Supposedly we do. I don’t know about the other folks who have posted, but in my experience, the couple of times I reported anything, I was told it’d be simpler for me to move somewhere else than for them to deal with it.
As for the other posts, wow, some of these things make that garage I mentioned look like a paradise.
Something a lot of these stories have in common is that the situations were temporary. You can withhold rent or sue but that takes time. It takes time for code inspectors to come, write tickets, and determine that the landlord won’t pay or correct the situation. If you only needed the place for three months there’s no point. Plus if the city shuts the joint down as being uninhabitable, you’re going to need to find another cheap temporary situation on short notice, just as likely to be crappy as the one you have now.
The first two places I lived in when I came to Japan, so total of three years in particularly shitty conditions even compared to the generally low standard of housing here.
The first had an ancient boiler that was actually dangerous. Built just post-War and basically never maintained. It was an old fashioned type that sucked water from the tub, circulated it through the boiler, and back into the tub. There was no showerhead. I had to boil the whole tub to get enough hot water to bathe, which I did by pouring buckets of water over me.
I spent a few months doing that before I finally had enough and asked someone to come out and at least give me an estimate on what it would take to get hot running water. At the inspection, and the guy said basically, “This needs to be fixed or replaced before it goes ‘boom.’” The danger was why I was eventually able to convince my employer (effectively also my landlord) to find the funds to get actual hot running water in the bathroom. Eventually. It promptly froze solid for two weeks that winter, until we got a thaw.
It’s typical in Japanese homes to have local water heaters, no central one. That house had no hot running water at first except for the kitchen, where I had a half-decent heater. The updated one in the bathroom that provided a warm trickle when the water was particularly cold starting out. Water heaters are virtually always on-demand types. The “stove” was a one-burner gas hot plate. Again, ovens and actual stove tops are rare to unheard of in Japan, but usually you have at least two burners. There was enough of a counter to have a cutting board on one side of the sink, but nowhere to put any other dishes while preparing things. I ended up having to put stuff on the floor in the hall so I didn’t step on it while getting things ready. Cooking was not easy there.
The walls were ridiculously thin. If I turned the heater off, about ten minutes later it was almost as cold in that room as outside. There is usually no central heating in Japan. If I hadn’t bought a sleeping bag rated for −15ºC on my first trip back to the US, I would have frozen that winter. Didn’t help that the winter was one of the coldest on record in the area, but there was no way to heat the place and keep it warm. I would literally have had better protection from the cold if I’d slept in a tent.
The windows didn’t fit right, so during the rainy season, I ended up having mold growing on my tatami. The floor was thin and probably worn over the years. I ended up nearly putting my foot through the floor in a couple of places. The stairs were (again typical for Japan) extremely steep. I rushed too much going to answer the phone once, slid, and basically didn’t touch the ground again solidly until I hit the bottom.
Those were the the highlights.
The second place had some of the same problems, along with 20 years of neglect, disuse, and drifted dust that I had to clean out when I moved in. The tub was even smaller than the first house. I used it twice, and decided it wasn’t a good idea to get into a tub that was so tight that I had to keep my arms outside so that I could lever myself out again.
That area was hotter than my first place, and again, as is typical in Japan, there was basically no insulation. It was always hotter inside than out of the house, and it was in the high 30sºC Every. Single. Day. From mid-June to the end of September. Oh, and the screens were busted until I could fix them, so I got eaten by mosquitoes for a couple of weeks until I finally got enough time off to both: go shopping, and actually do the work.
People who haven’t lived in Japan think it’s all high-tech and shiny. It’s not. Even expensive high-rise apartments in Tokyo are filled with fake plastic wood, crappy sheet metal or particleboard kitchen furnishings, and literal holes in the wall for air conditioning ducts due to some horrible construction regulations. Houses like the ones I lived in were slight exaggerations of what’s typical for many. I’ve never, ever visited anyone here who had a house or apartment that made me think, “Wow, I’d love to live here! This is a really nice place!” and I’ve been in a couple of places that were expensive even by Japanese standards, which means they probably would market for the equivalent of a few to several million dollars.
I once moved into a ‘flat’ - upstairs of a cute, old house. It had a separate entrance, leading up to a conglomeration of one smallish bedroom, a larger living room with north-facing windows. There was a tiny bathroom with a near useless sink and a flimsy tin-enclosed shower. The “kitchen” was a rectangular space consisting of a sink, an ancient refrigerator, a terrifying old gas stove, and a metal cabinet. All lined up facing a wall - there was JUST enough room between the oven and the wall to open the oven door, not that I used it (I used a toaster oven perched on top of the refrigerator). There was an ancient window to the left of the sink, the screen was on hinges like a door and I suppose that was the emergency exit, I suppose I could have opened it, dropped to the overhanging roof, and thus to the ground. The whole thing looked highly unsafe and illegal, the wiring was definitely defective, and the place just looked like a fire trap. The walls were plaster, so old and painted so many times they were rounded at the ceiling. Cold in winter? You bet. Absolutely broiling hot in summer. Blew a fuse whenever I used the toaster oven when the owners downstairs were home. I felt rather trapped there sometimes, had to haul my laundry down two flights of stairs to the laundromat. But I was so glad to be away from home, it was ultra-cheap rent ($150 a month), and I had it fixed up and decorated very nice and comfy. A snap to keep clean, the whole place was about the size of my current living room.
Number one was a crappy apartment in a cinderblock complex with aging avocado kitchen where rodents ran free. After that we moved up to a tiny rundown rental house with “central heating” (there was a vent in the center of the living room floor, the rest of the house froze in -25F winters and icicles formed on the inside of the windows, plus we had neighbors who on one side were dead drunk most of the time, and on the other side imported and set free snakes in the yard to control their verminous pests).
I’m getting nostalgic just thinking about it.
During a period when I was nearly destitute, I rented an “efficiency” cottage in a very rough neighborhood. It had one closet, a shower stall, and a combination kitchen/living area. I had to rent the propane tank which provided gas to the water heater and the kitchen range; on the rare cold nights in south-west Florida, the kitchen range provided the only heat. Furniture was a sofa on which I slept and one chair. But I had a jillion cockroaches to keep me company; I often was awakened by the damn things crawling over me. It was down the street from the worst bucket of blood bar in town and gunfire wasn’t uncommon. The neighborhood sported a door to door crack whore who begged me to let her move in, promising me all the sex I wanted which would have been none coming from her. She made the same offer to others; where she actually lived, I don’t know. Worst six months of my life----up to now anyway.
It was this danky under-earth space that I shared with 32 other guys. There was no furniture, no amenities, and it got really hot. Worst of all, for the longest time, there was no way of getting out of there!
I guess the worst place I lived in was a 3 week sublet. It was just a few years ago, my daughter had a new baby and no room for us in her apartment in Brooklyn, but she found us this sublet. I knew it was a fourth floor walkup which would not have bothered me when I was young, but at 71, it left me breathless. And it was actually 4 storeys up since from the street to the ground floor was at least one storey. To add to that, from my daughter’s to this place was up a fairly steep hill. But there were at least three other things that sucked. First was that it was a brownstone that had been built (like most Brooklyn housing at least in Park Slope) as a single family home with servant’s quarters and the servants must have been short. The ceilings were about 6’6" which was okay, but every time I walked into another room, I had to remember to duck or bang my head. Second, the toilet alternated, on about a 45 second period, between running and not running (I would hate to see their water bill), but when it ran the shower went very hot and when it stopped the shower went very cold. There was nothing we could do about this. Thirdly, when we arrived, there was a dead mouse in a trap in the kitchen. My wife would not go into the kitchen unless I first inspected to see that the other trap was empty.
Fortunately, we actually stayed there only ten days. My son was moving into an apartment only a block away, but not actually moving till the day we left. Mirabile dictu, the apartment had a Murphy bed and a couple chairs so we were able to spend the last 11 days occupying that. He was on the ground floor (and there was actually an elevator, not that it mattered). One of the neighbors even had an unsecured Wi-fi (called Ruth, but my son never met anyone called Ruth).
California.
Does a college dorm count?
What the hell was this–a Turkish prison?
My WAG was he was riffing on the Chilean mine collapse.
Damn! I’ve been whooshed!
Švejk, I challenge you to a duel–at 300,000 paces. Choose your weapons carefully.
a motel room.
Home with my parents. 23 long years.
:eek: Excuse me, I’m still picking my jaw up off the floor.
I will never, ever complain about my the strange noises my working heating vents make again.
Yeah.
Nothing sucks like having Mommy the Crazy Lady Who Hates You Because You are Smarter Than She is and Daddy Who Won’t Do Anything to Stop Her From Hitting and Screaming at You for Hours Five Times a Week for roomies.
I once rented an apartment from a guy who had a big old house, which was chopped up into apartments. Upstairs lived an alcoholic lawyer, who would have friends over for drinking parties-which would usually end with fistfights (bodies falling on the floor). I took it for 6 months and then moved out.
Our horrible living situation did indeed come with tenant protection, it was just a time consuming process to get it. You had to report problems to your landlord. Then when the landlord didn’t do anything you had to report them to the government agency responsible for forcing landlords to fix that stuff. Then you had to have several incidents that were being ignored by your landlord (all well documented) to build up a case against them before you took them to housing court. Then when you get to housing court they give the landlord 25 days to fix all the problems before you can come back again and ask to be let out of your lease. It took us more than a year of complaining and documenting problems before our landlord finally decided it was too much work to deal with us and that he was probably going to lose a court case anyway so he let us out of our lease. In the end because we gave him the benefit of the doubt for the first 4 months of living there it was going to take us probably 15 months before a judge would have declared that the landlord must end our lease and let us go if he hadn’t just decided it wasn’t worth it to deal with us any longer.
My apartment without hot water or heating was in South America, so there weren’t any tenant protections. I met some people who heated their shacks with a bucket of coals, so I counted myself somewhat fortunate.