Ask a Friendly Landlord
'Help! The Bedbugs Arrived at the Same Time As My New Neighbors'
How to survive an unresponsive landlord, and some very pesky critters.
What's your apartment living pet peeve? Your next-door nuisance? What do you do about the nosy neighbor who rifles through your mail? Or the guy who practices the trombone at 7 a.m. on weekends? In our latest series, Ask a Friendly Landlord, a peaceable expert suggests resolutions to the issues that arise when humans share space.
Bedbugs are, for many city dwellers, the ultimate apartment-based fear. They are tiny, they are almost invisible, and they are horribly invasive: the least-welcome houseguests of all time. And for those who get them, they can feel like a truly biblical plague. Getting rid of them often requires packing up and processing all your clothes and such, and can truly take over your life for a non-insignificant period of time.
Our last Ask a Friendly Landlord installment has to do with these horribly rude little critters, and how to deal with a landlord who won’t seem to help get rid of them.
My friend, I am very sorry that you have to deal with this! It’s a true nightmare, and we can only hope that you are racking up some good cosmic luck that will eventually rain down on you to balance out all this bad stuff.
It should be said that your landlord does have a legal obligation to take care of this for you. I spoke to Feng-Ying, a landlord outside of D.C., to get more insight. She insists—as do I—that you not pay for the treatment. “It should be the landlord’s responsibility, unless the landlord can prove that you brought the bugs to the apartment. My concern is that if you paid for the inspector, it might sort of admit your fault.”
Indeed, some leases come with a clause that suggests that tenants must pay for removal, if they are found responsible for bringing in bedbugs. However, in most cases, the law overrides that, making it very clear it’s management's responsibility to get rid of these cursed critters.
If you can’t get your landlord to come around and pay for the treatment, you should consider breaking your lease. This is what happened to the son of Feng-Ying’s friend, who also lives in New York. He got a lawyer to help him break the lease, because the building had bed bugs that the management couldn’t get rid of. If you can’t convince your landlord to pay for the treatment, you should let them know you plan on breaking the lease with the help of a lawyer. If that isn’t enough to get them to act, you gotta break that lease, baby—break free from the bugs.
Illustration by Emily Ringel
Written by: Marian Bull
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