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I've had it!
I have begun the process of finding the appropriate government agency to rain down wrath upon our expletive of a landlord. Our air conditioner has not worked since before Memorial Day, and section 24(b) of our rental agreement clearly states that it is the landlord's responsibility to maintain the air conditioning unit in working order.
We made a verbal complaint back in May, but of course, we can't prove that. But I have all of the documentation to prove that we sent a certified letter of complaint back on July 9th and that it was picked up (not by the landlord, to whom it was addressed, but by the apartment manager) on July 17th. We still haven't even been contacted about it. Now I just have to track down the right bureaucrat and see what our options are. I was passed around from government agency to government agency this morning and finally left a message with some landlord-tenant hotline. I'll be calling them again soon.
I will not be dissuaded!!
Re: I've had it!
I googled this website for you. It may have some info on there to help you out:
http://www.rentlaw.com/pennsylvaniarentlaw.htm
Apparently the "tenant counselor" is out today, but I'm supposed to call back at 9:30 tomorrow to talk to him about what can be done!
I've found some encouraging stuff in my research on the web. From now on, though, I'm sending every rent check by certified mail so they cannot evict us for "late payment" to retaliate for whatever we end up doing. The only other thing that I think they could make up would be excessive noise, which would be easy for them to claim since the manager shares a wall with us.
Both of the landlords I had before this were very responsive, and Matt never had any problems at his previous place, so this is a learning experience for us. Yayyyy...
Seriously. If we weren't trying to recover from literally thousands of dollars in unusual car maintenance and repairs right now, I would be trying to talk Matt into terminating the lease (which it looks like we are within our legal rights to do) and buying. I passed so many houses for sale on my way to work today, and we could probably swing it (though the mortgage would likely have to be in just my name). Then I could get my dog!
I agree, renting does suck! I have lived in a whole bunch of apartments, and I'm fairly certain that I've never had a sane landlord. I truly think the only people who become landlords have half their brain missing do to crack smoking or something.
But nothing tops my first landlord. I was only 18 when I rented from her, and if I weren't so young and naive I would have done something about it, but I had no idea how crazy she was until it was too late. She owned the crazy big house in the city where I did my undergrad. It was in a really swanky part of town, but she was recently divorced so I think she was having trouble with the costs, so she decided to make the place into apartments so she could continue to live in the main part of the house. So my friend and I were her very first tenants, we lived in a self-contained apartment in the basement of this house. We had our own entrance, laundry, everything. Her 98 year old father lived on the floor above us, and she lived above him on the next two floors with her two teenaged sons.
My first clue that she was crazy was that she was trying to set me up with her oldest son. I was 18, in my second year of university, and he was a senior in high school. I was not having it. After she found out that I had a boyfriend, (who I'd been with since I was 16) she FREAKED and tried to bar him from staying over on the weekends. Too bad lady, he lived an hour away and he came and visited me every weekend, where else was he going to stay?
We had problem after problem with her. I came home once to find my roommate cornered in the living room by our landlady who was YELLING at her, and when I walked in she began yelling at me too, accusing us of stealing a child support cheque that her ex-husband put in her mailbox. We were trying to explain that we didn't steal anything, and even if we had, we couldn't cash it, as it was in her name! It turns out that he had put it in her mailbox but it had gotten caught up in a newspaper, and she found it a few days later. She didn't apologize to us though.
She also flooded our entire apartment in the winter, when she was out trying to shovel snow and decided it would be a good idea to HOSE the snow to melt it?? And left the hose running pointed directly towards our basement apartment and forgot about it. We came home to two inches of water in our living room, which was freezing and awful to deal with in winter.
Another time she blew something electrical and we had no heat for over 24 hours, we had to wear snowsuits in our house to stay warm (Canadian winter!!)
Finally, when we moved out, we didn't get one penny of our damage deposit back, because she said that the carpet in the living room was ruined (hello, SHE FLOODED IT) and that we stole the bathroom mirror. There had never been a bathroom mirror there, my roommates dad had to buy us one, and she took it with her when she moved.
That woman was bat sh!t crazy. I wish I knew then what I know now, I would have taken her to court for all the craziness!
GOOD GOD JeHawley!
You make me feel like I should never complain about anything ever again lol