Housing Breakthrough. Literally.

Tucked behind the 7-11 in Isla Vista stands 6541 Sabado Tarde Road, a three-bedroom house owned and leased out by Bartlein and Company, Inc. While meant to be occupied by a maximum of six tenants, students in the college town makeshifted the dwelling to house eight students at a time. One of these occupants is Anastasia Cervantes, fourth-year student at the University of California, Santa Barbara who will be graduating with two degrees on June 12 — political science and environmental science.

The soon-to-be-graduate moved into the unit June of 2021 knowing she would be inhabiting a 264-square-foot garage that is tucked behind a wooden fence with beige peeling paint. What Cervantes didn’t expect was that the structure would become practically unlivable.

“When I first saw the garage it was carpeted and had a bad paint job,” she said. “But when I moved in, the entire place was stripped and there was literally only plywood laid down and some industrial carpeting.”

Cervantes said she was frustrated because her “room” she signed the lease for wasn’t what it seemed. “I eventually just decided to take it upon myself to make my living environment better because it was really ugly,” she said.

The student decided to do a mini-renovation of the garage, which isn’t a legal living dwelling. Many students in Isla Vista decide to cramp into a house and end up staying in make-do rooms like garage in order to have their monthly rent be more affordable. 

Because Cervantes’ garage-turned-bedroom was technically not a livable unit in the first place, despite no acknowledgement in the lease agreement that tenants were not to reside in the outside structure, she purchased new paint, vinyl flooring, and baseboards and began her summer project.

“It took me only a full day to paint the room and another day to rip up the disgusting carpeting that was practically cemented to the plywood underneath,” she said. “Then it took me about two days to lay down the floors and I never got to finish the baseboards.” Cervantes ended up spending almost $800 dollars during her first trip to Home Depot.

Up until the beginning of her senior year in September, Cervantes said her remodeling efforts were successful. Then one day as she walked out of her entryway, she heard a crack. “I stepped back inside and noticed that my previously-solid floor was now flexible,” she said. 

She ripped up a portion of the vinyl flooring with one of her housemates and discovered the subflooring of the garage had completely split. Cervantes was going to contact her landlord, Dave Russo, at Bartlein and Company, Inc. but since she wasn’t supposed to be living in the structure, she again took matters into her own hands.

Cervantes drove back to the Home Depot she had once purchased all of her renovation supplies at and bought a new portion of thicker plywood and additional vinyl flooring. 

“Me and my housemates replaced it ourselves because we didn’t want to get fined from our property management company,” she said. 

After replacing the cracked subflooring, things were okay for another month. Until Cervantes began detecting a scent of urine by the single-paned windows in the garage. After closer inspection, she discovered mold growing underneath the vinyl flooring she had placed down.

For the mold issue, she did contact Russo her landlord. He sent out two men from Coast Carpet Cleaning, a Santa Barbara based cleaning company to deal with possible water damage that was causing the mold growth. 

“They stepped into the garage, which by this time there was much more flooring damage, and told me they weren’t comfortable being in there,” Cervantes said. 

By this point, her flooring had three additional holes from the subflooring cracking underneath. Cervantes didn’t want to spend even more money on redoing the holes, so she simply taped flattened cardboard boxes over them. The men from the carpeting cleaning company urged her to find a different housing situation, but Cervantes never found an available listing within her budget. 

However, with the mold growth and severe unsafe flooring conditions, she decided to move out all of her belongings and brought most of it back home to Santa Clarita. Since then, for the last three weeks, she has been sleeping on the couch in the living room and has lived out of a suitcase until her lease is up on June 14. 

Dave Russo refused to comment on Cervantes’ living situation. But she said that following the houses move-out date, Bartlein and Company, Inc. has said they will be addressing the multiple issues in the garage. 

“Knowing them, they’ll probably just gut out the floors and lay down concrete or something,” Cervantes said.