Mold, Bad Contractor, Parking question

[Lupe]

Hi,

I am having some issue with moisture and mold in my apartment. I have been living here with my 22 month old son and husband for 6 months now. After researching I found out that my landlord is kind of a big wig and owns a LOT of property in various cities in the US but mainly in NY. I live in Brooklyn in a 4 story privately owned non regulated building with 5 rental units. We have a lease agreement with the landlord.

The mold is due to cracks in the side of the building and I also found out from the other tenants that there was a major roof leak before we moved in that I don't think was properly dealt with. Of course the majority of the bubbles and mold are in our son's room but there is a huge bubble in the front room as well. The landlord refuses to pay to have the mold tested and wants to use his awful contractor who has proven to be a sloppy worker (for example, he painted over the previous tenant's plastic outlet covers, light switches etc). We found mold one month after moving in and he paid for us to have it removed. We then had a picture literally fall out of the wall and the outer cardboard backing as well as the print were both covered in mold. We waited for over a month while he got a permit to do the work and got an email today that work is to begin tomorrow morning. The cracks are on the outside wall where the parking area is. They emailed to tell us that we cannot use our parking spaces until the work is done. No other information was given about how the work will effect us, how long the job will take etc. We asked about getting the rent prorated until the work is done since we will not be able to use our parking space and we were told that the parking is a "bonus" that we do not pay for (yea ok, so you just give us a parking space for free that you could rent out for a couple hundred a month...). Street parking where we are can be very difficult and my husband commutes and gets home very late so it will be a severe inconvenience to him to find parking at 11pm every night until this is all done. The management company has been pretty rude through all of this. Basically saying this is what happens when you complain, you get inconvenienced.

I have three questions:
1) If the parking space is not listed in our lease does that mean that we have no rights to it? I have all of my email correspondence with the broker regarding the parking space. We rented the apartment because of the parking and the washer and dryer. Neither are listed in the lease.

2) What steps can I take to ensure that the contractor actually eradicated the mold after this work is done?

3) Are we able to force the landlord to provide us with housing elsewhere while the wall is being replaced in our son's room due to the potentially hazardous nature of the mold? I foresee him fighting us on this.

Thanks for reading. Hope some of you guys out there can help!

[TenantNet]

Here's your dilemma. I would say based on what you've said you have a good case that parking is included as part of the services even if not listed on the lease. However, to establish that, you would likely have to go through some litigation.

More over, since you are not regulated, when your lease is up, the LL does not have to offer you a renewal. So you're between a rock and a hard place.

I'm not an expert in mold, but you can probably Google what constitutes a safe and effective repair job.

You can always ask the LL for alternative accommodations, but if he's as nasty as you claim, I wouldn't get my hopes up. Again, something like this comes from negotiation, or from litigation.