Tenant’s sewage complaints get ignored for over a month, organizes neighbors to flood the management phone lines, and gets the pipe fixed by Monday morning: ‘The change in their attitude was instant’

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  via Brian Wangenheim

  Woman sitting on a high chair at a kitchen island, wearing a light dress and looking at the camera in a modern home.

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• The management finally fixed the sewage backup after we blocked their phone lines for a whole day

  
  via KesselCrescent
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  via KesselCrescent

• The budget approval excuse is genuinely impressive as a stalling technique. It sounds like progress is being made somewhere. Spreadsheets, approvals, processes. What it actually is, is a way of saying we are not fixing this, and we are hoping you stop bringing it up. The smell is drifting up into a first-floor apartment, and the official response is basically hang tight.

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  via Brian Wangenheim

  Woman standing at a kitchen counter, looking down at a tea set in a bright modern kitchen.

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  via KesselCrescent

• The thing that keeps these situations going for as long as they do is simple. One frustrated tenant is very manageable. You delay, you send the plunger guy, you use the word unfortunately a lot in your emails, and eventually, most people exhaust themselves trying to fight it. The whole operation is built around individual complaints being cheaper to outlast than to fix.

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  via KesselCrescent

• Knocking on doors on a Saturday to tell your neighbors that the building smells like an open sewer is not radical organizing. It is just sharing information with people who already lived with the same problem and had no idea everyone else did too. Then, twenty people start calling the management line at the same time, and the regional VP is getting CC'd on photos of standing sewage water in the laundry room, and suddenly the vibe in the property management office changes completely.

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  via KesselCrescent
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• A commercial plumbing crew was there Monday at 8 AM, digging up the foundation to replace the actual broken pipe. The repair that needed a month of budget approval to even consider took one weekend of collective pressure to actually happen.

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  via KesselCrescent
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  via KesselCrescent

• The money existed the whole time. The plumber was available the whole time. What was missing was a situation where ignoring it cost more than fixing it. One person filing tickets was never going to create that situation. Twenty people threatening rent escrow absolutely did.

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  via KesselCrescent
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