Received this letter yesterday:
Georgetown Apartments will not be renewing your lease, which expires on February 28, 2015. You are still responsible for rent and utilities through the end of your lease agreement.
We are asking you please vacate your apartment by February 28, 2015 to avoid eviction procedures. There is no exception you must vacate the apartment by February 28, 2015.
Sincerely,
Katie Scott
Manager
And so ends our 14 year tenure at Georgetown Apartments in Shrewsbury, Missouri. Shrewsbury is another of the 62 inner loop towns that plague the St. Louis area.
We pay our rent on time, take care of our place, even planted pots with sunflowers that the neighbors loved. We decorate for Christmas, respect people's property, don't have wild parties, and keep the sound down after 10. In fact we've never had problems, until Mark moved in downstairs two years ago.
To say that Mark is the neighbor from hell is to put it mildly. He hit my car with his moving van, he spends over $400 a month on cigarettes (and we live in an older, wood frame building), and, as his ex-wife let slip when she was helping him move, the home he lived in three years ago burned to the ground. His son currently living with him was just released from jail for the second time—this time was for stealing a car, the previous time (in 2013) was for breaking and entering and stealing a gun.
We managed, though. We bought five 300 square foot air filters to help with the cigarette smoke, and purchased specialized carbon-filters for the furnace air vent. We'd stop by to chat with Mark when he was out on the front porch when we went by. I would commiserate with Mark when he talked about his son and his son's various escapades. All was manageable, until Mark got both a smoker-barbeque and a full size, double wide smoker—the kind where you start a fire in wood chips at the bottom, and then the smoke vents out the top. Well, that smoke venting was right underneath our deck, and directly into our home. The first time he ran that thing, our home filled with smoke, leaving us coughing and trying to air the place out from the front, except the smoke curled around the building and came in the front, too. Our home reeked of smoke for weeks.
I complained to the apartment, and the assistant manager basically said tough luck, that there are no rules against barbecues. I said this wasn't a barbecue. She said Mark told them it was a barbecue-smoker. I said, well, he had one of those, too, but this was a smoker. A full size, double wide meat smoker.
I told her about the layer of smoke that surrounded the block, our place being full of smoke, invited them to come see for themselves. Too bad, so sad, and she'd made her decision. I appealed to the manager, who said the same thing.
OK, not much left to do except appeal to the county health board for an air pollution violation, and the local Shrewsbury Fire Department for potential fire hazard. You see the smoker and the barbecue both used 20+ pound LP tanks, and if you look straight down from my deck, you'll see the ground around both littered with cigarette butts. Now, exactly why did Mark's previous home burn to the ground?
The Fire Chief responded with an interesting piece of news: Shrewsbury has fire laws that prohibit barbecues and LP tanks within 10 feet of combustible surfaces in multi-family dwellings. Point of fact, most communities now have these laws in place, though few actually enforce them.
Katie's reaction was a variation of "everyone is going to move because we can't have barbeque grills".
Please understand if we were to ban barbeque grills that would affect 95% of our residents, the majority of the property will be upset and move out which would result in rents increasing substantially. The office has not received any other complaints concerning the smoker or barbecue grills. I am not sure if you and your neighbor below you get along however; we have addressed all of your complaints previously.
Actually, telling us "tough shit" on that smoke pouring into our home really isn't addressing a complaint. And if you want to keep people from moving, put washer/dryers in every unit. And stop being an asshole.
Mark then proceeded to put his smoker-barbecue into the lawn in front of his place, which evidently the management agreed to. It was an odd agreement, because we've been told to keep our lawns free of obstructions. I complained again to the office, and they told me Mark had cleared it with the fire chief. Unlikely, considering how close it still was to the deck, so I filed a complaint with the Fire Department. They eventually came out, measured the distance and told Mark there is no place in his yard he could place either his smoker or his smoker-barbeque that would be far enough away to meet the safety requirements.
These safety requirements aren't arbitrary. Outdoor barbeques and outdoor smoking are leading causes of apartment fires in the US, exceeded only by indoor cooking fires and smoking. And LP tank grills are responsible for the majority of the fires. Just this summer, someone's barbeque caught on fire on a wooden deck in St. Louis, and a firefighter was burned trying to turn the tank off.
And who would really like to live with a full size smoker directly underneath their deck, with smoke pouring into their homes?
Eventually we stopped the smoker, but the cost was a terminated lease. Unfortunately, Missouri is one of the few states that doesn't have a law against landlord retaliation. If you go to the fire department, county health, or other organization about safety or health concerns about your home, your landlord can retaliate by terminating your lease.
By going to the Fire Department, I committed the ultimate sin: I bucked the manager. I continued to push, I rocked the boat. And the manager would rather have that smoker with the felon son, the trashed front yard, and the assorted health and safety risks, than someone who disputed her control.
I'll have more to say on this, and my experiences with the Shrewsbury fire, police, and town council related to this event in a later post. For now, we're buying a home, and I have a lot of research to accomplish in a very short period of time.
By the way, Merry Christmas.
Oh, if you're looking for a place to live in St. Louis, can I suggest Kansas City, instead?
