.”

Loranger is also assembling a directory of off-campus housing options based on the results of a survey handed out earlier this year.

“The survey . . . was just asking basic questions, like if you live in an off-campus house, where is it? What’s its name? How many bedrooms does it have? How many bathrooms? How is the landlord? What’s the rent?”

In the end, Burns stressed that Walla Walla landlords are not overwhelmingly bad.

“I guess the bad landlords get the most attention and get talked about the most; with the good landlords there’s nothing to talk about.”

Burns said the aim of his and Loranger’s initiative was not to make students suspicious or hostile toward their landlords but rather to empower them and put them on an even footing.

Students seem to agree that these sorts of initiatives are worthwhile. Junior Emily Allen, who lives off campus, has good relations with her landlord, but knows that this is not the case for many others.

“I have friends who have had trouble with their landlords,” Allen said.

Junior McKenna Milici agreed. She also said she believed some students did not understand the implications of signing a lease.

“I’m sure there are some people who sign a lease and don’t realize what kind of a legal, binding agreement they’re putting themselves in,” she said. “So I think any sort of resource campus would provide would be useful.”

Milici added that she thought Whitman-owned off-campus housing appealed to students because it obviated the need for such knowledge; Whitman looks out for students’ interests without them having to take the same kind of initiative, she said.

Allen agreed.

“I heard from a girl who lives in one of those houses that her faucet broke. She made a call and a guy was over there within hours. That would be amazing,” she said. “It took our landlord two weeks to get our microwave fixed.”