B
bedbugmanhattan17
Guest
- Jurisdiction
- New York
My roommate and I signed a lease in August 2016 which had the legally required disclosure of the buildings bed bug history attached to it (this one http://www.nyshcr.org/forms/rent/dbbn.pdf ) . The landlord signed claiming that our apartment nor any other apartments in the building had history of bed bugs in the last year. We signed thinking nothing of it because they had told us the information they're required to. There is also a line in the lease about pest control where it states the management must have access to all apartments and common areas once a month to give treatments, because if everyone doesn't participate it's hard to control pest problems. This is great too. However, they never performed any pest treatments our first six months in the apartment.
Fast forward to the beginning of February, my roommate found a bed bug on her wall. We called the management and they scheduled an exterminator and we've now had two treatments since then. In that time, we found out that our next door neighbor in addition to several other apartments (that she knew of, maybe even more) had some bed bugs this past summer ('16) and the management told them to keep it quiet. We are very angry with the management because they lied to us on the signed form about the building history. We also contacted them this week to see if we could come to an agreement to end our lease early (we proposed May instead of August) and were essentially told "[the leasing department] can ask the landlord and he might agree ONLY IF you stay until we find new tenants but he also is likely to say tough luck you signed a lease for a year pay up". If they hadn't violated terms in the lease (i.e. not performing pest control, lying about bed bug history) this would be easier to stomach. Is there anything we can do about this legally? We can't really claim the warranty of habitability is broken (as far as I understand) because they have actively sent exterminators and the apartment isn't extremely infested.We're interested in being able to get out of the lease early or receiving some sort of rent abatement.
Fast forward to the beginning of February, my roommate found a bed bug on her wall. We called the management and they scheduled an exterminator and we've now had two treatments since then. In that time, we found out that our next door neighbor in addition to several other apartments (that she knew of, maybe even more) had some bed bugs this past summer ('16) and the management told them to keep it quiet. We are very angry with the management because they lied to us on the signed form about the building history. We also contacted them this week to see if we could come to an agreement to end our lease early (we proposed May instead of August) and were essentially told "[the leasing department] can ask the landlord and he might agree ONLY IF you stay until we find new tenants but he also is likely to say tough luck you signed a lease for a year pay up". If they hadn't violated terms in the lease (i.e. not performing pest control, lying about bed bug history) this would be easier to stomach. Is there anything we can do about this legally? We can't really claim the warranty of habitability is broken (as far as I understand) because they have actively sent exterminators and the apartment isn't extremely infested.We're interested in being able to get out of the lease early or receiving some sort of rent abatement.
