Yeah, don't play chicken with the building official. Usually they'll work with you and brush off the more petty issues if you're working with them and it's clear that you're trying to be compliant. But if you act like a pompous dickbag or try to hide infractions then they will take immense pleasure in going through everything with a fine tooth comb and nail you for every single infraction they can find no matter how petty.

I played this card at an apartment complex I lived in years ago. We brought up multiple issues that they consistently failed to address, they replied with threats of fees or terminating our lease, and we shot back by getting in touch with a volunteer arbitrator at a local housing authority office. This huge guy showed up, assessed all the problems we had, then hand-delivered a notice to the office. Everything got fixed in the next 48 hours and we never heard from the office staff again. Not sure if these services still exist...

Why do you have this piece of paper and is there anything else on this page that tells us where it came from?

Writing at the bottom is off

Fake. A report would list the violations, the code reference, and have a lot of extra text describing the municipalities rules regarding said violations and a list of consequences for failing to correct said violations.

It would certainly not list a price because the inspector doesn't set repair costs or estimate them, and these were fines they aren't "estimated," much less printed out on a sheet like this. Even if it were remotely real, why would the tenant ever get a copy? The notice of violation goes to the landlord.

One of the apartments I lived in as a kid had started with the best kind of landlord: completely absent unless something needed to be fixed. But after a year or two, he sold it to essentially the opposite: Always there unless something needs fixing.

The actual owner was a retired guy who owned a bunch of apartments on the other side of town, and didn't want to be bothered with actually running this one building. He bought it so his weird son could move there and have a place to work on cars. So we now had a nosy neighbor that was always ready to tell us our business but wasn't going to be responsible for any actual upkeep, while the real landlord might as well have been in witness protection anytime we needed something. And as an added bonus, we had to move the car from the safe, spacious parking lot to the busy street in a fairly shitty neighborhood.

When I got my driver's license, a friend of the family sold me a really shitty car for $5. I got it home but needed to get it worked on because I've always believed that when it comes to steering and brakes, a car should be able to do at least one of those things reliably.

The next day, the bipedal rodent next door asked my mom about the car and she explained that it was mine and I was going to be getting it worked on so I could have a car. He offered $50 for it so he could fix it up and sell it, which my mom politely declined.

Later that day, my mom and discount Norman Bates got into an argument about some trivial bullshit and the by the next morning, my car got towed away. The shit head then went on to explain that the street in front of the apartment would be restricted to two hour parking, and that my mom would have to move her car if she didn't want it towed. He didn't care that there was nowhere else to park, not his problem.

So my mom showed up to work crying and on the edge of a nervous breakdown, which caught the attention of her boss, who just happened to be a member of the city council. She explained what had happened and he told her not to worry about it. Turns out the little unregistered business running out of our parking lot was about 7 different kinds of illegal, and while the place was being inspected by the city they also found several violations that would get very expensive if they weren't fixed.

In the aftermath of the legal colonoscopy, the lost heirs to the Habsburg dynasty were suddenly willing to be a lot more reasonable. We still had to park on the street (which was bullshit) but dipshit junior talked to his dad and the right to park there was going to be added to the lease agreement and they were both going to be off our backs for at least a few months because they were too busy dealing with the city.

Sadly, I never did get the gas guzzling death trap back. It would take a year and a half before I finally got my hands on an even more fucked up car.

More relevant to this post, there was a time when the plumbing backed up and the toilet started backing up into the bathtub. It's Saturday afternoon, my mom calls dipshit the elder (now actually answering the phone in the wake of the previous story) who says he'll come take a look at it on Wednesday or Thursday. My mom hangs up and calls a city renters hotline and asks what would happen if, hypothetically, someone were in this situation and complained to the city. Turns out, a lack of functioning plumbing is a pretty serious code violation and the fines could start after twenty four hours. When my mom called the old man back, suddenly he found the time in his schedule to come look at it the next day. And then when he couldn't fix it himself (shocked-kirk.jpg) he had a plumber there on Monday morning.

In cases like this, can the landlord mysteriously choose not to renew the rental contract?

And then everybody clapped. "Wires are crossed. $6,500. 21 days to fix." Am I playing pretend with my nephew?

Aww, did someone find out?