Tenant’s rights are often ignored if a different tennant is the issue. It is a huge problem if you want to support urbanization and denser developments in general.
Personal rant, but we just moved out of our apartment of almost five years, in part to having a horrible neighbor. This woman would: throw trash out her window to the garbage area creating huge messes, flood her apartment, which in turn flooded ours, blast music and other noise disturbances late into the night, and that was the least of the worries. She had crazy episodes where she would run through the halls naked threatening people, pulling the fire alarms, and other disturbances. Police were called multiple times on her, she was detained multiple times, and the final kicker was jumping out of her third story window to escape the police. That happened in front of me! I literally thought I watched this woman die until I got closer and saw she was still breathing.
After all that and appartntly bashing out the H street trolleys window with a hammer, the landlords were able to evict her. And I don’t blame the landlords in this situation! They were prompt with fixing damages, and documenting all complaints, but it took them forever to go through the courts. I understand this is a person who is struggling with a multitude of issues, and the city does not just want to make her homeless. I also understand that there are shitty landlords and many tenants deserve protections against these people. But placing the onus on the other tenants to just deal with it is a terrible policy.
If you want a thriving city, people must feel secure in their homes. We had multiple kids in our building when we first moved in, by the end, zero. These policies of inaction create toxicity that is detrimental to so many. People who can, move. People who cannot, the most vulnerable, are forced to live a worse life because we refuse to protect them against horrible neighbors. Serious change should be sought after in this policy space.