Richard Joseph Spinelli offers a working definition of fairness in the final paragraphs of his September 17 Blogger essay: it is tested in the hour when an owner decides something about a resident who can no longer answer back. The setting is a hard used apartment in June, its boxes already on the sidewalk and its windows open, where four of the five departing tenants will soon collect diplomas and have no reason ever to sign with a Belmont landlord again. Nothing that happens in that room can affect their future business. The definition is precise, and it serves as a lens for three other essays, one written before it and two after, each of which moves the same test to a different point in the lease.
An earlier essay puts the test before signing
The idea’s roots are in Reputation Is the Cheapest Marketing in Student Housing, published September 9, though there it is framed as commercial sense. Spinelli describes telling a group, before they sign, how a rear bedroom holds heat, even when the truth costs him the lease. He describes patience with a parent who calls on a Sunday about a door lock despite not being the customer of record. The motive given is reputation: in a closed student market, a household that feels misled tells everyone it knows. Fairness here is still protected by self interest, because the resident has something the operator wants.
The move out essay removes the self interest
Eight days later, Student Housing Move Out Is Where Fairness Gets Tested sets up the case where that protection disappears. Every other stage of the year produces something visible, Spinelli observes, while the final walkthrough produces nothing but cost, falls during turnover planning and concerns tenants on their way out of his life. So it tends to be rushed, handed to any available person holding a phone, with nothing written to guide the judgment. He admits doing it that way himself, and describes the result as inconsistent more than unfair, which across a portfolio becomes a kind of unfairness of its own.
His solution is a single page. It sorts end of lease conditions into three groups: the everyday marks of a hard year that he never bills, such as backpack scuffs, worn floor finish at thresholds and fine plaster cracks; a brief set of items he always charges; and a narrow middle band that needs a human judgment in the room. The page is shown to the group when they sign, and the final walk is done with a member of the household present. He also admits the approach errs in one direction on purpose. Some of what he absorbs was careless rather than ordinary, and he would sooner be overly generous with an undeserving household than run a system that silently bills inexperienced tenants for the building’s own aging.
He is specific about the price. Because the company does its own repainting and refinishing, the absorbed wear shows up as summer weeks of its own crews, arriving in the same stretch as every other August job, and it is invisible to anyone outside the firm. It is easy to hold the line in a gentle year, he concedes, and harder when several units need more than paint.
New York law now imposes part of this discipline on every landlord. Under the 2019 rules, as the Daily News explained1, two weeks after a tenant leaves, an owner must have returned the money or sent a written list of deductions, and one who does neither forfeits the whole deposit. The enforcement record shows why the rule was needed. Patch reported2 that a Brooklyn landlord agreed to repay 129 tenants after the state found no itemized list had ever been provided, and the state Attorney General announced3 a recovery for 150 Plattsburgh tenants in a similar case. The city’s tenant bill of rights4 repeats the limits: a deposit capped at a single month of rent, and repaid inside 14 days of the move. The law sets a minimum; Spinelli’s essay describes a standard above it.
The group essay adds consistency
The following day’s piece, Leasing to Groups Is Its Own Discipline, carries the test into the middle of the lease and changes its form. The risk it identifies is inconsistency. Handle five roommates as five separate customers, Spinelli argues, and one hears an easygoing answer early in the week while another hears a stricter one days later, until the roommates decide that policy varies with the messenger. From there the roommates sensibly shop one answer against another, and the owner is drawn into refereeing quarrels that belong to the tenants. His remedy is to state each rule once, in the same words, to the whole group. In this piece fairness means the same answer to everyone, delivered on any day of the week, which he says matters more than any upgrade to how a household describes him.
The resident first essay adds the bounded promise
On September 21, What Resident First Actually Means Day to Day applies the test to promises. Spinelli declines to tell his residents that anything can be fixed at any hour, because a small team could keep that promise for a few weeks in September and not afterward. His narrower standard answers true emergencies at once, meaning heat, hot water, a failed lock or a leak, and gives every other request a real date that is then met. A student promised Thursday who then watches Thursday kept, he argues, trusts the company more than one who heard only that it would try. It is the move out principle applied earlier: promise only what the company can deliver when the resident has no means of enforcing it.
What the law and the campus leave uncovered
The protections under the law are uneven. Gothamist reported5 that the 14 day rule did not cover about a million rent stabilized apartments until the governor pledged to close the gap, and THE CITY found6 applicants still being asked for good faith deposits months after the new state limits took effect. The imbalance is not unique to New York: in Maine, tenants filed a class action7 over deposits kept when buildings were sold, with their lawyer arguing that a housing shortage shifts power further toward owners. Universities offer students little help. A professor who was also mayor of a university town wrote8 that upperclassmen are sent to negotiate leases largely alone.
How deposits work in New York, including the rules summarized above, is explained at length in a richardjspinelli.com page on deposits held by city landlords, which is the main article for it.
The problem Spinelli leaves open
The move out essay ends by naming its own limit, and it is the most honest point in this group of pieces. The approach works, Spinelli writes, because at 27 units a single person can carry the whole standard in memory, walk every apartment and make each judgment at the door. Larger operators who switch to itemized schedules are not being cynical, he says, and campus housing offices solved consistency with policy precisely because individual judgment does not scale. If the company keeps growing around Rose Hill, it will face the same problem, and he says plainly that he does not yet know how his version of fairness survives growth. That question remains unanswered in the essays so far.
