Tenants, landlord frustrated over conditions

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series about landlord-tenant disputes. See Tuesday’s Frontiersman for part II.

WASILLA — Aside from rubbing the sleep from his eyes after an early afternoon nap, the diaper-clad toddler seems happy enough, even if his torso is dotted with raised red welts. His young sister is still weak as she battles respiratory ailments.

Laurie Luzader’s grandchildren are the youngest of nine people living in their three-bedroom apartment at 345 E. Victor Circle. Two of Luzader’s other school-aged children were sent home from school because they had gnats on them. And all of them, Luzader claims, have been living without heat since they moved into the place in October 2012. The children’s health and sanitation problems are the result of their environment, she said, an environment caused by an alleged neglectful landlord.

“We’ve told him several times about the black mold in the carpet and in the (communal) laundry room,” she said during a Frontiersman visit Thursday to view the living conditions. “I just don’t think it’s safe for any kind of family to stay in this situation. This little guy right here, he has got welts all over his body from the water. He can’t take the water here. You see how bad he is?

“It’s not safe, it’s not. Our kids have already gone to the hospital because they’re sick — runny noses, coughs, they can’t breathe because of that mold that comes running up the wall.”

That mold can be seen streaking up the drywall in and outside the laundry room, which is situated directly below Luzader’s apartment. It’s at the end of a short, filthy hallway caked with grime. There are mushrooms growing around the edges of the hallway carpet. Only a clothes dryer is in the laundry room now, which shows signs of significant water and mold damage.

The mold and lack of heat are only part of the nightmare Luzader said she and her family have been begging landlord Hans Svendson to fix since they moved in nearly a year ago. Those complaints include:

• Holes in the bathtub, bathroom door and walls.

• Natural gas shut off to the building for a time last month for lack of payment, which is the landlord’s responsibility.

• Water is cloudy and dirty, and stains the toilet and bathtub.

• Non-functioning smoke detectors and a lack of carbon monoxide detectors.

• Half the burners on the stove don’t work.

• Apartment was dirty and filled with trash on move-in, which she had to clean.

• Water turned off.

That last item, the water getting turned off, happened just this past week after Luzader said she informed Svendson she was withholding the September rent until those issues were fixed.

Mat-Su Borough property records show the complex at 345 E. Victor Circle is owned by Svendson Properties LLC. State business license records show Svendson as a manager for the company, which is owned by Narda Jensen. They both have a primary residence listing the same address, which is a home across the street within eyeshot of the Victor Circle property.

Luzader’s son-in-law Chris Giles said he confronted Svendson about the water being turned off.

“He said he had the water turned off, that he has somebody fixing it,” Giles said. When asked when the water would be turned back on, he said Svendson told him that depended on when they paid their rent.

“I went over there and asked when we were getting the water turned back on, and he said you ain’t getting no water turned back on until you pay us the rent money, because we need $5,000 for a new boiler and new pipes. He told me it got completely shut off" he said.

After checking around the building, Giles said he noticed the breaker to the water pump had been shut off, so he turned it back on and they have water again.

Mess of their own making

While he acknowledges the poor condition of the community hallway and laundry room, including the growing black mold, Svendson said there are two sides to this story. While his tenants may want to portray him as a slumlord who refuses to provide a fit place to live, Svendson said he’s gone above and beyond to try and accommodate Luzader and other residents, but they’re living in their own mess.

“The mess you see in there is their own frigging mess,” he said, adding he’s as frustrated with them as they are with him.

As for the laundry room and the mold, “They have used the hell out of it,” he said. “I used to have a lady going in there cleaning every day. They have their kids playing in there every day, they destroyed one of the machines. They’re the ones that caused the damage.”

The mold, he said, comes from a broken washing machine he never knew was broken. Apparently, he said, the machine was left with the same dirty water in it and began leaking. By the time he noticed the problem, the tenants had made the problem exponentially worse by continuing to use a broken machine and not reporting it.

He also said the condition of the hallway and laundry room had become so bad that the cleaning person finally refused to continue cleaning it and he also couldn’t afford to spend the $75 a day it was costing to clean up after the tenants.

“The filth in there, there’s a limit to how much people will clean,” he said. “If I’m paying a cleaning lady $75 every day, uh uh, that ain’t happening forever.”

He said the smoke detectors don’t work because tenants get angry when the detector beeps when the battery is low, and instead of replacing the battery, they destroy the detector.

“They tore those out themselves instead of changing a battery when they’re supposed to,” he said. “At $120 apiece, there’s a limit to how many I’ll replace. When they move in, everything (required by law) is there.”

As for Luzader’s claim she hasn’t had heat since moving in last October, that’s news to him, Svendson said.

“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do,” he said. “If they make a mess, that’s their problem. I just want them out so I can bring it back up to standard, back up to a decent place to live.”

Along with problems with the law — Alaska State Troopers respond to calls at the building often — Svendson said his lease with Luzader says two people will be living there, not nine. Having that many people in a three-bedroom place stresses the place beyond what it was intended to serve, he said.

“It’s only her and her husband who are supposed to be living there,” he said, “but I don’t know who all they have there.”

Now that tenants are withholding rent, the situation is past the point of an amicable resolution, Svendson said.

“I just want them out,” he said. “They’re like locusts. They know the system inside out and they’ll try anything they can to stay longer with free rent. It’s an absolute nightmare.”

Not alone with complaints

That the situation is a nightmare is something Svendson and his tenants can agree on, and that includes more than just Luzader and her family.

Arielle Hausmann moved into the building in November 2012, about a month after Luzader. Although Hausmann said she and her boyfriend didn’t have problems with the heat last winter like Luzader, they’ve had plenty of others that fell on deaf ears when they asked Svendson to fix them.

“Well, since we’ve been here, one of the showers hasn’t worked and we told him for the longest time it wasn’t working, and he was like, ‘Oh, I ordered the part, I ordered the part,’” she said. “Months and months went by and he never fixed it. Our oven’s broken and he hasn’t fixed it.”

That’s been a problem for “about five or six months,” she said.

“Our dishwasher broke about a month ago and he doesn’t want to fix that, either,” she said. “Despite all that, we tried not to break our lease, but with the mold now and the gas being shut off and having no heat or hot water, we have no choice.”

Hausmann said she hasn’t paid rent since July. In August, instead of the rent, her and her boyfriend sent Svendson a certified letter informing him they were withholding rent until the mold problem was fixed. By that time, it had become more than an annoyance, it’s a real health threat for their newborn daughter, who now lives with them in an apartment about 10 feet from the moldy laundry room.

“Honestly, I was terrified about bringing her home,” Hausmann said. “We try and stay out of the hallway because it’s a mess anyway, but then we learned of the mold and what it could do. But where else are we going to take her until we find a new place?”

Since sending the certified letter last month, Hausmann said the plan now is to move.

“I told him in the letter I wasn’t paying rent until he resolved the issues,” she said. “I was putting rent into a separate account — $1,200, my full rent — and you’re not going to get it until you fix this issue, because it’s not livable. People should not have to live with black mold and no heat.”

For his part, Svendson said he agrees with Hausmann that people shouldn’t have to live in those conditions. The problem is, he said, they created those conditions despite his best efforts to keep the place fit for habitation.

“Those people are just plain bloody pigs, they created their own mess,” he said. “They’re living in their own (mess), and they’re all equally as bad.”

Editor’s note: What can tenants do to compel a landlord to provide adequate maintenance and upkeep, and what remedies do both tenants and landlords have to resolve their disputes? We’ll delve into those questions in Tuesday’s Frontiersman in part II of this story.

Contact Greg Johnson at 352-2269 or greg.johnson@frontiersman.com.