> For repairing a broken thing? After provably trying in vain to get the landlord to fix it?

Down the hallway from my office used to be the management of a small hotel chain. We often had lunch together and I got to hear a bunch of interesting anecdotes over the years.

Way back when they started up and didn't yet have enough cash to actually own the buildings they operated in, they rented. One of the buildings turned out to have numerous issues (holes in the roof, gaps near exterior walls, etc...). To the point that they eventually didn't pass a fire inspection. They repeatedly asked the owner to have it fixed. Pressed for time, they themselves eventually payed someone, out of their own pocket, so it would at least be up to code for the fire inspection.

From what I was told, the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.

If you are a tenant in a rental apartment, you'd probably have more leniency on the legal side (compared to a company renting a business property). But still, I'd be very careful making any assumptions about the legal situation rather than risking some sort of Kafkaesque legal mess.

Over here at least, it is very common in apartment complexes that the apartment owner is a different person/entity than the building owner and only the later has the rights to mess with stuff installed in the walls (e.g. plumbing) and especially stuff elsewhere in the building (e.g. an external intercom system). If you ask the landlord to fix it, the best they could do is forward that request to the building owner. If you pulled a stunt like the OP did, there's a good chance that the building owner will sue your landlord.

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Hackbraten an hour ago | parent [-]

> the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.

Was the unauthorized modification permanent or undoable? If the latter, I think some people should really get their judge card (or landlord card) revoked.

Did the judge at least suggest what alternative action the tenant should have taken to comply with the law and code?

	▲	drabbiticus 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most likely the (legally) correct thing to do in the US is to first report the landlord to the relevant agency, possibly named something like Licensing and Inspections or Fair Housing or somesuch. Each local jurisdiction will have it's own agencies for this, so do research. Failure to respond to that would next involve a landlord-tenant lawyer. Whether or not it's worth all the trouble and time is a different matter. For most people, I'd say reporting to relevant authorities to make the landlord's life harder without needing much continuing effort is probably worth doing, but the lawsuit side is likely to be a huge time and money sink and it's almost always easier to just move. Let the city sue them for continuing to accrue complaints of unsafe living conditions. In the same way, a landlord cannot evict you themself if you just fail to pay rent, but there are multiple legal mechanisms to eventually get the sheriff to do it for them. Basically, if landlord-tenant negotiation fails, I think the only legal recourse is to involve governmental third parties unless you technically open yourself up to legal reprisal.