My landlord IS the noisy neighbor!

By Julia

My boyfriend and i live in an apartment that is essentially a converted attic. We have a separate entrance from the outside of the building. The bottom two floors of the house are occupied by our landlord. From the minute we moved in, we discovered that the house is very badly insulated. We heard every sound they made downstairs (our landlord and her two teenage boys… she didn’t tell us about them). Everytime they walked it was, "boom, boom, boom" and our apartment would shake like a mild earthquake. We told our landlord about the problem and she said she would talk to the boys. After a lot of back and forth, they eventually quieted down. It was not great, but better.

Then one weekend, it sounded like a heard of elephants, late into the night. Come to find out, our landlord’s daughter (?!) was home from College for the weekend. Her daughter is the most heavy footed walker I have ever heard. Our landlord said she would talk to her daughter, but it made no difference. Finally, her daughter went back to school. But she came back… and it was so loud. We would be woken up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night, with earplugs in! We told the landlord what was going on and asked if her daughter was expected to be home for the summer. The answer was yes, and if we needed to move, then we should!

Then I got a message saying her daughter would be away on an internship for most of the summer, if that affected our decision to move. We told her it did. That we would use the summer to look for a place, so we wouldn’t have to be so rushed.

The summer started and the daughter came home for two weeks of HELL. She was up all night, stomping around. Her friends were up all night, stomping around. We would go downstairs in the middle of the night as ask them to be quiet. They would tell us everyone was asleep, then we would see people walking around!!! The landlord said we were being unreasonable.

Then I got a note from our landlord saying that her daughter had woken HER up one night… that her daughter needed to change her ways, etc… (Admission of the problem, finally!)

We waited the two weeks, totally sleep deprived. But the daughter never left. She has been here all summer.

Whenever I would ask them to be quiet, my landlord would say I was harrassing them, waking them up! She threatened to evict us on numerous occassionsWe tried witholding rent, so she held off a plumbing repair we had been waiting on for three weeks already. We had a talk, agreed to quiet hours, agreed that the plumber would be scheduled again, etc… and we gave her the June rent.

Literally the next night, they woke us up again. I went downstairs to ask them to be quiet (at about 1 a.m.) and my landlord SCREAMED at me, saying she wanted us to get the F out of her Fn house.

I canceled the rent check and sent her a letter explaining that she can’t threaten and abuse us and can’t infringe on our right to a clean, safe place to live if we are going to pay rent. She threatened to evict us on numerous occassions (even though we already have a place to move to in September.)

In addition to this, they all smoke on their terrace, right below our bedroom window. When we first asked about it, our landlord said she would have her daughter smoke out front. That happened about once. They smoke constantly below our bedroom window and it fills our room with smoke. I get woken up in the morning by their smoke. I have written and called our landlord about this and she just ignores me.

Also, regarding the noise, I said many times that they should put rugs down (isn’t that what a landlord would make a noisy tenant do?) but they never have.

Now it is August. We did not give her our rent check because she has started a new face of simply not responding to us at all in regard to the smoke and noise. She said she was going to take us to court for the rent! She has our deposit and the apartment has zero damage (if anything it’s cleaner than when we moved in!) I don’t trust her to give us our deposit back, so we are just witholding rent until we move.

On top of all of this, there is water damage in our entryway that was supposed to be fixed within two weeks of our moving in last October. Not only was it never fixed, the wall kept leaking! Our landlord came up to recaulk the tub. She got caulking everywhere and said she would come back to clean it up. She never did. The wall still leaks and has NEVER been repaired. She said she would replace the broken linoleum in our kitchen, she never did. It took her 5 months to finish installing a light over our kitchen sink that just had wires hanging down.

We are in our last two weeks, but they are still keeping us up all night and won’t respond to our requests for quiet. WHAT DO WE DO?!?!

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