It Could Be Worse

Niece Kate is doing her best to give us some competition this week for First Prize in the Landlords Suck competition:  thanks to a faulty pipe that her landlord claims is the responsibility of the town to fix, the basement level of the house she rents an apartment in is currently filled with raw sewage, so much so that it’s leaking out of the house and down the sidewalk and heading for adjacent properties.  They were visited by representatives from the City and the Health Department the other day, who informed the landlord that:

• Neither of the two apartments in the building had legal Certificates of Occupancy, for which she would be receiving two $1200 citations, just to start with.
• The Health Department was going to cite her for letting the sewage run down the sidewalk, and continue to cite her for every day it wasn’t cleaned up.
• The pipe was NOT the City’s responsibility, it was hers, and if she didn’t fix it, they were going to cite her for that, too, also continuing for every day it wasn’t done.
• They were declaring the house unlivable until it had been inspected post-clean-up, so the tenants had to go elsewhere, and if the tenants didn’t have relatives or friends conveniently close that they could stay with, she would be putting them up at a hotel, at her expense.

And goddamn it, that’s what government should freakin’ be for.