Lauren Culler and her friend needed a place to live.

It was the spring of 2004, and they had just been kicked out of their apartment. With money scarce, Culler and her friend held their noses and decided to move into a Knox Box basement.

Except the landlord refused.

“Our landlord told us he doesn’t normally rent the basement to girls because of the bugs that were down there, and girls freak out because of the bugs,” Culler said.

But Culler and her friend persisted, and the landlord eventually caved. The result?

“It was pretty gross,” she said. “We put up with it, but we had a lot of cockroaches.”

For decades, Knox Box basement residents have sacrificed luxury and even sometimes decency in the name of affordability and convenience. But with the death of David Ellis, who died one week ago of smoke inhalation in a Knox Box basement fire, city and university officials and media are focusing on how these basement apartments are not just uncomfortable, but unsafe.

One landlord, Janet Firth, who owns the building Ellis lived in, has pledged to temporarily move her residents out of the basements until their windows can be replaced to meet fire code. Current and former basement residents told The Diamondback in interviews that landlords like Firth have by and large been responsive to their concerns, but that windows too small to escape through in case of a fire are just the tip of the iceberg.

The lack of cell phone service was a universal complaint, as were smoke detectors persistently going off because of basic cooking and uninvited bugs.

“If I left my window open at night when I went out,” said Victor Diggs, “when I would come home, there would be five crickets in my room having their own little party.”

Diggs, a junior English major who lived in the basement unit that bordered Ellis’s, said he suffered through the consequences of living below ground level. Those factors, combined with the unsafe conditions now revealed, make Diggs wary of moving back into the basement.

“I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemies,” he said.

Some of the first Knox Boxes were built in the 1950s along parts of Knox and Hartwick roads and Rossburg and Guilford drives, and today they are primarily rented by students.

Bugs also plagued Nicole Powell, a senior geography major who lived in a basement last year and said ants invaded following heavy rains. More bothersome, however, were the first-floor residents leaving standing water that seeped through the floor, and the lack of sunlight made the basement dark and depressing, she said.

“My parents didn’t see the apartment before I signed the lease and my mom said if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have let me live there,” Powell said.

Even with the litany of complaints current and former residents have, the basements remain packed semester after semester.

Most students suffer through the conditions because they’re cheap and near classes and Route 1. Some genuinely enjoy living in the basements – at least in the beginning.

“I love it here,” said Jenn Doyle, a freshman letters and sciences major who moved in about a week ago.

Ian Gedalowitz has lived in two different Knox Box basements over the last two and a half years, but not because he’s enamored with the conditions.

“It’s a good location … but for me it’s all about the money,” said the senior communication major who pays his own rent.

Gedalowitz’s $360 a month doesn’t buy him many niceties. He has no control over the heat, and like many other basement residents, has had to pay for a landline because cell phone service is so poor. He can’t watch TV and use the microwave at the same time, or simultaneously use the toaster and microwave. And when he walks down the narrow hall from the kitchen to his bedroom, Gedalowitz navigates a mishmash of four different types of linoleum.

“A lot of people don’t like it. They think it’s a dungeon or something, especially girls,” said Gedalowitz, who added he doesn’t urge the ladies to check out his pad. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Contact reporter Brendan Lowe at lowedbk@gmail.com.