What is our financial obligation when terminating our lease?

By Brittany

We live in a basement apartment (which is actually illegal in our city) and the upstairs tenants don’t speak very good english.  We have asked them to keep the A/C on all night, but they continue to turn it off.  Since we are paying (included in our rent) for all of our utilities we expect to have A/C.  We have made complaints to our landlord and nothing has been done.  We have also had to make many complaints about the noise upstairs as well as the alcohol (which is also against the lease) and nothing is being done.  Later the renter upstairs actually threatened my husband if he ever made a complaint again. 

My husband and I found a new place and now we are getting a lot of crap from the landlord, telling us we have to continue to pay rent until a new renter is in.  We have lived here for over 2 years and never had a problem until this family moved in.  We have been very loyal to the landlord, and when he wasn’t willing to take our complaints seriously we decided to leave.  We have had to terminate a lease before due to a job loss and they just kept our deposit.  What is the norm for something like this?

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Holy Cow, we couldn't find any other related post. Sorry. :(