Hairline cracks over a window, scuffs where bags brush a hallway wall, a dull track worn into the floor finish at every threshold, a cabinet hinge gone slack: Richard Joseph Spinelli files all of these under ordinary wear. The phrase appears four times, every one of them in Student Housing Move Out Is Where Fairness Gets Tested, yet it carries one of the sharpest commitments in his writing. In his usage ordinary wear is the aging an old apartment undergoes simply by being lived in, and his position is that a departing household should never pay for it.
One essay, three stages
Within that single Blogger essay of September 17, 2026, the term moves through three stages. First it is descriptive. His buildings are mostly prewar, he writes, and such buildings age along a handful of familiar lines, which is what makes the wear predictable. Old plaster bears that out: This Old House explains1 that hairline cracks come from a house settling, from seasonal swings in temperature and humidity, and from age. Because the same marks show up at the close of each school year, he argues, they can be sorted ahead of time, and sorting them ahead of time is the only way two separate exit inspections will treat identical marks identically. That link between old construction and foreseeable behavior belongs to the idea page old buildings speak early.
Next the term becomes policy. Spinelli describes handing each group, at signing, a written account of what counts as wear and what counts as damage, and inviting someone from the household along for the final look around. His examples track the list the New York City Bar gives tenants2, where fading paint, floors lightly scuffed by foot traffic, worn carpet and loose door handles all count as normal wear. He expects peers to object that stating the rules up front hands tenants something to argue over, and replies that disputes come from rules nobody stated, not from rules stated too soon.
Finally the term becomes a cost. Writing wear off obliges the company to cover each summer’s paint and floor work itself, with its own crews and its own weeks. City law already leans that way, since Brick Underground notes3 that the housing code has owners repaint or recover walls every three years, and in 2025 Massachusetts went further when its top court ruled, as the Boston Globe reported4, that deposits cannot cover painting, carpet repair or cleaning after reasonable use. He also concedes that the dividing line between neglect and normal use is blurry, and that he errs toward the resident on purpose, accepting that some of what he writes off was not ordinary at all. The reasoning connects to fairness when the tenancy closes and to first lease residents, since most of his tenants cannot tell a fair charge from an unfair one.
Why off campus students need the line drawn
Reporting from his own neighborhood shows the gap he is addressing. A 2017 Norwood News report from Belmont5 quoted a senior who said that renting away from the dorms meant handling the landlord and repairs personally, with no resident assistant to call. Some universities try to fill that gap from their side. Texas State, as Inside Higher Ed described in 20256, steers students toward landlords it trusts and has a staff member mediate disputes between landlords and students. Spinelli’s written standard is an operator’s version of that protection, supplied before any dispute exists. The related entry on the move out walkthrough covers the inspection where the standard is applied.
Of all his terms, this one most needs a text he has not published. He describes the sheet and offers examples, but the full list stays private, so readers must take his categories on trust. Absent that list, the best guide to where he draws the line is the short run of examples in the essay itself, together with his promise that the line is fixed before the lease begins rather than discovered when it ends.
