The obvious advantage of the US rental housing market is that you always move into a freshly painted apartment. In 99% of cases, the landlord — the person renting out the apartment — repaints the entire place with white paint before new tenants move in.
It is efficient and practical in the American way, and at first glance, it seems like a win-win for the tenant. So where is the catch?
The catch is that a lazy and especially budget-conscious landlord does everything as quickly and cheaply as possible. So the landlord or their contractor paints over not only the walls, but also everything that happens to be in the path of the brush.
So when you move in, you often discover that your electrical outlets and light switches are covered in a fresh layer of paint as well. And you can determine how many tenants have lived in the apartment by the thickness of the “white buildup” on the light switch — almost as accurately as you can determine the age of an oak tree by its rings.
There are countless photos online showing that, along with light switches and electrical outlets, landlords have also painted over things such as a cockroach that happened to be on the wall while it was being painted.
By the way, there is a specific term for this in English: Landlord Special.
Americans use it ironically to describe “landlord-style repairs”: as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, and meant to last for ten years. The classic Landlord Special is when the entire apartment is given one coat of the cheapest white paint without removing or covering anything: electrical outlets, light switches, hinges, screws, baseboards, door handles, the thermostat, and, if you are lucky, even the smoke detector on the ceiling. This is also where the expressions landlord white and landlord beige come from — those wonderfully “nothing” shades that half of America seems to be painted in.
More broadly, a Landlord Special can mean any cheap shortcut taken to save money: bathroom tiles painted over, laminate flooring installed on top of old laminate, a $15 faucet, or a ceiling fan that is older than the tenant. The phrase has become so common that entire communities on social media revolve around it, with people posting photos of their apartments under the motto, “Here is my Landlord Special.”
