Unsavoury Land lords/ladies

[spiceman1957]

I was reading Sdlee posting and just wanting if anyone has every had a shady land lord/lady. My first apartment in my salad days was a studio type with a fantastic rent of $95.00 per month. (Now I'm telling my age). However, this land lady fixed the thermostat at 60 degree so that I could not raise it any higher. I was not allowed to have any kind of space heaters either. Talk about freezing! She even fixed the water heater at 105 degrees. Almost like taking a cold shower.
John

 

[toggleswitch2]

An ice cube tray sitting atop the thermostat does wonders.

Ditto: turn off radiator in room with the thermostat. If you can't turn off, go buy heavy upholstering fabric and enclose it. you'll get more heat in the other rooms

Law in NYC: during heating season between 6am and 10pm there must be minimum temperture indoors of 68*F. 10pm to 6am => 50*F

My county of Long Island goes further to define room temp at NIGHT no less than 65*F

Many landlords seem to forget that rent is given in exhange for space AND services.

 

[petek]

Where's SDLees posting on this.. I must have missed it.

 

[mielabor]

Is it a common phenomenon in the US to rent an apartment inclusive heat? That is very unusual in the Netherlands and the fact that you can't control the climate in your own home would generate a lot of complaints here. Here this would be a good argument for an official application to reduce the rent just as one can do when there is not sufficient ventilation, etc.

 

[sudsmaster]

My experience out here in Northern California is that most apartments/rentals do not include coverage for utilities like gas, electricity, and heat. Often water may be covered, due to the difficulty and expense of setting up separate water meters.

I think New York City may be a bit of an exception due to the very dense construction, and a legacy of apartment buildings being heated by steam with central boilers in each building, or even contracts to buy steam from underground systems.

In SF my mom lived in an apartment in a building that did have pre-paid central steam heat, which she loved, but when the system needed repairs the landlord opted to change it over to inadequate separate gas heaters in each unit - the gas for which each tenant had to pay themselves. This was legal under that city's version of rent control, which provides for rent increases due to the cost of repairs etc. In her case the heat source moved from the living room to the entry hallway, and she would spend a lot of time standing in front of the heater in the hallway.

There were other problems with her unit. One which I discovered when we moved her out to a rest home, was that the landlord had removed the fuse box inside her unit and simply hard-wired all the connections, which led back to a single 40 amp circuit breaker for each unit at the front of the building by all the electric meters. Since she had already left the unit, and because another tenant asked me not to report it, I didn't. But it didn't seem particularly safe to me.

 

[runematic]

Law in NYC: during heating season between 6am and 10pm there

Do you mean for renters/rentals?

I keep my winter therm set at 64 when I'm at work, 66 when I get home & 64 at night.

 

[mielabor]

What we do have here are communal heating systems, typically found in 1960/70's apartment buildings. Usually people pay a fixed amount per month for this (separate from the rent when applicable, as it can also exist with self owned apartments) and at the end of each year the difference between estimated and actual use is compensated. Nowadays this set-up is rather unpopular and newer buildings almost invariably have individual heaters.

The problems with the communal heating system are that it is difficult to regulate for each apartment and that energy conscious behaviour is not rewarded. People complain that they have to pay extra because their neighbours waste energy.

 

[whirlcool]

When we first moved to Texas we were looking for a temporary apartment. The person would show us an apartment and when we asked the cost she'd say something like "$375.00 Bills". And on other apartments she'd say something like "$400, No Bills".
I finally asked her what she meant and it turned out that if she said "Bills" that meant the rent included your utilities. If she said "No Bills", that meant you paid your own bills. In the late 80's it became harder and harder to find places with"Bills". Now I don't think any landlords pay the bills anymore.

 

[spiceman1957]

petek,

I was referring to post #27469 where Sdlee was talking about his land lady.
John

 

[toggleswitch2]

Law in NYC: during heating season between 6am and 10pm there must be minimum temperture indoors of 68*F

Yes, where the landlord provides heat (i.e. pays for it) and the tenant has no contol over (more of) it.

 

[toggleswitch2]

~Is it a common phenomenon in the US to rent an apartment inclusive of heat?

The US is such a big place one can't talk about the country as a whole. After all, there are places where you don't need ANY heat and a lot more that you use it only for two weeks or less.

In New York City most apartments include heat. This was done to move away from having many small vented gas, wood or coal "stoves" (heaters) in each apartment back in the early 20th century

It was seen as much safer/cleamer to have one large central heating system for all apartments. The first central heating systems were coal-fired steam systems that were completely non-electric.

A relative has a two-family house where the heat is inlcuded in the rent to the tenant. A easy as it would be to separate the heat and have the tenant pay for their own gas (or oil) heat [and control it with their own thermotat], their is reluctance to change it, in that it becoemes difficult to judge at what level the rent shodld be set. There are very few apartments to compare it to where heat is NOT included.

Similarly, tenats normally pay for cooking gas ($15 or less per month) in buldings constructed before 1960. (The vast majority here) In newer buildings where gas is still only used by the tenats for cooking, it is usally an expense to the lanlord and not individually metered to tenants.

The logic is: Say in a 20-story buildng it makes no seses to meter each run (stove) separately, from the basment to the stove. Much easier is to pick-up all 20 stoves/ cookers with one vertical pipe run. Multiply this by the number of apartments on one floor. So a buiding 20 high by 5 "wide" only needs 5 pipe-runs rather than 100. The cost of piping and plumibing is way too high compared to the cost of gas comsumed.

Honestly no one cares either way WHO pays for cooking gas. But uneducated apartment dwellers sometimes use their stoves for more heat and are breathing in toxic fumes.

VERY slowly new construciton is changing over to where all utlites (except cold water) is metered to the teants.

I love HVAC talk. (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. So if we want to start a thread as to how aparmtens in large buidlngs each individually heated and metered i'd love it!

the "esay" fix here to get separte heat to each teant is to throw hotel-style PTAC units in. These are 42" wide (100cm +) and that is bad in that electirc heat is not "GREEN" or economcal to operate.

http://www.hoffmanspecialty.com/pdf/submittals/hs-901a.pdf

 

[toggleswitch2]

PTAC UNITS:

Electric heat heat-pump models are available.

http://www.mcquayservice.com/McQuay/ProductInformation/PTAC/PTACs

 

[alr2903]

I think urban dwellers have less choices, i lived in apartment complexes in New Orleans for years, prior to purchasing a home. In subtropical regions it's the roaches that breed like mice. They tended to spray insecticide in apartments on request. Driving others bugs over to your apartment, to kill them off you have to spray the whole building at the same time. To this day i still keep sugar and flour in the refrigerator. To get back on topic, a good friend once lived in St. Louis' Central west end, in a loft apartment, it was so hot in the loft with steam heat i had the window open a couple of inches during a Christmas, it was snowing outside. I hope i never have to go back to multi unit housing ... i hated it. Single family and a big lot is a true blessing. alr2903

 

[sudsmaster]

I lived in a number of shared single family dwellings in the Bay Area in college. In one, the previous student tenants had managed to force the landlord to install separate gas wall space heaters in each bedroom. That was in Berkeley, in the 70's, and I guess there was some law requiring that. Before that there was just one floor grill heater in the downstairs dining/living room area. Pretty much inadequate.

I also remember fighting with the phone company at that time over the fact that one phone line was shared by a number of unrelated adults living in the same unit. It didn't help that one housemate who infamously used ice picks to chip frost off the freezer compartment and wash dishes in Lysol had also managed to really piss off the phone company, lol... She was also a phone company employee, some kind of vendetta going on I guess.