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My family and I rented a townhome in North Charleston, SC. It was me and my husband's first time living on our own and we were excited to have a space of our own for me and the kids. After we signed our lease, we weren't excited long. On move in day they switched our unit from the one we viewed and to a unit that was dilapidated and had issues. Immediately, we smelled what seemed to be a wet carpet smell and mildew. We had nowhere else to go, already had paid out hard earned money for a moving truck and help unloading so we didn't have a choice but to move in. In North Charleston, there's literally nowhere else we could afford to even try to rent elsewhere. While living there, we often had no AC . That's too hot to do in Charleston. It felt terrible to paying over $1000 a month just to sit in a home that was hot as hell, had bedbugs and poor service from staff. We ended up moving on month 11 to Philadelphia in search of better conditions that we could afford. We had to leave the state bc of the cost of rent. We paid an early termination fee and bought out of the lease, only for management to still file an eviction. When trying to contact the landlord office about it, I found that they had sold off the property and we could never find the landlord or company to remove it from my record. Even though it was a 0.00 eviction on our record, it still impacted me bc places look at the eviction and think it's bc we don't pay our rent. I was never able to figure out who to talk to about the eviction and we ended up just moving on the best we could which meant finding and renting from private landlords that have even less oversight and accountability.

I demand that we have renter protections that includes a landlord registry and that landlords have some oversight the same as any other business operation. I believe the rent is too high and that rental caps should be out into effect for property owners who receive federal loans or funds. These people should have to be kept accountable.