Lay some bad landlord stories on me
DjArcadian
3,632 Posts
My landlord is being a bitch lately. Misery needs company right now.
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Your Honor, we the defendants do not owe the plaintiff any money, because we are not responsible for funding structural improvements to her property. Ms ***** is claiming that we must pay for the replacement of her main sewer line, which was worked on in February 2003. Ms ***** has made allegations that we flushed improper waste down our toilet, and is trying to claim that this destroyed her sewer line. She has stated in her letter of demand dated April 9th 2003 that under section 9 of our lease we are responsible for the repair costs.
Your Honor, we must emphatically refute this claim on the following grounds:
Soon after moving into our unit, (which is the lower floor of a duplex house in which Ms ***** lives upstairs in ###), it was apparent that there was a problem with wastewater drainage from our bathroom. Several plumbers were called in to fix it via snaking but were not succeeding. You can see the call logged on 12/10/02 to the ***** company, describing the ???sewage and mud??? that was backing up into our unit from the toilet and shower.
On December 20th 2002, a representative of the licensed plumbing contractor company ***** came to the property and used a scoping camera to inspect the main line. If I may direct your attention to the document, You will see in his assessment that he found the main line to be in very bad shape, from cracks, tree roots and total collapse. This shows the line to have a pre-existing condition from age. The fact that the line was made of clay pipe further attests to it being out of date and overdue for replacement.
As can be seen on the invoice, Ms. ***** did not go ahead with the recommended work, instead canceling. She instead hired a handyman named ***** , not a licensed plumbing contractor, to take care of the problem. He struggled with the work, having to return twice, finally finishing his work on February 9th 2003.
When the work was complete, Ms ***** then blamed us for causing the problem. We were told that some sort of plastic object or sanitary napkin was found where Ms *****'s main line met the street sewer line, and that this material was responsible for the poor drainage dating back to early December. However no such material was ever shown to or viewed by us, and this claim completely contradicts the assessment made by the licensed plumbing contractor ***** on 12/20/02.
Ms ***** delivered to us a ???Letter of Demand??? on April 9th 2003, stating that under Sec 9 of our lease, we were responsible for all ???charges for plumbing stoppages???, which she listed as $7142, further stating that she would later also charge us for the cost of repairing her driveway, a part of which had been dug up to do the work. This letter threatened legal action if we did not respond, which we did promptly in our letter dated April 13, 2003. In our letter you will see we stated our position.
Ms ***** wrote again on April 14th, stating that sanitary napkins were ???the main cause of the blockage???, and accusing us of ???using our toilet as a wastebasket???, and stating that we had ???breached the lease agreement???. As our position was already clearly stated in our letter of April 13th, we did not see fit to respond further.
Your Honor, we did not violate our lease. If we look at section 9, it says: ???Tenant shall be responsible for the cleaning or repair of any plumbing fixture where a stoppage has occurred.???
Your Honor, this lease must be fairly interpreted. We do understand that if we the tenants plug or damage a plumbing fixture, in this case the toilet, then we are responsible for having it fixed.
However, your honor, we need to fairly define the terms being used. A ???fixture??? in an apartment is attached or affixed to the property. This would include things like a toilet or a cabinet mounted to the wall of the kitchen. It would not include something mobile like a couch, nor something like the roof which is part of the building structure. We the tenants have rented this unit, and this unit only. We are not responsible for the building structure, unless of course we had been proven to damage it, for example by driving a car into an exterior wall. But we are not responsible for a crack that forms in the foundation or if the roof blows off in a typhoon. Those are structural repair costs, and the owner of the property is responsible for taking care of them.
Your Honor, The main sewer line is not a fixture like the toilet is. The toilet is an attached feature of our unit. The main sewer line running under the front yard is a structural part of the building, like the roof or the foundation. We are not responsible for such structural repair costs and Ms. ***** cannot charge us for that.
Ms. ***** is not trying to charge us for snaking the toilet, she is trying to stick us with the repair costs of the main line. Not one plumber has said it was our toilet that was was the problem, nor that somehow sanitary napkins could have caused the damage to the main line. The source of the problem was clearly stated on 12/20 to be an aging, collapsed main line. Only Ms ***** has cited our toilet to be the source of the problem, not any plumber.
Your Honor, note that once the work was completed on Feb 9th 2003, all drainage problems in our bathroom stopped, and we have had no problems since then.
We absolutely deny the allegation that we put any excessive waste in the toilet. The only person to claim we did this is Ms. ***** . That is a self serving claim, as she is trying to stick us with the cost of a structural improvement, and under our lease she???s not allowed to do that.
We would further like to point out that why would we do what Ms ***** claims we did? We signed a 1 year fixed lease on the unit. If we were malicious characters who intended on wrecking things and getting away with it, then why did we look for and sign up for a unit with a fixed 1 year lease? And even if we were so foolish as to sabotage our own place of residence immediately upon moving in, then why have there been no other problems since the main line was repaired on Feb 9th 2003? We moved in to this unit with the intention of living in peace and quiet, not being taken to court over structural building repairs that we are not responsible for.
Your Honor, we ask that this claim be fully dismissed. Thank you.
my last landlord:
i moved into a clean place. three months later: mold all over the place. almost no dry wall in fall/winter and damaged furniture. he said it was all my fault and that i could not move out immediately. he wanted me to pay for another three months. i called a company that could prove that the apartment is a mess. no isolation and no chance not to get mold. after living there for 6 months, my girlfriend had seious helth issues because of the mold. all of the sudden, our landlord said we could move out immediately without having to pay for anything. he said that he was sorry and that it was not our fault. we were all happy, until we noticed that he sold the place to a young girl who already bought a new kitchen for the apartment and other expensive furniture. what an asshole. she sued him and won!!!
I assume you won. What the fuck is a "sanitary napkin" anyway? Sounds like toilet paper if you ask me.
EDIT: Oh, nevermind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_napkin
if your landlord is harassing you or doing some stuff that you think might be illegal, you should go to the San Francisco Tenants Union and get some advice on how to handle it. maybe even put some stuff on www.trembicky.com yourself.
I'm not sure how this is that extraordinary. A lot of rental units have policies on pets. Barring a cat isn't very unusual or unreasonable.
My ex-girlfriend used to live with four other friends in a really huge apartment in the Mission...shit was two floors, with 4-6 rooms (depending on how you wanted to configure) and the rent was ridiculously low...like $2000 a month for the whole thing. Of course, it only had one bathroom and 4-5 women living in it but...
In any case, the landlord, who was cool, got a divorce and his ex-wife got the apartment as part of the settlement. She then served the tenants with an eviction notice CLAIMING owner move-in. In S.F., this is one of the few ways you can legally evict a tenant.
No one's happy about it but whatever, they pack up, move out. One month later, one of the tenants' friends is rental hunting and notices their address listed in the classifieds. Then they did a drive-by and saw a "for rent" sign in the window. They then called to ask what the new rent was and it was 150% higher than what they were paying.
The tenants promptly hired a lawyer, sued, and ended up getting a few thousands dollars out of the settlement.
Dude the same thing happened to my old downstairs neighbors. She didn't make them pay, but she didn't fix it either.
Unfortunately the standard that our landlord had in mind for the lawn upkeep exceeded anything we were accustomed to. I was steady mowing it at least every 10 days...not good enough. One day I came home from work to discover that someone else had guerilla mowed our front yard. And they had to have been in a major hurry when they did it for they did a terrible job of it, leaving a few obvious "holidays" - my grandfather's word for missed spots. Okay, we thought, that's weird as hell. We asked the landlord about it, but she very sheepishly denied having anything to do with it. Yeah, right.
Then during the summer, despite watering the fuck out of it, the lawn had a few isolated yellow spots. In Texas during the summer, you can pretty much expect your whole lawn to turn yellow, only to have it return to full green in the fall. That was the norm for us so we didn't think much of the yellow spots, reasoning...this is Oregon, it'll be green again before we know it. Unfortunately our landlord thought otherwise. She left us a phone message giving us the business about how we weren't watering enough.
Next thing we know she's at our house laying down some mystery lawn fertilizer that within a few days wound up killing just about all of our garden just as it was maturing with tomotoes, peppers, squash, etc. sprouting about.
Needless to say, whether it was the fertilizer that did it or not, the lawn was all green again come fall. But then our lease was up and we were ready to move back to Texas and even though the day we left the lawn looked as good as it did the day we moved in, our landlord swiped the entirety of a our lawn deposit from us.
I didn't really care all that much about the money, but damned if that lady wasn't a total wacko.
Fucking lawn Nazis. I hate that shit. I will not water my lawn. Its a waste of fucking water.
All of this makes me so happy that I own a house now. If my neighbors don't like my lawn they can keep that shit to themselves.
So we had to put a plan in action. In the room upstairs, we went ahead and took down one of the chambers completely, but left the second one. We reasoned that we would just lock it up, and since we had installed a wall a/c unit feeding into it, we figured that we'd tell her that the person whose room that was - who was out of town - had his expensive computer equipment locked up in there. Since itgets to plus 100 degrees in Austin during teh summer we figured teh story would be an acceptable one. My own novel addition to this plan, which worked like a charm, was aimed to keep her from asking too many questions while she was in there. So what I did was get a pair of tighty-whitey underwear and with a brown Crayola marker draw in the biggest shit-stain you ever did see on it. Then we just dropped it on the middle of the floor in that room. Sure enough when she walked in the room she asked us about the chamber - which had plants in it at the time - but as soon as she spotted the seemingly dirty underwear, she bolted out of there as quickly as possible.
The next room upstairs actually had an entire harvest drying in its closet. We tried to hide it behind hanging clothes as much as possible and reasoned that she probably wouldn't want to look in the closet. For good measure, since the door was a little bigger than the frame, we jammed that thing shut as tight as we could get it. Sure enough, when she was in that room she decided that she did indeed want to look in the closet. It was one of the most tense moments I have even been a part of as we watched her struggle with the door for a moment only to luckily give up on it as too difficult to open. She had to have smelled the stuff in there, but fortunately she didn't press the issue.
We renewed our lease and over the course of the next year expanded the operation into an adjoing section of the attic.
Funnier still, a year or two after we finally moved out of that house...it became available again. My friend who was the mastermind of our operation and wasn't on the lease while we previously lived there...he was the dude with the "computer" that was "out of town"...decided to rent the place again. Obviously the landlord had caught wind of what we had been doing there and thus she had the entire upstairs section of the house closed up. A set of stairs were taken out, a little dining room was put in its place, and the whole upstairs became sealed up and obscured. But my friend of course knew that there were 2 bedrooms up there, so what does he do but cut a hole in the ceiling of a downstairs closet so that he could have access to upstairs where he once again got a big operation going all over again.
http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=1309
first, we are being evicted november 14th (my birthday)
this dude cannot speak english and he's probably 90. He's the meanest old man Ive ever met in my life. The stories I've heard in the building concerning this guy are pretty amazing. Back in the day, his mother owned half the building and he owned the other half. He didn't like how she ran her half, so over the course of 5 years he FORCED HIS OWN MOTHER IN BANKRUPTCY so that she would sell the place to him. Of course she ended up selling it to this more bohemian dude... my landlord's least favourite thing. Our landlord has a wife who speaks rather good english, but one of the few things he's said clearly to us is "SHE DOES NOT OWN THE PLACE, I OWN THE PLACE" - getting some background info we came to find out that when he dies (which will be soon), not only does his wife not get the place, but NOBODY does. he is giving them place up.
now for why we're being evicted. I'll admit, I'm not great at building a relationship with a shitty landlord. I see through assholes like they glass... its a blessing and curse. So if my lanlord is shit, I do cop attitude. I digress... since we moved into the place in the summer, the backdoor has been in need of a LOCK and a DOOR KNOB. right now its driftwood on hinges. Last week raccoons opened my door during the night and stole a bag of popcorn. As a side note, i went out for halloween as a raccoon. they're so gutsy, i admire their huge raccoon balls.
anyway... 2 months without being fixed, I finally step to him about it kind of angrily. Not only does he refuse to fix it, but hands us an eviction notice 30 minutes later saying that he is moving in. The guy can barely walk, much less climb 3 flights of stairs. So now we gotta stakeout on this fucker to see if he's gonna rent it to someone else just to get our last month's rent back.
We told our bohemian neighbour/owner of the other half of teh building, and his response was "Evicted... I wish I told you earlier, he has the best lawyer in the city because he evicts people about twice a year"
fuck a landlord
my old landlord is way worse. here is an excerpt from the link i posted earlier
there are a couple articles on him and his partner from the village voice about how elderly tenants and aids patients in his chelsea buildings would die due to not having working heat during the winter
This dude should be shot.
OK, this is completely fucking brilliant.
I guess I'm lucky in that I don't have any truly awful landlord stories...just run-of-the-mill lousy maintenance/gank you for your security deposit shit.
Sounds like you got shafted by your landlord. Where are you living, don't you have tenant's rights?
But these sentences above are the funniest things I've read all day, thank you. You'd think raccoons would recognize your food-gathering hustle!
I'm moving out in 2 months and am worried. My landlord is great, but previously has mentioned using the opportunity when people leave to spruce the place up a bit more. e.g. a tenant left a load of rotting food in the fridge, and they threw out the whole fridge. Holes in the wall? Re-paint the entire apartment. And so on.
What makes it worse is that one of my roommates is freaked out about this and is worried we'll be evicted. I keep telling her not to worry. She'd be a damn fool to throw out roommates that pay their rent on time. Still, she's making me look bad and I just can't stand that. It's so undeserved and demeaning. I'm going to call her after work today and try and straighten it out.
That's the funniest thing I've read all week. When I was 16 I moved out and lived with a gang of flaky people, one of whom didn't pay rent for ages. We started to get threats from the landlord, so I got him to write, and sign that it was HIM who wasn't paying rent. He soon moves out. Anyway, we all get summoned to court and I'm the only one who rocks up. I've got my signed statement from the offender so I think I'll be sweet...
After waiting 20 minutes for the judge to rock up, he comes in, winks at the blonde representing the landlord and orders ME to pay the rent due without asking me a thing. I didn't even get to say one word. I seriously gave up on any sense of justice that day.
I own the house next door to my residence. Just rented to four artsy-hipster guys who seem nice enough. But about 2 saturdays ago at 2 in the morning I hear this blood curdling scream. I go to my window to see if I can hear where it's coming from. I open my window only to hear quite clearly, "You were fucking her this whole time?".
I closed the window more screaming for 5 minutes. The next day I saw my tenants and they were a little unnerved. One of my tenants begins relating the story of last nights adventures. Evidently, one of their girlfriends came over, started beefing, hit the guy with a beer bottled in the head and had to be pulled off homey. One of my tenants looks me dead in the eye and says, "obviously, she's not allowed to come over anymore.". I nodded and said, "sounds like a good idea".
I own a large building that has huge 100 ft attic running over several units. In it are 4ft wide pans that are covered with tar paper. It took me the longest time to figure out that this was the remnants of a massive grow house from the 70s.
This one place was in this rundown carriage house, so the second story had no bathroom and the ceiling ranged in height from 3' to 8'. So lots of stooping down for a tall guy like me. The one good story about that place is one of the girls there, a total pothead, called the landlord about a squirrel problem. Well the landlord called some guys and they came in and put poison in the ceiling, but forgot to seal the hole. Then she went on vacation. By the time she came back, the squirrel had long since died, and there were maggots falling out the hole and accumulating on her bed. To this day she can't eat rice.
When I was in college I had a landlord who let a homeless guy live in the basement. The best part about that was it led to all kinds of ridiculous in jokes between me and my friends. He adopted this kind of mythical fake cult personality. Was a little creepy, we knew nothing about him, but would just hear him cough some nights through the air vent. And as a friend pointed out, TECHNICALLY he was no longer homeless. Same house the tenants above us had maybe two families living there. One night for giggles we counted, I shit you not, ELEVEN cars in the backyard. Not a party, just family business as usual.
Anybody here listen to "shut up little man"???
i was just kidding. my current landlord is the best. he just won't allow me to have a cat. which sucks. and makes him my worst landlord so far. i love cats. and i'm talking a lot of bullshit.
Hey, you wouldn't want to NOT come with females who are gentle on your unit(s).
when i moved in last june i noticed the bathroom was covered in black mold spores...the same black mold i saw when i volunteered to muck/gut houses in NOLA was right here in my own bathroom. i complained every week and it didn't get taken care of (bleached/painted over) until september.
the mold problem got so bad that a mushroom grew up from under my shower, also the mold ate thru the shower wall to a built in bookcase on the other side in the family room and destroyed wifeys book collection.
we also have many holes in our roof so we have some leaks...the worst would be the one ABOVE OUR BED.
I also found out that my house used to be a chicken coup....beat that soulstrut
I had mold in my vents in the first placed I lived. We'd take a shower and the vents had a fan. The vibrations from the fan would knock the mold loose so it would fall into the fan and spray whomever was in the shower. Yeah, I moved out shortly thereafter. I had coughing problems that went away right after I moved out.