5 Comments

  • Having heard a gazillion landlord horror stories, one that ended up with a brief delay and a signature is really about the tamest I’ve seen. It doesn’t start to get “fun” until the landlord has to write massive checks to get somebody to finally move out.

    Anyway, I’m totally nitpicking here, but this bit doesn’t make a ton of sense to me: “Novak was running her tub prior to the inspector’s visit to drain the building’s hot water tank.” If this is a building large enough to have a manager and a “common area,” one tenant running the tub should not be able to use up all the hot water for the building. Sounds like the water heater was undersized.

    • The apartment that I recently vacated had individual water heaters in each apartment.

      • There are even buildings where there are individual water heaters in the basement. This allows the water and energy being used to be charged to the renter as an individual rather than the collective group of people.

        The writer of the article does say that the women drained the “building’s hot water tank” which is odd if there were individual tanks.

        That being said, in my opinion, the landlord had a problem tenant and one that he wanted to get rid of. He had the legal means to do so long before the accommodation complaint / issue was raised.

        Instead of addressing the issue as he originally said he was doing by giving her a non-renewal notice, he let her slide.

        He took the money over the problems.

        While I sympathize with him going in front of some government employee, if he had followed his original reaction and not renewed, this wouldn’t have happened. (At least to the extent it did.)

  • That type of client affects every trade. In construction, as the joke goes: “Ma’am, if we buy your house back at a 20% premium, have it demolished, and shoot the project manager; then would you stop calling us?”

  • Mx,

    one tenant running the tub should not be able to use up all the hot water for the building

    Perhaps she was running the tub with the drain open.