Apartment Woes

Starting about 4 weeks ago, my wife and I started to notice a certain spot of the floor in our bedroom starting to "sag" a little bit. Almost like a divot in the floor/carpet, roughly the size of a small shoebox. I thought it was a bit abnormal, but didn't pay it much attention, since it only seemed to be in the one spot. Well, about 2 weeks go by and we start noticing a few more, smaller in size, but they've also started to crop up in the hallway/living room. Naturally, I called the office/management company and let them know. They said that it may just be the carpet getting old, but they'll send somebody out to look at it.

Well, about a week goes by, nobody shows up, and now the apartment reeks like sewage. I call again, this time more pissed off, letting them know that it's obviously some sort of water damage/rot/sewer leak and that they need to send somebodytoday. Around 6pm that day (Tuesday), the maintenance "supervisor" shows up. He immediately notices the smell, takes a look in the bedroom, and concludes that it's possible a beam may have shifted. He searches the apartment for a bit to try and find crawlspace access, but there isn't one. He explains to us that they'll have somebody show up to investigate no later than Thursday, but they'll need permission to enter in case they have to start pumping water, or anything else serious, but not to worry, because they'll put us in a hotel if the damage is extensive. He then takes a look around the grounds, finds the crawlspace, but says that he'll need a key to get access.

Needless to say, Thursday comes and goes and I don't hear a word from anybody at the management company, the maintenance supervisor, or anyone else. I text the maintenance supervisor asking him what the hell the deal is and he says he wasn't able to get the key, because he "e-mailed" the management company and they hadn't responded yet. However, he'll be here on Saturday (today) to take a look at it by not later than 11AM. Well, it's now 1pm and once again I've heard nothing from him, nor anyone else. Needless to say, this mess is frustrating as fuck and I'm really curious what my legal options are at this point. I guess they'll take it serious once the foundation collapses, but I don't want to wait around for that. I know the obvious answer is, "just move". The thing is, not only is moving a huge hassle that I don't want to deal with, I'm sick of renting companies treating tenants like absolute garbage. Does anyone have any experience dealing with a similar situation that could offer some advice?

Well, finally got through to the management office after letting them know via voicemail that I submitted complaints with both the housing authority and a code compliance group that our city has set up. They called me and let me know that they'd setup reservations for a hotel until the repairs are completed.

I also spoke with an attorney, but they said that there isn't really a whole lot that you can do "preemptively" about potential health/property hazards. I'd have to wait until they manifest. It'd all just be speculation prior to that. However, he did say I should be able to terminate the lease over the issue and that he'd recommend letting the management company know that we want a "liveable" hotel room.

Selix_sl said:

OOC is getting a house or renting a house out of the question where you are Kirun? Multiple nightmare experiences with apartment complexes is what drove me to buying a house.

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We're looking at all of our options. We're putting in an application today for a condo.

To add to the layer of bullshit, they finally send out a cleaning crew to pump the water and dry out the crawl space. The complex put us up in a hotel for 4 days while this is going on. I keep calling the moron manager every day, because despite me explicitly telling her that she needed to call me every day with updates on progress, she still doesn't. Anyhow, I call her Friday (the last day of our hotel stay) and ask her if the work has been finished. She said that she was "in meetings all day" and had to make some calls, but she'd call me back. She ends up calling me back about 10 minutes from 5 o'clock and says the cleaning crew is done. I told her, "Well, that's great, but what about cleaning up the crawlspace access? The carpet is still torn up there, it's going to need a new piece of plywood to cover it, etc.". She says, "Oh, let me call Juan (the maintenance supervisor) and have him come out".

An hour goes by and I hear nothing from Juan, so I call him myself (super nice guy. He's the only one that has been giving me any concrete information through this whole mess.). He says that he's about 30 minute away, but he'll be there asap. So, he comes over, has to leave briefly to grab some materials, but decides that he'll go take a look in the crawlspace just to make sure everything is completed. He comes out, shaking his head, and informs me the cleaning crew never pumped the second round of water. It was the pipe from the sink that ended up rusting all the way through, so it wasn't holding any water. Almost everything from the sink was draining into the crawlspace area. Well, when the crew came the first time, they pumped all the water out, and Juan repaired the pipe once they did. The problem is, between the first pumping (lol) and the repair, people had obviously used their sinks/water (surprise, the manager never shut the water off!), and so some areas had filled back up. Anyhow, the cleaning crew laid down the vapor barrier on TOP of the standing water, in a hope (I'm assuming) that nobody would notice. So, now we get to do this all over again...

Needless to say, we're looking for new places right away. My wife and I have already lost our shit on the apartment manger and she told us we can leave without notice if we choose. So, once we find a place, we're definitely out of this dump.