Rick* cannot breathe in a moldy rental home, but is ‘sent from pillar to post’

“You can probably see how shallow my breathing is at the moment,” Rick says at the kitchen table at his home, three floors up on the Liesbos in the Overbos district of Hoofddorp. “Last night it was so bad that I wanted to call the doctor’s office. I ended up sleeping on the couch.”

The reason he fled his bed becomes clear during a tour. It is cold through the open windows, there is condensation on the windows. And yet there is a musty smell coming from the bathroom.

Mold

The thick layer of mold on the ceiling and walls makes the room unusable. The smell is similar to used sportswear after sitting in a sealed bag for a week.

“I just stuffed towels under the door to keep the smell away. The advice is to air the room, but if I do that, my home becomes virtually uninhabitable because of the air,” Rick explains. The culprit is a broken ventilation system, the only way for fresh air to enter the otherwise windowless room.

Rick: “I can tackle the fungus myself, but it will come back just as quickly until the fan works again. And that has been taking months now.” Months full of phone calls, home visits and repairmen who, according to Rick, often did not come.

Referral

The rental property is owned by Ymere, a housing association with tens of thousands of rental properties in and around Amsterdam. When Rick reported the mold (and other defects) to them two months ago, he was referred to an external maintenance company. But they referred again to another company. And that company told him to go back to external maintenance company number one.

At least five different companies have now been involved in the problems in the house. It drives Rick to despair: “I am already over the anger, it is that bad. I have completely lost track of which problem is with whom, you can no longer see the forest for the trees.”

Rick has only lived on the Liesbos for a year and a half, but his neighbor has been living there for two decades. He has the same problem in his own bathroom: “Because the ventilation is stopped, the toilet odors from the neighbors also drift into your own house. When our grandchild comes to visit, he sleeps in the living room out of necessity.” He says he has become accustomed to the way things are done over the past twenty years.

Besides the bathroom mold, Rick has more problems. A leaking water pipe in the building has caused another mold spot near his front door. Parts of the window frames have rotted away so much that flies have nested in them. To counteract the sewage smell that comes from the ventilation shaft near his toilet, he keeps his living room windows open. But Ymere advises to keep the windows closed due to a vermin infestation. And then there is the leaking balcony door.

“I have now taken almost half of my vacation days for maintenance appointments, which only show up half the time. It is too sad for words,” Rick says dejectedly. Emotions have now run so high that he has filed a formal complaint against his contact person for repairs at Ymere and he is in discussions with the Rental Committee.

During the interview he receives a call from the company that was going to install draft excluders tomorrow. Their mechanic is ill, and Rick asks if he still has time on Friday: “Yes, no problem, that is also possible.”