My landlord won’t fix things — what can I do?

Do not stop paying the rent. The library’s page on this says that part first, and so does this answer, because the obvious move is the trap: in most places unpaid rent is grounds for eviction even when the landlord is completely in the wrong. Two wrongs do not cancel in housing court.

Put the repair history in writing tonight. Whatever your jurisdiction turns out to offer, When repairs stall, the rent can wait in escrow says the opening step is the same everywhere and costs ten minutes: dates, problems, photos, sent to the landlord where a court could someday read it. For one renter in those conversations the folder did most of the work by itself, twice; one landlord returned a whole deposit at the mention of pictures.

Ask whether rent escrow exists where you live. The same page describes the legal version of no repairs, no rent: you keep paying in full and on time, to the court rather than the landlord, and the landlord cannot collect a cent until the defects are fixed. The pressure that withholding tries to create, escrow creates legally with your record spotless. The person who shared it flagged both edges in one breath: the mechanism is real, and every part of it may be state-specific, usually with written notice and a waiting period before any filing. A free legal-aid office can tell you in one conversation whether the path exists where you live. The Resource Bank’s Legal Services Corporation finder locates free civil legal help by area, and HUD-approved housing counselors are free for eviction, foreclosure and homelessness. 211 is the same ask by phone.

If the fault is electrical, this is not a dispute. Shocks from the shower mean an electrician, today is one of the few pages here with no gentler path. Tingles from taps or the shower are not static; plumbing is grounded by design and should never carry a charge you can feel, and the severity of the zap tells you nothing about the severity of the fault. Stop using the fixture, and report it in writing as an urgent electrical fault. Grounding problems are squarely the landlord’s to fix, and the paper trail protects you.

Know that the deposit has laws on its side. That page says security deposits are regulated almost everywhere and the rules favour tenants more than the lease admits: what can be deducted, what counts as normal wear, how fast the money must come back. One city bars deductions for patched nail holes, shampooed carpets and repainting entirely. The strongest sentence there is about hierarchy: a lease clause that contradicts tenant law is void where those renters live. Renters who knew that stopped arguing about the lease and started citing the act. When a landlord keeps the money anyway, the path is small claims court; one renter’s mother took a folder and a photo set and came home with three times the deposit.

Who this is not for. If you cannot pay the rent at all, this is a different problem, and the housing counselor and 211 doors above are for that. Outside the United States the remedies differ; the UK, for one, protects deposits in a scheme where the landlord must prove damage first, which the deposit page mentions. And one line that is the library’s rather than those pages’: if anyone in the home is in immediate danger from fire or live current, get out and call 911 in the US or 999 in the UK; the letter can wait.