Growing up as part of the South Asian community in America, I have a sixth sense about money. The way I was raised led me to never gamble, never give in to fake promo deals and never throw money away.
So when I came across an apartment complex called The Grad: San José, there was no doubt in my mind I should have read the fine print, because I should have exposed the biggest scam in Silicon Valley.
As a naive undergraduate student, I was swayed into this scheme because I was immediately impressed by the building’s exterior and advertisements.
My first impression of The Grad was decorated with mixed feelings. I was so excited about moving away from my hometown, Fremont, that I got distracted by the fact that plenty of students were housing there since it is adjacent to San José State.
At the start, it looked like a good deal, but I soon realized I was sucked into a labyrinth of horror. To me, rooming at the Grad was the worst decision I had ever made.
Everywhere I went in the building, I felt like I was discovering a new species of mold. Quite literally, I felt sick a week after moving into The Grad. I missed two and a half weeks of school because of an upper respiratory infection.
Equally, the apartment was aesthetically heinous and made me sick to my stomach. It almost felt like I was in the epicenter of a forest fire.
When I reached out to the maintenance team, they came into my apartment, sprayed Febreze and charged me money for the service.
My experience isn’t just an isolated incident either, because other students have had similar experiences.
Natnaiel Yishak, a fourth year engineering student, quickly learned his new apartment involved a few regrets when he was a resident.
“The cleanliness was pretty tough. The maintenance was cleaning the trash chutes one time, and there was a fruit fly infestation,” Yishak said. “It took them two months (to deal with it and) they don’t throw out the trash properly.”
Besides being a hotspot for vermin and infestation, the residents were left to deal with any technical shortcomings alone.
Sometimes, the water would shut down in the whole building and there were even times when the air conditioning didn’t work.
“There was one time when the parking garage wasn’t working (and) when we tried to leave, the garage door was blocked,” Yishak said. “We couldn’t get out for the entire day (and maintenance) messaged us in the middle of the day that the garage door wasn’t working.”
Yishak said he wouldn’t recommend The Grad to anyone searching for off-campus housing. Being exposed to a plethora of problems made him leave within the same year he joined.
Most UC and CSU campuses don’t ensure housing for academia and students are often left competing in big time rental markets such as Santa Cruz, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area, according to a Sept. 30, 2022 article from Ed Source.
I try not to take it as a negative, but doing so is difficult when I looked around my apartment and had nothing positive to look at or to say.
Students shouldn’t have to save up their hard-earned money to be treated like, feel like or live in shit.
As my time progressed at The Grad, I realized it wasn’t just the building that was the problem, but also my roommate who was assigned to me without any warning.
On multiple occasions, my roommate tried to trick me into duplicating my key at a nearby hardware store, only because he wanted to give his friends access to our apartment without the front desk workers knowing.
It didn’t take me long to realize my roommate primarily lived in San Francisco and used the apartment he shared with me to hoard garbage.
When I was hunting for student housing, I was looking for three things; personal space, price and quality. At the time, The Grad seemed to be a decent place with a private bedroom and a decent price.
Unfortunately, the price was deceiving. The personal space was fabricated with amenities that didn’t work and the price was the biggest rip-off since crappy hotel porn.
Yishak reflects on not only having unreliable staff at The Grad, but roommates that took advantage of his space in the wrong way.
“I had a roommate who had spoiled food (in his apartment), so you could smell it from his refrigerator,” Yishak said. “They were just unsanitary roommates, they were unbearable to live with, they had spoiled foods (and) it’d just be left in the refrigerator for months.”
My roommate apparently didn’t even have time to shut off the air conditioning or turn off his noisy 3D printer when he left for San Francisco, which drove the bill up like a trolley up Bradford Street in the city.
The way my roommate took care of his apartment, the funk of urine and feces was unavoidable to the point where it felt like my roommate’s ass was pressing up against my face.
To put it candidly, the only aspect my apartment was missing was several species of flora to make it a legitimate habitat for sasquatch.
Construction for The Grad was completed in 2020, according to an AMCAL web page. It didn’t take long for the community to take advantage of the crappy security and horrible location.
A student was shot and killed near The Grad, which at the time was known as a “luxury off-campus housing for students,” according to an April 25, 2021 KTVU article.
At times I thought I was dead and had been banished to hell, but unfortunately, I was just at The Grad.
