My family and I are renting a three bedroom apartment in Brooklyn in a two-family house. As some of you may know from previous postings, I’ve had some issues with the landlords here.
The landlords themselves live in Israel. We communicate (when necessary) by email.
Our lease expired in November 2002. We recently received an email from them stating that they would like to raise the rent. They also want us to now pay for our own heat. We never agreed to these conditions. They have been, to be diplomatic, not the best landlords in the world. It took about 10 weeks to fix a hole in the ceiling when it collapsed one afternoon. It took over two weeks to replace a stove (yes, we had no stove for two weeks!). Of course, when the double self-cleaning stove was replaced, it was replaced with a single non-self-cleaning model. But fine, that’s thier perogative. Sure, we’ve been waiting for two years to have windows fixed, but hey, who’s counting years?
I haven’t responded to thier email yet (regarding the request that we pay heat) because my wife and I are still discussing the best way to politely say “no.”
In any event, today, lo and behold, a plumber shows up at the door (with no warning, of course) to switch the boiler so that we pay for the heat. He was also there to do other repairs in one of the other apartments, and so he went to do those first. I don’t know if he’s going to get around to doing the boiler thing today.
My question is: can they unilaterally do this? We never agreed to pay for the heat. In the expired lease, it explicitly stated that the landlord pays for the heat, but I understand that the lease is now expired.
I’m not crazy about paying any rent increase considering the way we’ve been treated, but paying for the heat is an abosolute no-way for us. Especially since we have no way to verify that we’re not being charged the heat for the entire house!
Can anyone offer any suggestions (besides move fast)?
Zev Steinhardt