Issues must be reported by tenants first
When Kelsey Pincket took a tour of her studio apartment last fall, she thought she’d found a nice place with a homey feel.
But Pincket, a second-year sport and entertainment management student, was in for a surprise.
Everything seemed OK in the apartment, so she signed the lease and moved in for the school year.
When she moved in, she starting noticing issues. The cable and Wi-Fi didn’t work at all — it’d been pirated illegally. But she and the landlord worked it out.
About a week later, Pincket noticed a leak in her ceiling. After a week, the landlord came to paint over the water damage, and that was it.
Pincket wanted to get out of the lease, but by then, it was too late to find a subtenant, and she’d have to pay a year’s rent to break the lease under state law. She was stuck.
She’s not alone — issues between students and their landlords aren’t uncommon.
When they come up, said David Hatcher, the top housing official for the city of Columbia, they have rights.
First, Hatcher said, students should talk to their landlord to resolve the issue.
If they don’t, they should seek out his office, which oversees inspections for housing codes.
Still, when it comes to enforcement, inspectors can’t break a lease between a landlord and tenant, Hatcher said.
“The tenant is bound to that lease. That’s what they have to follow,” he said. “However, if there is a code violation involving a housing unit, one of the inspectors can step in and tell the landlord that they have to fix something by a certain time.”
Hatcher’s office gets a lot of calls from people claiming their landlord didn’t follow the lease and wondering if the office could help them out.
Hatcher said they can only take care of a limited range of issues, dealing mostly with the bare essentials.
In general, the unit has to have running water, electricity and heat in the winter time. Landlords are bound by other basic codes, mostly regarding tenants’ safety. The structure has to be sound, and it has to be clean and pest-free.
Hatcher cautioned that contacting the landlord is a student’s responsibility and suggested if he or she refuses to address the problem, the student should call a code inspector to check for potential violations. If there is one, the office will send a letter to the landlord and give him or her a certain amount of time to fix the problem. For example, Hatcher said, something like a leaky pipe has to be fixed within 20 days.
If the landlord doesn’t resolve the issue within the set period of time, the office can summon him or her to municipal court.
“However, it is up to the student to initiate all of this. They need to contact the landlord first, and if nothing happens then they can call us,” Hatcher said.