Me and my husband live in the Mathews Crossing apartments in Jacksonville, FL. When we signed our lease on April 30th, 2010 we were assured that the complex was safe and that all the maintanence that needed to be done would be. Come to find out within a week, when a 10 month old baby was shot in the building next to ours, the complex is riddled with crime, there is always police busting someone. Cars and apartments are broken into. I’m 7 months pregnant and do not want to continue living in this area as it is a risk to our safety. All around the complex there are busted out windows, and tarps of the roofs. Our deck has rotted wood. The railing on the staircase is completely rusted away and is breaking off. The air conditioning unit is leaking. There is a bug problem they have not addressed. Any time we file a complaint and they actually send maintenence out, the maintenence worker can hardly speak English to understand the problem, and has yet to actually fix anything. How can we break lease legally?
I asked about the eviction process because if we cannot get out of this lease legally, we can’t continue to live here, either way. I will not put myself, and my family at risk.
We don’t want to have to pay an early lease termination fee and the rest of the months that we are on the lease for. We already have a credit of zero, and are not worried about our credit being messed up. We have another place available to move into any time we want.
We were told that the existing problems with our apartment and deck would be taken care of immediately. As well as the bugs. We didn’t take the time to drive around the apartment complex and look at the condition of the other buildings. And we were told it was a very safe place with good security, which we couldn’t tell was a lie until we had lived there for a little while.
There is an early lease termination thing in the lease. But it would still require us to pay over $1000 to break the lease early. I suppose we could take out a loan with someone, it would be better than paying for their attorney fees and the $3000+ for the months we still have on our lease.