Landlord renovating with a stop work order

Advice Needed

I’m in a multi family home on the top floor and the landlord has been doing renovations on our basement for weeks. His brother lives on the bottom floor, and the basement is the brother’s basement but our laundry was in a private side room within it. Now all the walls have been ripped down and I can see wires hanging and exposed pipes. They’ve also ripped out an entire bathroom I didn’t know was down there (because it was previously hidden by walls lol). He’s been doing construction every weekend for the past 3 weekends, starting at 7-9 AM every Saturday :D. My roommates and I are dumb and naive and didn’t think much of it, but then a family member asked me if there were any permits. I didn’t see any placard anywhere, and my landlord has done some shitty things in the past, so of course I called the town’s building department and there was no permit. That was on 3/4. They also slapped a stop work placard on the front door. But yesterday on 3/7 he continued to do work. They were pouring cement yesterday in the backyard in front of a garage that’s back there, and inside the basement I could hear drilling and banging. What am I supposed to do? He won’t stop and doesn’t care about the stop work sign. I can just keep notifying the town and giving them documentation of what he’s doing, but I feel like this guy just flies under the radar and gets away with this kind of stuff a lot. A few months back we found out this apartment had no certificate of occupancy either which is required in my town for every new tenant. What do I do??

Posted Mar 8, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

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