tenant rights

Photo by PoPville flickr user LaTur

“Dear PoPville,

I have been renting a rowhouse around Petworth for the past three years along with two other roommates. It’s an old house and the rent is relatively cheap, so I try not to complain about a lot of minor infrastructure issues and interior aesthetics. But due to some serious leakage (initially from the rooftop/upstairs bathroom old window, now to a lesser extent from an old bathtub with broken tiles/flooring upstairs), our property manager has notified us that they want to do a complete renovation of the upstairs bathroom.

This work will “take about a week” to complete, and will obviously put our bathroom out of commission. We have a half bath downstairs, so there is no other shower option available. (more…)

Photo by PoPville flickr user Erin

“Dear PoPville,

I’ve been renting an English basement of a townhouse for several years, am happy with my living situation, and have maintained a friendly relationship with the landlords.

They’ve had some recent life changes and appear to be preparing to sell the house. But I would like to stay put, or at least be compensated reasonably for suddenly being put out.

I know that sometimes a new owner will keep an old tenant once buying the property, or that sometimes owners will often pay the tenant to minimize the burden on them (they’ll give them a security fee+rent for a month or two+moving costs, for example).

But that was under the old TOPA laws, which were recently changed so that people in my situation are no longer given priority. (more…)

Photo by PoPville flickr user Elvert Barnes

“Dear PoPville,

I currently live in a so-called luxury apartment and have recently sighted a mouse in my unit. I’ve alerted management, but they have not been very responsive at all which has been very frustrating. The kicker here is that my lease is up in two months so my questions are — anyone else have this issue in a somewhat new-ish building? Am I overreacting or is this normal for DC? Is it worth battling it out with management or should I just bail? I like the area, but have had a few minor complaints about the building itself so I’m not entirely in love with the place. Thanks.”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Ted Eytan

“Dear PoPville,

Does an eviction end a former tenant’s TOPA rights? A friend successfully evicted her tenants and listed the home for sale. Now the buyer’s settlement company wants a document from the former tenants signing away their TOPA rights, even though they were legally evicted from the property. Thoughts?”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Brian Mosley

“Dear PoPville,

I’m sure that you have touched on this before, but hoping for a refresher. We own a condo in small building. We have wonderful tenants, however are looking to sell for financial reasons. What are the steps or recommendations on how to proceed with sale in a manner that is both fair and (of course) legal? Thanks!”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Erin

“Dear PoPville,

I have a question/issue regarding rent checks that I’m hoping others can weigh in on – either with any action we can take or with how they may have handled a similar issue.

My boyfriend and I have lived in a small apartment building in NW for going on four years now. It’s a good location for us and has what we need with no-frills which is totally fine with us.

Our issue over the last year and a half has been our landlord. Our building is owned by a small rental company/individual who still uses a dropoff/pickup method of paying rent by physical check every month. The problem is that our landlord will pick up the rent checks by the 5th of each month and then not cash them for sometimes (conservatively) 3-4 weeks at a time. We’ve gotten used to that quirk but what happened this month, and is not the first time, is the landlord cashed both the rent checks for two consecutive months on the same day. The first check was written over seven weeks ago, and the second one over three.

Is there any recourse for us to try and stop our landlord from doing this or is the company allowed to hold onto checks for that long, indefinitely, etc? (more…)

Photo by PoPville flickr user Pablo Raw

“Dear PoPville,

After three and a half years together, my boyfriend and I recently started looking for an apartment – our first shared space! – around Lanier Heights to build a home in for the medium term. We were very charmed by a one-bedroom unit at the Argonne, a recently renovated interwar building at 1629 Columbia Road NW, listed on both third-party websites and management company CIM Urban Real Asset’s own site at $2198. After a showing during which the agent consistently repeated this same amount, we decided to move ahead with the application process.

$340 in fees later, a surprise came buried in some pre-lease documentation which CIM is required by law to provide: the official rent for the unit was recorded at $3267, a grand and change more than the number which had been represented to us. I did a little digging to find out what might be lurking here: fortunately, owing to an excellent set of online resources and firsthand accounts from people who have been taken advantage of (including a 2015 PoP post) I didn’t have to search long.

The rent discount/concession scam has gotten enough press in the last few years that I imagined CIM might show some flexibility if we ask specific, informed questions that showed we had no illusions about what was going on. Instead, we were met with dishonesty and misdirection. The agent told us that the $3267 was a “maximum rent” level supplied by the city, characterizing it is as a bureaucratic or bookkeeping device out of the company’s hands. The lease we were forwarded made it clear this was not the case: $3267 was, on any plain reading of the main lease and “Lease Addendum for Rent Concession or Other Rent Discount,” in fact the official rent for the unit, modified by a $1069 “discount” offered by the company as a discretionary “consideration for agreement to remain in your dwelling and fulfill lease obligations.”

Being neither rich nor stupid, and having read about the nightmares of others who’d lost money and homes to the concession scam, we made our case carefully. (more…)