“I am not the only one with stories like these – there are at least 8 other former/current tenants who have their own horror stories.”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Victoria Pickering

“Dear PoPville,

I’m writing because, even after nearly 2 years of being out of this living situation, I am still just as outraged as I was when I left. I thought, perhaps, that time away from the situation would decrease my outrage and overall disgust, but after hearing from a tenant still in the house, I am just as mad today as was when I lived there. The rental home is unfit for tenants because the landlord has let it fall apart, and he is unfit to be a landlord due to his aggressive ways and unsettling, creepy behavior towards his female tenants.

First up: house maintenance. I lived in this house from July 2015 to March 2017 and my time there was extremely unpleasant. At first, I chalked up some of the issues around the house to it being a mildly shitty DC starter home (I was 23 when I moved in, so a less than pristine house is to be expected). It looked like the house hadn’t had a good cleaning in several years, there were dated appliances, countertops, cabinets, and some odds and ends that needed to be repaired. Then, when things started breaking, we would inform the landlord and he would come by and fix it himself, not with real tools or expertise, but with random scraps from the basement. These fixes were half ass to say the least and were the equivalent to putting a band aid on a broken leg. Below are some of the “updates” and “fixes” that occurred. Full disclosure, there were so many I can’t even begin to remember all of them, but here are a few that I can remember:

Toilet was running for hours at a time since May 2014 (before I moved in). He insisted it wasn’t a real issue and wouldn’t affect the water bill (LOL) but we saw otherwise. After we begged him to get it fixed he “fixed” with a rubber band. That obviously didn’t stick, and it took several more months for him to get a plumber to look at it. Once the plumber looked at it our water bill decreased significantly.

The dryer broke and began to leave (what looked like) grease marks all over our clothing. When we asked him to please get it fixed he again “fixed” it himself, which did not stop the problem. Then when we told him that it was still broken, he raised our rent, so he could buy a new dryer.

There was a big chunk of the counter that was broken off in the kitchen. He charged the previous tenants for it to be fixed but didn’t fix it for at least 3 years. It remained unfixed when I left.

Significant black mold problem. This was one was very annoying to me since I’m allergic to mold. There was mold coming out of the wall in my bedroom, in one of the bathrooms, and in the dining room. When I asked for this to be taken care of, Yvon said that Americans make up mold allergies and that it was fine. When I did push back, he came to take “care of it”. Spoiler: he didn’t take care of it, he painted over the mold.
The back door was a major security issue. A piece was missing from the doorknob (i.e., there was no lower lock, nothing to “catch” with the frame), and the deadbolt did not line up well with the doorframe, making it very easy to break the door in. Getting him to admit there was a problem was like pulling teeth and he provided a very half ass solution to “fix” it.

Despite the house falling apart, my roommates and I would try our best to clean the house and make it aesthetically pleasing – I even washed the walls – but the kind of deep clean and fixes that were needed to improve the house were beyond what we were capable of.

Next: his temperament and inappropriate behavior. Nearly every time he would come to the house he would scream at myself and my roommates, try to physically intimidate us, get in our faces and yell, etc. What triggered this behavior was usually us telling him about something being broken or an issue in the house, which he would try to blame on us and charge us for. Typically, whatever the issue was, was due to his poor upkeep of the house (see above) and not something we did directly so there was no reason that we should have to pay for it. He was so erratic and out of control we had to add a section to the lease addendum that discussions about the house were to be executed in a calm, respectful manner.

On top of being aggressive, he was extremely inappropriate. Before I moved in, he would come into the house unannounced to see if there were any “projects” he could do. I found that to be unacceptable, so we added a section to the addendum that required 24 hours’ notice before he came to the house. We negotiated a new rule that he needed to give us 24 hours before coming over, which he adhered to about 75% of the time.

He would also use the opportunity to go into our bedrooms when we were not there. Even when the “work” he was there to do was outside or downstairs, we all suspected that he was going into our rooms, but since we were not there, we couldn’t prove it…until one day.

I was home on a random weekday when he decided to pay a visit to the house. It was about 10 am and I was still in bed when my door opened and he was standing in my room. He didn’t close the door, he just stood there until I yelled at him to close the door and get out. After a few minutes I got dressed and went downstairs to ask him why he was going into my room, and why didn’t he knock. He gave me a non-answer about checking something in my room and that he didn’t think I would be in it. I tried to explain that it was inappropriate and asked that he give a heads up if he wanted to go into the bedrooms. Even after that occurrence, we suspected that he was still snooping around our bedrooms when we were not there. This was confirmed by another current roommate, who while home in between shifts (she is a flight attendant) was also startled by him walking into her bedroom unannounced in the middle of the day.

Another creepy occurrence happened when I asked him to take care of the mold in my bedroom (again). I showed him the black mold that was growing out of the wall and he started yelling at me right off the bat. I told him that he couldn’t speak to me that way and that I’m just looking for a solution to the mold problem because it was a health issue. He eventually calmed down and felt bad for his behavior and began hugging me in my bedroom. I was obviously creeped out and said I would rather not hug.

SPOILER: 4/5 of us wanted to leave the house and when we were finding our replacements Yvon told us that he didn’t want any men living in the house. Not only did that come off really creepy due to his past behavior, it is discriminatory.

Finally: money. He was very sketchy when it came to the security deposit for the house. We always suspected that money was tight for Yvon, due to the state of the house and his unwillingness to have professionals deal with issues in it, but red flags went off when 2/5 of the tenants moved out after the lease ended.

He refused to return the security deposit to the 2 tenants who were moving out until the new tenants moved in. This seemed pretty strange, considering the move in of the new tenants should have nothing to do with the old tenants getting their money back. It was at this point that I got suspicious about what the hell he was doing with the security deposit, so I did a little digging around in DC’s Tenant Bill of Rights.

Per the District of Columbia’s Tenant Bill of Rights, the security deposit is to be held in an escrow account and the landlord should post notices stating where the security deposit is held, as well as the prevailing interest rate. We asked Yvon where the security deposit was being held and he did not like that. After he yelled at us, he told us that the security deposit was in an “old account” of his at Wells Fargo. When we asked him to move the money from his “old account” and into an escrow account he freaked out again and said it was too expensive to do that at Wells Fargo. I called Wells Fargo and found out that it was free. When I told him this he still refused to move the money or show us that it was in any kind of account.

All that being said, 4/5 of us arranged to leave the house. When we did our final walk though, he told us he was going to withhold a portion of the security deposit because we didn’t wipe down the fridge. I said that was ridiculous and he screamed in my face said he was going to withhold the entire deposit because of my disrespect. It was at this point another room had to step in between us and tell him to sit down, while I left the house until the walk through was complete. Ultimately, he did not return the full amount (kept several hundred dollars) and even tried to get us to let him over to our new house so he could drop of the check. We obviously said no way and we have been happy to be free of his dilapidated house and insane behavior ever since.

This week I received a text from the one remaining roommate who was still there asking if he ever did anything “hostile or creepy” to us before she moved in. She said that due to his crazy behavior and house that was falling apart (water damage, black mold, etc.) and she and another roommate were about to make a quick exit. I told her that, yes, he acted inappropriately on several occasions and that he wasn’t able to deal with a simple fix for the house without losing his mind. She told me several stories about his wild behavior and told me that when he thinks people aren’t home he has been peeking and going into bedrooms. It was then that I decided I should to try to do SOMETHING.

That is why I’m here, I need some kind of guidance or advice that will put an end to his reign of terror. I figure it is impossible to do anything about his anger issues/creepy behavior, but there has to be something that can be done about the state of the house, and the black mold is probably the best bet. Probably also the discrimination, but I’m not sure I have that in writing, so it can’t be proven as easily. I have most of the issues that I mentioned saved in my email and can prove most of these conversations/occurrences happened if need be. Also, obviously I am not the only one with stories like these – there are at least 8 other former/current tenants who have their own horror stories. PLEASE ADVISE!!!!”