I live in NY and rent a basement in a private house. My landlord lives in the house with his wife and two teenage sons who are constantly blasting music, movies and TV so loud that it is nearly Impossible to hear my own TV, let alone hear myself think. I have repeatedly asked them to lower the volume and sometimes they have, other times it was as if I didn’t even live there with their parties until 3am and music so loud it can be heard down the block. After a confrontation with my landlord last night because of this excessive volume he told me flat out that if I didn’t like it to find another place to live because they were not going to “change their ways”.

I am a single parent with a child in school, so I can’t exactly up and move this minute, but after this confrontation I an finding myself searching for an apartment.

I never had a lease, I suppose you can say that I’m there month-to-month, going into my fourth year as of September 1st. I did give him a full deposit, which I’m going to need back in order to move, but I am very unsure of my rights.

Thanks for all your info and advise.

Q.

When there is no written lease, the agreement between you and the landlord is the landlord / tenant laws of your state. There's a "sticky" at the top of this forum with a link for each state. THAT is basically your lease at this point.

If you were locked into a lease you could certainly "fight" this. It would probably just tick off the landlord off, and your living conditions may become MORE miserable. He shouldn't be able to do that, but it's the likely outcome. You can continuously drag him into court, but it's just going to create and perpetuate an ugly cycle.

BUT, since you're month - to - month he'll most likely just give you a 30 day notice to terminate your tenancy if you do anything to try to force them to quiet down. He doesn't have to have any reason. As long as he gives you the legal amount of notice, that's it.

My two suggestions are:
1. Find another place to live. You're not going to get your deposit back until after you move out. So eventually you're going to have to find some way to find other housing w/out those funds to rely on. Maybe with tax returns at the beginning of the year??

2. If they're causing enough noise to be heard outside of the house, just keep anonymously calling the police. They'll probably know it's you - since you've complained about noise. But if the cops get sick of coming out they'll eventually fine them.

Sorry you have lived there 4 years, could not be that bad or you would have moved 3 years, 2 years or 1 year ago??


But it sounds like you just need to move.