• @HongoBongo@lemmy.world
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    11 year ago

    The effective move is to have everyone pay into escrow. Most areas have renters rights laws that guarantee minimum standards, if you provide written notice that these aren’t being met you are typically allowed to pay into escrow and withhold the payments until issues are fixed.

    I did this in college after we negotiated them adding a dishwasher and got it written into our lease, then a few months later were fed up when it hadn’t been installed yet. I also helped a friend do this when they found cockroaches, and in their case after three months of it not getting fixed they were granted leave to break their lease and were awarded the escrow money on top.

    Not all places have the same laws and it definitely helped we went to our university legal council and they laid out the options and wrote up the notice. But almost all places have at least basic standards