Though landlords wield considerable power over their tenants in Eugene’s rental housing market, student renters can resist any assumed helplessness by becoming well-versed in city and state tenant law.
Earlier this summer, University senior David Taxer used his political science education and personal knowledge of tenant law to win the worst landlord bout of his life. Taxer signed a lease on June 20 for four rooms of a triplex on 16th Avenue between Ferry and Mill streets.
Though the signed document was riddled with whited-out photocopied revisions and handwritten side notes, Taxer suppressed his suspicions in lieu of the cheap rent and convenient location.
After going over the place with a fine-toothed comb, however, Taxer began to notice serious sanitation and safety problems not listed in the lease addendum or described during his tour with the landlord days ago.
“Obvious things had been glossed over during the tour,” Taxer said. “I found such filth on the insides of cupboards and drawers, I couldn’t even bring myself to put my toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet.”
A window facing the street had no locking mechanism. Drywall gouges with fluffy pink and white insulation spilling out punctuated closet walls. Down a rickety staircase of two-by-fours, the basement carpet was laced with mildew stains. Taxer decided against drinking the tap water after finding brittle, rusty pipes in the basement. He also made plans to don a dust mask and palm sander to grind off the five layers of peeling paint adorning window and door frames.
“I was very concerned about my living room being in that basement,” Taxer said. “The old paint most likely contained lead, and I later learned that (my landlord) had installed a pump in the basement to stop seasonal flooding, which explained the carpet’s condition.”
When the tenant brought the initial problems, including the broken window lock, to his landlord’s attention, the proprietor promised he would return the next day to fix the most pressing problems.
After moving out and ensuring that the money from his checks was returned, Taxer branched out to some of his ex-attorney acquaintances to try to find out more about his landlord’s renting history.
John Davidson, a former landlord tenant lawyer and Taxer’s constitutional law professor, consoled his former student by telling him that the landlord in question had a decade-long laundry list of violations on his record.
“I took Dave’s landlord to court once during the ’90s for problems involving one of the same set of triplexes and some of the same habitability problems,” Davidson said. “During my time with ASUO Legal Services, I had one or two more sets of student tenants come to me with similar complaints about the same premises and the same landlord.”
After four days of waiting for repairs and further examining the squalor he had agreed to live in for a year, Taxer authorized his bank to put stops on his rent and deposit checks and started looking for another home. Within 24 hours, his landlord had shut off water and electricity to the residence, forcing Taxer to race against the sun to move his furniture out of the one-window basement.
Angry and desperate, Taxer was forced to hire a moving company to move out in the dark, and to sign a new lease for an apartment in Chase Village on the same day.
Even under significantly less than ideal circumstances, Taxer was able to stay calm because he had taken the correct steps. He knew if his case ever ended up in court, his meticulous documentation, including the photos of the apartment and the landlord’s tense e-mail communications would serve as more than enough evidence.
Taxer was careful to cite relevant chapters of the Oregon Residential Landlord and Tenant Act in his correspondence, which ultimately spooked the landlord enough to let Taxer out of the lease without penalties.
“I quoted the law to him,” Taxer said. “He obviously knew the codes, and he eventually acknowledged that he was in violation of the law.”
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Escaping from a nightmare lease
Daily Emerald
August 29, 2010
Ivar Vong
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