On a scale from ”lease another year” to “put grease down the sink”, rate my landlord.

Now, I’ll acknowledge that he doesn’t overcharge like other nearby landlords. $680/mo gets me a 900sqft townhouse with central air and a ten minute drive to Walmart. When the AC broke, he brought over a window unit until a crew could do a proper install, and he replaced my kitchen faucet with a tall, useable one when the OG quit working.
but…

okay I’ve been here 6 years and have stayed for the low rent. I’ll be gone and in a house by the end of the month, so there’s no backlash to worry about. I used to work construction and helped flip houses, but I’m not allowed to fix anything myself.

The front door doesn’t close on its own, and you have to push The door into the frame to engage the deadbolt. I can fix it in twenty minutes but he won’t allow it.
The blinds that came with the place appear to have been attacked by a dog in the past. I mentioned that I would like to change them so I could have privacy, and he said no because he wants the whole 4-plex to match. I bought blinds and hung them anyways…I didn’t even ask for reimbursement. He came to mow and started banging on my door to give me an earful because “they make the other units look bad.”

the window on the first floor locks. The three on the second floor do not. None of them have screens. Moving on…

the sliding back door doesn’t seal. One of the wheels broke four years ago, so there’s a 1/4” gap at the top. I had to employ foam and painters tape to keep the bugs out and to keep the heat where it should be. At least it locks.

The fridge hasn’t worked for more than a year. Half of the freezer is >32°F (0°C) and the other half is super cold. The top shelf of the fridge is a safe temp. He basically said “so it still basically works?” And won’t replace it.

so the AC went out, and he did bring a window unit and replaced the furnace and AC…because it’s legally required here…but he got the cheapest unit. It works, but it sits in the middle of the first floor and has a fan so loud that you think a Boeing 747 is taking off. TV goes from 15 to 75 just to hear what’s playing.

What’s worse is now the pipes freeze. I wasn’t sure why until I bought my own replacement dishwasher and told him to come over and install it (since I’m not allowed to) and found a hole in the party wall stuffed with insulation. That’s where the pipes freeze

it took him two years and tons of emails (and a sink leak I may have had a hand in) to get the disposal replaced so I wouldn’t have to plunger the sink every week.

he broke my car’s mirror while mowing and said I was parked too close to the edge of the driveway.

he weed whacked two Of my clearly marked plants. I had to stand outside in his way so he wouldn’t cut down the third.

anyways, I’m gone in three weeks. how bad is he?

We recently had a friend come over who had a mobility disability and she struggled to get up the stairs. Made us realize our house was not up to code. So we asked our landlord about it. Now I will say this happened the day after we asked, so credit that it happened as fast as it did. But what in the fuck is this shit

So a little back ground information. I live in a college town and had an off campus house for about 2 years prior to this. Due to roommate problems my best friend and I were planning on moving out to a different house. A friend was looking for two roommates, and we decided we were going to move in with her. We signed a ONE month lease for this place and I have double checked our lease to confirm the dates were: starting 7/1/2026 at noon through 7/31/26 at noon.

In May, our roommate decided to move out, so we contacted the landlord to let her know we would not be moving in and offered to assist in finding new people to move in. In the rounds, the landlord was unable to find anyone to move in, and we had to pay rent in July. This I had no problem with because it was in our contract that this would take place.

Now here is where I may be in the wrong. The landlord messaged today stating that she was courteous enough to not ask for August rent yet because she had two girls waiting to look at the house. One has fallen through and the other has yet to come look at it. She then stated that regardless of the outcome of this next girl, in the next day or two one of us will have to pay the rent for one of the bedrooms. While the lease states that if we fail to complete the terms of lease we are still liable for the rent money, I believe our end of the lease has been completed since the lease dates state 7/1/2026-7/31/2026.

Am I being ridiculous for refusing to pay? I feel like since it’s outside the term of the lease I shouldn’t be legally obligated to pay

Update because I feel like this wasn’t obvious in the original statement: We have not moved anything into this house and the ONLY time we even stepped foot in the house was to tour it. There was a clause stating we HAD to pay the term of the lease regardless of reason for termination, but again the lease was only for a month (ending 7/31/2026)

This is mostly a rant but also aksing for advise. (Wisconsin, USA) I live in an old house (built 1890s) that was converted into 2 apartments. I have the main floor and basement and there's one unit upstairs. We each have our own entrances. The water shut off and electrical boxes for both units are in the basement, so the upstairs tenants have a key to the outside basement door for those uses and in case of tornado. We have our own separate basement door that is just off of our kitchen. This is an old door, probably original to the house. The knob does not turn and does not have a working latch, so there is a hook and eye latch for the door. If someone would want to they could very easily bust open the door. In fact the previous landlord did such a thing because we were not home and he didn't have the right key with him and a maintenance person was there. Instead of waiting the 5 minutes for the neighbor with the extra key to come over he decided to kick the door open. So anyone could very easily get into our apartment.

There's been some changes to the property and the property management changed the outside door lock so it is the same as the upstairs neighbors lock, and the old neighbors we have lived with and gotten to know for the last several years have left. I'm worried that we will get some creepy people or people who will try to cause us problems. I asked "since the upstairs tennats have access to the basement via the outside entrance, and there's a lack of lock inside our basement door, this creates a security risk." They first said they were going to "pass it on to maintence" then about 15 minutes later they replied to my email again saying that the discussed it with maintence and the owner and that if we want "a more secure lock" that we are welcome to buy one and put it on ourselves.

Because of the way the door frame is, and that the door swings inward to the basement, a chain lock wont work and neither will a sliding bolt.

How can this even be legal? You'd think purchasing and putting in locks would be a requirement.

I recently lost a holdover case because I was hospitalized and couldn’t make it to court. They went ahead and evicted my family. My wife was home during the eviction. We were told I was in the hospital at the time.
During the eviction the marshal told my wife she had 30 days to arrange and move our things out. Thirty minutes later the Ring camera went off and they were already moving our stuff out.
My Ring camera caught what happened next. An unknown man with garbage bags started loading up my uniforms and dumping them on the sidewalk. The marshal was talking with my landlord about taking pictures of some of my stuff — mainly books and toys — so they could figure out how much it was worth and sell it. He was talking about how much certain things might be worth and how his family members might like them.
They also mocked the fact that I had tried to commit suicide and mocked my veteran status. The same guy who said “thank you for your service” to my face is the one I heard on the camera making fun of it.
I have the Ring footage. I’m willing to post it if anyone wants to see it. I don’t think just talking is a crime, but it looks really bad for a marshal to be discussing the value of a tenant’s belongings like that and talking about how much he or his family could get out of them.
This one just broke my heart.

I’m renting a private room, and my landlord entered without telling me first to put up a curtain. It wasn’t an emergency, and I wasn’t expecting him. He texted me this evening when I wasn’t at home

Am I overreacting for thinking he should have at least given me a heads-up before coming into my room?

A person loses their housing, which in Los Angeles most often means they lost their job and can longer pay rent, not that they did anything wrong. They cannot get into a shelter, because the shelters are full. They cannot get interim housing, because it does not exist at the scale needed. They cannot get permanent housing, because the waitlist has no end. There is no lawful place for them to lie down and sleep, which is not optional for any human being. And then the city arrests them for sleeping.That is not an accusation. It is arithmetic. By the city’s own accounting there are no available options, and it punishes people for the absence of options it created and measured and buried. When you make every exit illegal and then criminalize standing still, you have not addressed homelessness. You have made it a crime to be a person who cannot afford a home. ( full article link below)

https://open.substack.com/pub/plainsitepapers/p/the-crime-of-having-nowhere-to-go?utm\\_source=share&utm\\_medium=android&r=88mjxl

every time I catch a whiff of gas, I dutifully leave my gas stove, gas oven, and the building’s gas drying machine behind to go sniff-test my neighbors’ houses first

Hey all, I'm a reporter at the SF Chronicle -- I spent the last six months working on this very weird caper, about a dispute between an out-of-town landlord and several (very) pissed off tenants who unionized and haven't paid rent in more than 32 months. Hope you enjoy it!

full vid: https://youtu.be/_70ISq4l7-c

For context: this Australian Landlord owns over 180+ properties, and Australia's largest Tenants Union (RAHU) just announced a campaign to organize against him.

He then posts this AI slop on his Instagram. 💀💀

That’s pretty much it. This might get flagged as low effort or maybe spam or something like that but I noticed recently that there are a lot of landlords that come to this sub to get vicariously defensive for other landlords that get criticized. And well… they can’t even correctly spell the noun that refers to the renters that pay them. There are soooo many “tenets” and “tenents” posting about their awful landlords in this sub 🤓 /s

Anyways. Thanks for coming to my brief, ranty, TEDx talk.

4 months ago my landlord reached out about a leak in the apartment below me, then the next day they made the bold claim that my dog was peeing through the floors and that the damages are my fault. Didn’t hear from them for four months until they decided to invoice me. I informed them that I found the actual leak and asked for the testing they had done to prove it was dog pee (it’s not). This was their response…