Cold Hearted Landlord

"I haven't had a landlord in 21+ years and I hope I never have another one again!

When I was 12, we moved into our new apartment. It was a 2 family apartment house. We rented out the upstairs apartment and our landlord lived below us in the first floor apartment with his wife. We lived here for 15 years, and he was an absolutely terrible person. He thought nothing of invading our privacy, freezing us every winter, and refusing to make repairs or improvements on our apartment.

When we first moved in, we had the habit of leaving our front door unlocked , but only during the daytime and only when we were home. Our landlord took advantage of this and would frequently barge in without notice without knocking or ringing the doorbell. We'd be sitting in our living room watching tv or doing whatever when we would hear our front door being pushed open, someone barging up the stairs, and the next thing we knew our landlord was standing there in our living room with us. We got tired of this really fast. So we learned to keep our door locked at all times from then on, but even then he would still try to barge into our apartment. After this he'd try to open the door normally but when it didn't open he'd then press his body against the door and try to force it open or break it down. He'd try this for a minute or two before finally giving in and knocking like a normal person should. He did this for many years. I wouldn't open the door until he knocked on principle, I was so sick of his treatment of us.

Even though we both had mail slots in our front doors, the mailman would deliver the entire building's mail in one pile into the lone mailbox nailed up on the wall outside our front doors. If any of my family ever got to the mail first, we would separate our mail from the landlord's, leaving their mail in the mailbox. If the landlord or his wife got the mail first, they'd grab the whole bundle of mail and take it into their apartment. They wouldn't give us our mail until much later in the day or the next day or a couple days later, I'm pretty sure this was a felony!

While living at this apartment I briefly subscribed to TV Guide. Normally it came in the mail on Thursday or Friday. One week Thursday came and I couldn't find the tv guide in the mail when it eventually came. Friday was the exact same, no tv guide. Saturday morning the tv guide still hadn't come. Thinking it was lost in the mail, I went to the local grocery store on Saturday morning to buy that weeks tv guide. the next day my landlord slipped my missing tv guide into our front door mail slot. He had kept my TV guide in his room the entire time.

He also had an invasive habit of opening up our phone bill. We knew this because he was calling us on the phone every other day. We changed our number only to have him call us at the new number , even though we never gave him our new number. To avoid the harassment we had our number changed again, only to have him call again later at the new number after the latest phone bill came in the mail. We changed our phone number again and finally he stopped calling. I guess he got the message, it only took him months of incessant calling and number changing for him to get the hint.

One time we had family come over to the apartment, a few of my uncles and a cousin. One of my uncles went inside my apartment while I talked with my other uncle and cousin down the block from my place, alongside their parked car. They were facing my apartment while my back was to it. According to them they witnessed my landlord come out of his apartment, suspiciously look around, up and down the block, peek inside the little window in my front door, then he placed his ear against the glass window in the door for a minute or two before going back into his apartment.

The worst part of living in that apartment were the winters. The landlord froze us every winter because he gave us very little or no heat. Being a very old building, our apartment didn't have a separate thermostat of our own so that we could adjust the heat for ourselves. Our landlord controlled how much heat we got and when. Where we lived housing law stated that a landlord must turn on the heat in October and can't turn it off completely until April. No matter how cold it got, he wouldn't turn our heat on until the last week of October. And no matter how cold it still was, he'd turn it off for good after the first week of April.

On the rare occasion he actually turned on the heat it wasn't long before he turned it off again, about 15 minutes at best. After he turned it off, it would be a long time before he turned it on again. And it wouldn't be long before the apartment became frigid in the winter with that system of heating. When he eventually turned the heat on it was basically for celebration, but basic necessities shouldn't have been cause for celebration.

I became so accustomed to freezing indoors that it never failed to take me by surprise that whenever I went to visit a friend or relative's house during the wintertime no matter what day I was visiting or what time of the day it was, I always felt incredibly warm in their house. It was so freezing in our apartment that I was used to going to bed fully clothed, complete with stockings. I would use the kitchen stove to try to heat up the apartment basically every other day in the apartment. I'm surprised the gas bill alone wasn't enough to convince the landlord to put the heat back on. I'd open the stove door, turn it up full blast, then close all the doors in between the kitchen and my bedroom so that the heat would travel up the hallway and into my bedroom. I almost started a fire because the landlord was too stingy with the heat.

Oh, you can be darn sure he kept his apartment nice and toasty warm all day, every day during the winter. How did I know? At the bottom of our stairs, behind our front door was a very small radiator. This particular radiator wasn't connected to our other radiators in our apartment upstairs, it was connected through the wall to his radiators in his apartment. And it was this little radiator that was on most or all of the time at the same time while our radiators were off. That bottom part of the stairs was the only place in our apartment that was consistently warm all winter long. Sometimes I would sit down there with a book just to keep warm for a little while.

One cold winter evening I was returning home from a friends relatively warm apartment. I was walking home from the bus stop. As I reached the front of my apartment house, i turned my head and saw my landlord through his living room window. He was adjusting the thermostat on his wall and had his shirt sleeves rolled up as if he were in the tropics. I thought to myself, 'Yeah, but I'll bet my apartment is like a freaking freezer.' I entered my front door and that little radiator behind his door was going full blast. I climbed the steps up to my apartment and sure enough the place was freezing, no heat was on in my apartment at all. As a matter of fact he wouldn't turn on the heat for our place until 5am the next morning. That night, like many other nights before and after it, I slept fully clothed to keep warm while I slept.

I had a really stupid landlord."