Our landlord and her husband lives in our small 10 units building. She used to be the sweetest old lady you’ve ever met. She’s always helpful and takes good care of the building. We considered ourselves very lucky to have found our apartment.
Starting March, Covid hit NYC and I started working from home everyday. My wife and I completely stopped eating out. We’d start buying more grocery, cooking more, doing more dishes...etc, i think everyone else is doing the same.
On day in May the landlord’s husband came up and wanted to see if there was a leak. From a previous conversation I knew he doesn’t take Covid seriously and thought it’s “just like the flu”, my wife is high risk (asthma) so I didn’t let him in and said I’d check instead. Nothing was leaking.
A few days later the landlord herself called, freaking out saying her water bill of the entire building is tripling in the past three months. Because she’s old and had always been kind, I tried to help her saying it could be because everyone is staying at home, that we are washing our hands and sanitizing everything. She wouldn’t take any of that, insisting that there’s no way Covid could increase the bill that much.
She then started harassing me everyday, first thing in the morning while I’m working. Trying to tell me that the water bill started to climb ever since we moved in April 2019. But we moved in May 2018. She started twisting everything I said (when I was trying to help her) and use it against us - implying us using excessive water to wash packages, to wash our cats (??), using water to run my wife’s business...my wife is a blogger, and the landlord doesn’t understand what that is and refuse to listen.
A few weeks ago she finally got individual water meters installed in the building, now she can clearly see it’s not us wasting water. But she STILL managed to harass us about my wife’s packages. She’d either call us or text us when there’s a package, put a bottle of Lysol on top of them, and tell us not to wash the package. When we asked if our water meter shows anything unusual, she’d say we are fine, but then proceeded to harass us the next time.
Today she texted me again and when I checked, the package wasn’t ours. She then said we had other stuff, and I told her it was a grocery delivery, then she said the delivery guy slammed the front door...
At this point I don’t know if she’s going senile or she just hates us for some reason. I don’t want to argue with her because she’s old and clearly will never listen, It’s not worth it. Plus we need to get her reference when we move out. But this is not the way to live in a pandemic when your home is the only place that’s supposed to be safe, and our lease won’t end until next year...what do we do?
Edit: I asked this on r/legaladvice 2 weeks ago. At this point there isn’t much we can do legally but I’m looking to see how we can approach this on a personal level.
Tl:dr Our landlord is harassing us for water usage during Covid, but we can’t move out until next year.
Submitted July 03, 2020 at 02:29PM by Throwawaymadtenant https://ift.tt/2BCt3q7
No comments:
Post a Comment