American University's Weber said she has heard her share of horror stories from interns and interns' parents.
"We sometimes get panicked phone calls from parents, in cases where their children had made the arrangements without seeing the housing" or the surrounding neighborhood, Weber said.
Weber said she tries to help find alternatives and refers students to the D.C. landlord-tenant relations office. "A lot of times, though, the students have acted on faith and don't have any signed documents" regarding what was promised, "so they end up just getting stuck," she said.
For example, a group of seven students who rented a house on Capitol Hill last summer had a "terrible" housing experience, one participant said.
"The place was horrible," remembers Hari Kondabolu, now a senior at Bowdoin College in Maine. "None of us had seen it before, but we were assured that it would be in working condition, that it would be clean, and safe, and that there was enough room for everybody to function."
While the group understood that the house was being renovated, the landlord "told us that by the time we got there it would be ready," he said.
Instead, Kondabolu claimed that when they arrived, the house had only one functioning bathroom, a second toilet that was being installed "in a bathroom with barely enough room to get in" and "an unfinished basement that was filthy" where the four male students were supposed to live.
The seven students moved to a hotel in Virginia for two weeks, but "it wasn't much better when we returned," said Kondabolu, so they asked for their $2,800 deposit back.
Rajen Desai, who is now a first-year medical student at Stanford, claimed the landlord had promised six bedrooms but there were only three; that the basement was divided only by partitions and had big exposed pipes; and "there were still paint cans sitting around" at the time of the second visit.
The landlord, Jonathan Yates, said this week that the house "was in fine condition, livable condition" and denied that it looked the way the students described. He said he had purchased the house in March and had "put a lot of money into fixing it up," including new appliances and carpet.
"I've been a landlord for over 10 years and never had a violation filed against me," Yates said.
Yates added that the students could at any time have sent someone to check out the house, and that at least two or three lived in Roanoke and Charlottesville. He added that the lease "stipulates that the lessee has examined the grounds" and found it to be "safe and in good condition."
Yates said he refused to give back the deposit "because that was the rent for the month." He had no trouble renting it to others, he said.
One of the other students said that the group met with Yates a month after the move-in date to discuss their deposit "and he had the house fixed up by then." While she remembered the landlord offering the house to them again, she said the students had already arranged other housing.
Kondabolu said he learned a lesson from what he said happened. Instead of "doing everything by e-mail," he said, house-hunting interns should "definitely use the phone from time to time, to hear the people's own voices" as the details are worked out.
While a student did see the outside of the house, the person didn't ask to see the inside, Desai said. "We were too naive," he said.
Said Kondabolu: "We should have shown the contract to someone ahead of time. And we definitely should have seen the house."
