Editorial:Can you live with this?

Today’s cover story deals with an issue most of us can relate to — what to do with a problem landlord or tenant.

We receive calls from time to time asking us to “expose” a bad landlord or abusive and obnoxious tenant or neighbor. Usually, we politely respond that putting ourselves in the middle of a civil dispute like that just because someone wants us to “get” someone else really isn’t what a community newspaper is about.

But there was something about the call we received this past week that made us hesitate and think. The conditions this tenant described sounded so exaggerated they couldn’t be as bad as she was claiming. Black mold running up the walls, no heat since October 2012 and just that morning, the water had been turned off after the tenant informed the landlord she was withholding rent until he fixed the place.

We decided to go look for ourselves, and on Thursday sent a reporter and photographer to the apartment building — a four-plex near Knik-Goose Bay Road south of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. What we saw was every bit as frightening and filthy as the caller had claimed the day before.

Still, without intimate knowledge of the situation, and after talking with two of the building’s tenants and the landlord, we were left with the predictable they-said-he-said story. They claim the landlord’s negligence is creating an unlivable situation and making their children sick. He claims the tenants are living in their own filth and with problems of their own creation; he even had to hire someone to clean the common areas on a daily basis and it still deteriorated.

By deciding to report on this issue, we’re not opening the floodgates to write about every landlord-tenant dispute in the Valley. What we have here is an opportunity to tell a compelling local story to serve as an example that can hopefully provide some insight that can help other landlords and tenants who may be dealing with similar situations. Instead of an exposé to “out” a slumlord or play “gotcha” with neglectful tenants, we wanted to ask more broad questions.

What remedies do tenants have when dealing with a less-than-attentive landlord? What can landlords do to protect their investment from tenants? What does the Alaska Landlord and Tenant Act say about both?

Today, read about the conflict between these local tenants and landlord, and in Tuesday’s Frontiersman, read part II of the story about what tenants can do to compel a landlord to provide adequate maintenance and upkeep, and what can both do to resolve their disputes.