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Lofts 125 Garfield Spencer Tenant harassment, wrongful eviction, housing code violations (mold, not up to fire code) Pawtucket RHODE ISLAND
I've lived here about three years. The buildings are beautiful and terribly constructed. Everything breaks constantly. The AC, the heat, the water heaters. Constant major leaks through the ceiling and windows from plumbing or from rain/snow coming in through very poorly insulated windows/brick walls. Outrageous utility bills as a result. The constant humidity caused by the leaks causes mold throughout the buildings.
You can smell it when you walk in - the musty damp odor of a building with very poor air quality. It made me ill enough that I got a dehumidifier and an expensive air filter, both of which I ran constantly to maintain the air in a breathable state. Others in the building had visible mold growing on their units and were sick. There are unjustified, random fees tacked onto rent bills every month. Management ignores maintenance requests, for weeks, months. Nothing ever gets fixed no matter how vital to daily life. I would have dealt with all this without complaining, but not the harassment. Management banned me from the communal dog park on the basis of an unsubstantiated complaint from another anonymous tenant.
It was never investigated and since that time, I’ve met others who had similar experiences - they were told their neighbors were complaining about them or their dogs with no proof this was true. For example, one other tenant said management told her her neighbor was complaining about her dog barking on a day her dog wasn’t even in her apartment. I think management does this to get tenants to get fed up and leave. When I objected to being banned from the park, management said she "didn’t need a reason to evict me” - basically threatening me into silence.
I was pretty shocked at this and became very guarded, making sure to document everything after that. The next time I saw management, she said, unprovoked, that "wasn’t getting into a pissing match over the dog park”. I was there to pay rent! I said I was recording the conversation to force some degree of respect, and I think that being stood up to really upset management because shortly after this incident, management (jenny bogan) began to get out of control in her behavior. The final straw came when management posted a 5 day demand for $625 on my door just days after the start on the quarantine in March. This is money I did not owe... and management would not hand over a ledger or any other explanation of the unexplained balance, so I ignored the notice because my records clearly showed it to be in error.
Undeterred, management then refused to accept my rent payments in April and May, and started eviction proceedings for nonpayment in June. You read that right. She REFUSED to accept my money - then evicted me for NONPAYMENT! I was forced out of my apartment on August 13, 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic that cost me my job. I’m now homeless and jobless. No one wants to rent to me, because the assumption is that I did something to deserve the eviction. The worst abuses are almost unbelievable. In my final weeks in my apartment, I began to try to organize the other tenants in the building into a tenant union so they could defend themselves against the common forms of harassment at Lofts 125.
I hung up flyers and wrote my name and number in dry erase marker on a glass door when management took my.flyers down. Well two weeks later, on my birthday, management called the Pawtucket police and had them arrest me for vandalism because of my flyers! She also had them take my dogs to animal control. It’s so unbelievable that it’s almost difficult to write now, but there will be a lawsuit, I filed a complaint against the Pawtucket PD, and I have a good lawyer, so there will be public record of this. As I went through this terrible time, I did some research and found that the landlord has been sued at least 40 times for similar complaints as I had at the Lofts 125. He lost those lawsuits and failed to pay the associated fees and still continues to put up buildings in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
There is a huge degree of corruption in Rhode Island, and Pawtucket is especially well known for its lack of adherence to any standards of legality or ethics. The landlords are propped up by the corrupt legal and judicial systems, so there's nowhere to go to get justice - but to the press. People have to speak up so that others don't end up in the same situation I was in - renting from people who don't hold up their end of the bargain and punish tenants to boot. Buyer beware!