Building B Boiler Failure: Entry, Oxygen, and a Rent-Withholding Threat
January 10 is a Friday and the forecast is 12 degrees. Marshall Courts is a 120-unit market-rate property built in 1978; a single boiler serves Building B, 24 units. At 4:40 p.m. the boiler shuts down. The HVAC contractor says the draft-inducer motor failed and the part cannot arrive until Monday afternoon. Unit 3B is occupied by Rose Kaminski, 78, who has COPD and uses an oxygen concentrator; she lives alone. When maintenance knocks at 6 p.m. to check her radiators for freeze risk, she refuses entry, saying a prior landlord's worker 'went through my things,' and she refuses a hotel room. She says she is withholding February rent until heat is restored. A neighbor offers to lend her two kerosene space heaters. Two other Building B tenants have called; one has an infant. The lease requires 24-hour notice for entry and prohibits space heaters, and a unit in Building A is vacant and available Monday. Local code requires heat at 68 degrees.
1. Can the manager enter Unit 3B without Ms. Kaminski's consent, and what should the manager do to protect both the tenant and the owner?
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The lease gives a right of entry with 24 hours' notice for inspection and repair, and most leases and state statutes allow entry without consent in a genuine emergency threatening health, safety, or property. Applying that here:
- The boiler failure is an emergency for Building B; freeze risk to pipes and loss of heat are real.
- But the boiler repair itself does not require entry into 3B. What justifies entry is checking her unit for freeze risk and confirming her radiators work after restoration.
- Send written 24-hour notice, knock and announce, and log each attempt with a time stamp.
- Offer to bring a second staff member, or a witness of her choosing, to address her theft concern. That costs nothing and usually resolves the refusal.
- Do not force entry absent an actual emergency (burst pipe, gas odor, no response during a real threat). If one occurs, entry without consent is defensible; call the fire department if life safety requires it.
- Keep the argument out of the doorway. Put the notice, the reason, and the refusal in writing and keep copies.
Documenting the refusals protects the owner against later damage claims without turning a repair call into a confrontation.
2. What immediate actions should the manager take for Ms. Kaminski and the other 23 units, and how should the kerosene heaters and the vacant unit be handled?
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Refuse the kerosene heaters. An open-flame or kerosene appliance in a room with an oxygen concentrator is a fire and carbon monoxide hazard, and the lease prohibits it. Explain the reason to both tenants in person and in writing.
Provide safe heat. Supply UL-listed electric heaters, verify the circuits can carry them, and confirm CO alarms are present and working. Check on Ms. Kaminski at least twice daily through the outage.
Offer relocation as a reasonable accommodation. Her COPD makes cold exposure a disability-related risk. Offer the vacant Building A unit or a hotel at the owner's expense in writing; if she declines, document the offer and the refusal. Make the offer in a way that can be accepted later in the weekend.
Communicate with the building. Notify all 24 Building B tenants in writing with the repair timeline, the temporary heat plan, an emergency contact, and the option to relocate. Track the infant household separately.
Code compliance. Local code requires 68 degrees. If a unit cannot be held at that temperature, relocation is the code-compliant answer, and the manager should be able to show the temperature readings taken and the timeline given to tenants.
3. Ms. Kaminski says she is withholding February rent until the heat is fixed. How should the manager handle that, both before and after the repair?
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Before restoration: do not serve a pay-or-quit or file for nonpayment while the heat is out, and do not cut off any other service. Most states protect tenants who complain about habitability from retaliation, and the timing here would look retaliatory regardless of the actual motive.
Her right to withhold depends on state law: rent escrow, repair-and-deduct, and similar remedies have procedural requirements she may not be following. But the owner's duty to maintain heat is independent of her compliance with those procedures, so the owner's exposure does not disappear because she chose self-help.
After restoration: document the repair with the contractor invoice and a dated temperature reading, then address the withheld rent. A written notice identifying the amount owed, followed by a short payment plan, is usually the better move than an eviction filing; an eviction on these facts invites a habitability counterclaim and a fair housing complaint given her age and disability. Confirm whether accepting any partial payment after a notice waives the breach under state law before cashing a check.
Keep a written acknowledgment to her of the outage dates, the remediation, and the rent resolution. The paper trail is what makes a later court or agency review manageable.