In which the final word was "AUUUUUGHHHHH!"

[the_mae_nymph]

To relate my own story of bad apartment services, I must set the scene. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Basically, we were in college and found out that the majority of our friends were backstabbing, manipulative assholes.

We had been living in a trailer near campus under an awesome landlord. He laid down reasonable rules and he

Comments

[67words]

i'm not trying to be snarky and i really enjoyed this post, but i don't see the bad service. seems like mostly bad neighbors. the landlord sent out people to fix the boiler multiple times when it went out. it kept breaking so you decided to stop paying rent and returning his phone calls?
did you ever say anything to the landlord about the upstairs bathroom not working?

[the_mae_nymph]

Mostly, the problem lay in the fact that he kept hiring these men (I think there were two) and they would come, look at it, and leave. And in the end he stopped sending people. When it's a little apartment building full of people without heat, one shouldn't be so uncaring about it. We informed him about the bugs and the bathroom. He made the poor maintenance guy pay from his own pocket for supplies to fix things under the context of reduced rent. The maintenance guy was really nice and his mom was like 90, so them brun without heat was also worse than just us being withou it :(
When we found our new place and told our landlord who we used to rent from, he told us our landlord has a notorious reputation for renting junk apartments. :( essentially he was a slum lord.

And this is West Virginia. One of those places where someone always knows someone else who is kind of handy or thinks they can fix anything... Whether or not that is the case. LOL

[psychicmedium26]

iawtc

[orthent]

i don't see the bad service. seems like mostly bad neighbors. the landlord sent out people to fix the boiler multiple times when it went out. it kept breaking so you decided to stop paying rent and returning his phone calls?

It's bad service because when you put a house or apartment on the market, there is this thing called an "implied warrant of habitability," which means that you are making yourself responsible for guaranteeing it to be habitable. In a place that has cold winters, an apartment without a working furnace is not habitable; if the furnace consistently breaks down to the point where tenants are relying on space heaters, or, God forbid, their kitchen stove, it's the landlord's duty to replace it, and if he can't afford to replace something so essential, he shouldn't be renting property.

[67words]

but if you just decide to stop telling the landlord about it and stop paying your rent? like i said, i enjoyed the post, just didn't see it.

[the_mae_nymph]

I just want to mention that he did know about the furnace. But we worked so often that I personally didn't call him all the time to tell him, the maintenance guy did. I just refused to answer his calls after he started calling me twice a day when we all refused to pay until the boiler was fixed. We ended up not paying for two months and into the second month we finally moved yay :)

[orthent]

Well, you have a right to withhold the rent or break your lease without penalty if the dwelling is uninhabitable. Of course, if you do, it's also your duty to notify the landlord in writing of your intention, spelling out exactly why you're taking the action, and send the letter by certified mail. So the OP was in the wrong there, but that doesn't negate the suck on the landlord's part.

[hellototheworld]

They were on a month to month (no lease) anyway.

[orthent]

Good point, though I'm fairly sure that even on a month to month tenancy, you have to give the landlord a certain number of days' notice if you're clearing out, or if you want to stay but plan to withhold rent until a problem is corrected.

[scribefigaro]

This depends on jurisdiction; in some places you must pay rent into an escrow account or even get approval from a local court or housing official to withhold rent.

The lack of heat might've been enough for the OP to claim the landlord/slumlord broke their "implied" lease by rendering the unit uninhabitable, but it's not much of a claim if they continued to live there anyway, and in any case, their lack of lease terms meant they could pretty much leave and stop paying at any time.

It really seems from the condition of the place that the landlord had no right to let anyone live there, and if anything, he should be happy that none of his residents died there and (rightfully) saddled him with numerous lawsuits for renting out his slummy little deathtrap.

[orthent]

IDK, if you have a severely limited budget and there are few options, you may not have much choice about staying in a unit that isn't fit to be lived in--it may be that, or being homeless. I don't think that staying on, under those conditions, absolves the landlord of his obligation to make sure his premises are habitable. But I agree with you that this old motel should probably not have been rented out at all, and I have to wonder how the place was passing inspection--unless nobody official knew that it was being used for rental housing at all.