(OH) Does a long string of questionable issues "stack up"?
I live in an apartment. Since I've been here (~6 months) I've gone without hot water twice, second time it lasted 4 days. Went without any water at all on one occasion for a day and a half. Also went without power for 2+ days, though I'm not certain that was their fault.
The radiator kept drip leaking and soaked the carpet of my bedroom, and the work order I submitted for that was closed without comment. (Around the same time they did that the weather warmed up enough they stopped running the heat so I didn't pursue the issue.)
The bathtub/toiled backed up and filled up with sewage twice (second time it was enough to ever so lightly slosh onto the floor and I had to clean that up).
That same second time I pointed out to the maintenance guy that there was a leak in the ceiling from the neighbor above. He said he would look into it. The leak was not a continuous issue (and I realize now most of the water wound up in the walls) so I didn't fill out a work order for that (dumb to not have a paper trail I realize now).
However the ceiling then collapsed in my bathroom from water damage from the leak. The work order I opened for that one was also closed without comment. That time I opened another work order. That was 22 days ago. Several days after the second work order someone came and sort of cleaned up the mess of drywall; and several days after that a plumbing company came and replaced all the pipes, fixing the leak. They however did remove a bunch more drywall in the process of that (including the drywall my shower curtain was anchored to). They told me someone would come the day after the plumbers in order to replace the drywall. That did not happen.
Today, over a week after the plumbers, I came home to find my bathroom vanity/sink sitting in my dining room. There was no sink in my bathroom, just capped pipes. They'd also ripped out yet more drywall in the bathroom, albeit they did replace some of the drywall they ripped out.
Presumably they plan to leave me without a bathroom sink all weekend at minimum.
They had also locked my cats in one of the rooms (cats had food/water/litter in there, but I was annoyed they did that without even informing me they were going to be there, and also didn't let the cats out when they left).
Apartment also now seems to have a roach problem with the warmer weather; though I haven't reported that yet; I've only started noticing them in the last few days.
I looked into what my options were for a lot of these issues when they were occurring; and unfortunately it seemed the absolute best case for any of these were I could maybe get a hotel room and ask them to pay for the hotel room; and even that seemed unlikely. The hassle and time sink of moving to a hotel did not seem worth it so I didn't pursue the issue.
What I would like to do is to cancel my lease and buy a house like I was planning to do at the normal end of my lease, or get some kind of rent reduction.
One legal option I saw (potentially with the bad mold problem that is currently present due to the leak) would be to just immediately move out and cancel the lease saying it was unfit for habitation; but I don't really want to do that either since I'd like to have time to actually buy a house.
Do I have any options besides just harassing them to fix the issues? I know options like putting rent in escrow will maybe help them fix the issues faster; but they're just fast enough with fixing issues that the 30 days of rent escrow won't speed things up, and they get their rent in the end so it's not like they're out anything.
(Fun bonus story, they ask people who come for tours to leave reviews for the touring agent. Through some web trickery those reviews get posted as google reviews for the property, artificially raising the google star rating for the property by a considerable amount. I know that's just a TOS violation at best, but it really made me realize how scummy this place was. Unfortunately I did not have time to do due diligence when I moved here.)
Posted Jun 12, 2026, 11:47 PM UTC