When Cal Poly master’s student Katie Kelly was still an undergraduate, she walked into her kitchen one day to find an unknown black substance spread across her counter tops.
It was especially thick on the wall-covering behind her sink, she told an audience last Friday.
“Taking a kitchen knife — and bravery — I peeled it back,” she said to the rapt crowd. “Mushrooms sprung out at me.”
With Halloween just around the corner, the SLO Tenants Union threw an event at The Bunker SLO art gallery last week for renters to share horror stories about poor living conditions and unresponsive landlords.
“We have stories of termite infestation, rats and walls that are structurally unsafe and crumble when you touch them,” said event-emcee Max Hoffstadt, a city and regional planning student at Cal Poly.
SLO Tenants Union organizer Dona Hare Price said the idea for the event came up during a conversation with collaborator Annie Aguiñiga Frew, a political science professor at Cal Poly.
“One of the reasons storytelling is so incredibly powerful is it reminds us that behind every housing statistic, policy debate, or discussion about renters' rights are the real people who are navigating these experiences,” Frew said.
When asked about her mushroom story, Kelly said the horror element is “the overarching feeling of not having your needs met and feeling powerless against your landlord, who controls where you live.”
Kelly told KCBX that at her last rental, her landlord was slow to fix problems like the water-logged walls that became a habitat for fungus. But because of the high rent and lack of other housing options, she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Her roommate, who has cystic fibrosis, had been sick for months before the discovery of the mold and mushrooms lining their walls.
When it comes to solutions, Kelly says San Luis Obispo should hire more enforcement professionals to respond to unhealthy living conditions.
Other storytellers said they want the city to establish a rental registry, higher fines for code violations and more affordable housing.
The San Luis Obispo City Council discussed establishing a registry of rental units to track evictions and prices earlier this year, but hasn’t yet committed to creating one.
