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There is a specific process when it comes to witholding rent that must be followed in order for it to work in your favor; otherwise it’ll simply count as non-payment of rent and more or less wind up shooting yourselves in the foot, giving the landlord everything they need to legally evict you and whoever else refrains from paying.

 

Generally you will need some documentation to show that this is not your first resort for the problem, demonstrating that you have attempted to communicate with the landlord about these issues multiple times and that they haven’t held up their end of things.

It needs to be communicated in advance that you will be withholding rent along with the specific reasons for your grievances, as well as the resolutions you are seeking, so that there is a course of action specified within a certain timeframe that they could take to prevent the withholding from being necessary.

 

Then, if they still don’t fix the issues, and you have ample documentation to prove they’ve not been holding up their end of the lease, call inspectional to back you up and confirm what’s going wrong on record. If that’s still not enough to light a fire under the LL’s ass, you can put the rent money in escrow, showing you have the funds and intend to pay once the problems are fixed.

 

Do note, I am not a legal expert, nor are most others here, and I’d strongly recommend speaking to one if you plan on going through with actually withholding rent, since that’s pretty much the nuclear option when it comes to your relationship with the landlord, and could very easily backfire if you don’t get all the details just right.

Contact inspectional services for the heat, especially now that it’s dropped below freezing at night. They will give your landlord a timeline for necessary fixes, and the landlord is not legally allowed to retaliate after you’ve contacted them. I’m not sure if the flooded basement will be as much of a priority, since it also sounds as though they fixed it as you’re speaking about it in the past tense.

I was denied an apartment last month based on a “renter score”, basically this 3rd party company will run an algorithm that assigns you a score based off a background check, your actual credit score, and literally who even knows what else. You have to submit paperwork to even know what your file says and it’s not regulated by the government the same way credit reporting it. It was total bullshit but it doesn’t seem to be too widespread yet (fingers crossed it never takes off in a big way) and I found an apartment a week later with a great landlord (only owns a couple properties, hobby contractor, very nice dude all around). For some reason there’s lots of big mgmt companies that will auto deny anyone for any reason and the only way they know how to judge the quality of an applicant is seeing how many ridiculous hoops a person is willing to jump through to secure housing. However from my experience, you can always find a landlord who doesn’t give a shit about most of it. I’ve had good landlords who understand what information is relevant when it comes to applicants and can make decisions based on their own impressions and experience , and I’ve also had shitty ones who don’t care about any of it and just want rent money from whoever the hell for doing absolutely nothing. But either way there are plenty of landlords and even some of the smaller mgmt companies that don’t care. I rented from a mgmt company that had almost none of that, they just needed proof of income and that was it. They didn’t even make us give them a security deposit. It was a shit apartment but my point is don’t worry about it

A landlord can not blacklist or bad mouth a previous tenant, but if a new landlord calls previous for a reference, the previous LL can say they would not rent again to this person. That sets off red flags

when you grow up you'll figure out that no one has the time or cares enough to keep the permanent record you've been stressing about your whole life

Many landlords go with a third party company to avoid being sued. Very risking trying to just go off feelings about someone.

Combine a very tight supply and the government turning landlords into a social safety net during COVID and it makes sense landlords had the benefit of being picky.