Know your tenant rights

“It is the landlord’s responsibility to make sure that the residential complex is kept in a good state of repair, fit for habitation and to comply with any health, safety, housing and maintenance standards.”

Everyone knows someone with a student house horror story. It’s a sad reality that students are at the mercy of a largely unmonitored system, but a reality nonetheless, and it is those students’ responsibility to hold their landlords accountable if and when they are in the wrong.

For example, it is the house owner’s (landlord in most cases) legal duty to clear the sidewalk and house access within 24 hours of a snowfall. They are responsible for making sure tenants have safe access to their residence at all times, and this falls under that umbrella.

I have been no stranger to shitty student living situations in the past. In my third year, I lived in a student house with a comically greedy landlord. Despite being charged for parking spaces as part of my lease, since I left them unused, he took it upon himself to sell the spaces at his own discretion without consulting me or anyone else in the house, which found us constantly dealing with strangers on our property at all times of day.

Landlords take advantage of student tenants because they know that there is only a minute chance they will be confronted about it. Students don’t have the luxury of spending time and energy fighting landlords over every nickle and dime, when their studies already demand so much of it. It is also their word against yours, which makes it difficult to produce proof of any claim you may want to lay against a landlord.

Here’s what you can do: read your lease, brush up on the laws, and know some of the absolute basic rights you have as a tenant, so you make it that much more difficult for them to take advantage of the next group of impressionable friends that comes along to fill your rooms.

And it will be especially pertinent if you see yourself living in the same house for the next two or three years.