Afternoon all,
Ok, here’s the background.
I stay in a block of 6 flats with shops on the street level, all has been fine until a couple of months ago when a new neighbour moved in.
Basically the guy is a junky or maybe even a dealer (constant visits from unsavoury types) so this means…
vomit/half eaten food in the stairwell, visits from various dodgy characters, the dentists (on the ground floor) has been broken into many times, these people buzzing my flat cause they can’t get their guy to answer, rather than knock on his door they shout through his letterbox (or mine when they come to the wrong flat!)we even had a guy wander dazed into our flat one time when we hadn’t locked our door properly!
So as you can imagine it’s getting pretty tiresome so i’m looking for advice on how to get him out!
Does anyone have experience in this, who do i contact?
Also are there any ways to ‘encourage’ him to leave?
cheers
nick
If you were describing a movie you could kill him, hide the body and let everybody think he skipped because he couldn’t pay the rent.
Alas, in real life you don’t have such an easy solution. Try getting together with the other tenants and tell the landlord to do something or he gets no rent.
You would have to put the rent money into some kind of escrow acct. and you probably need a lawyer (are they called barristers in Scotland too?) to advise you.
Why don’t you just move Nick? It’s ten times easier to move yourself than to get someone to move, or have him removed. Why not live somewhere nicer? Find a chap who will rent you a flat upstairs, in a house, or a duplex. What part of Scotland are you in? I know a fellow in Edinburgh who had a few flats… I rented from him a long while ago…
Attempting to force someone out of their home will not get a good reaction from anyone and an even worse one from ‘unsavoury types’ as you say. You’ll probably just create more hassle for yourself and it could get ugly.
I agree with Antiquarian, you need to do the moving.
Moving is very good advice but on the other hand characters like that are often transient. He could well be gone in a couple of months. If he’s really worrying you though I’d say something to the landlord and split.
You could ring them but there’s probably not a lot the police will/can do especially if you live in one of the larger cities like Edinborough or Glasgow.
They can’t arrest this guy just for being a junky and there has to be some sort of concrete evidence that he’s dealing out of his flat other than the fact that you suspect he is.
They can’t really do much about the break-ins either unless you see it happening and call them and they come and catch them in the act.
And as for the comings and goings of people and activities in the stairwell, they are free to come and go and unless they start gathering in the stairwell and creating a disturbance or something, I doubt if the police would act much on that either.
aftenoon
bit of an update…
monday night, i hear noise form the stairwell so i look throughthe door’s peephole. My neighbour and some of his aquaintances involved in a tussle!
my nieghbour is holding back this old guy (like, a bloke with a walking stick!) while someone else is down the stairs a bit hold back someone else!
lots of shouting , something about the old guy being down £20 or something.
It’s just occured to me now that i should have called the cops on them but anyway…
i head out and come back to find the guy’s dogs (two pit bull type dogs) have shit all over our landing!
so anyway, next day i called pest control who are going to see him about it (today i think)
wheels set in motion hopefully (apparently after this they’d go to his landlord).
my new strategy is to report him every tiem he oversteps the mark, i guess he won’t want that attention and hopefully will move on, we’ll see
n.
the latest…
ok, so i’d phoned the animal control people who were going to send someone out to speak to him.
Well, on friday morning i came home to a card from the animal unit saying they’d been and for me to call them for an update.
So the story was, the officer had first visited on wednesday but there was no reply so she put a card through the door. She said she also noted there is no lock on the door (as in a hole where it should be!)
She then called again on thursday, again no response.
So finally she was back on friday with the police!(shame i missed it) She said the flat is a total mess, empty bottles everywhere and all the interior doors are off the hinges.
i mentioned i thought they were dealing but the police found no sign of drugs.
the police reckon they are either squatting there or the landlord doesn’t know what’s been going on. but we actually received a letter meant for them so they can’t be squatting.
So she is now going to contact the landlord and let them know what’s been going on.
if i was the landlord and saw the state of the place i’d been quick to act so fingers crossed!
nick