Breaking Lease due to Disability : ezLandlordForms

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Breaking Lease due to Disability

Bryan W

started a topic about 3 years ago

I rent an apartment in Indiana and am diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The apartment is in a very old building that was recently renovated leading to some weird "bugs" in how it's built. One such bug involves a brewery on the first floor of the building a few floors beneath my apartment. Due to some strangeness in the ventilation, I get a lot of fumes and powerful, unpleasant smells coming into my apartment from the brewery during certain stages of the brewing process. This has been brought up with management several times, the first few times they said they couldn't fix it and "no one else is complaining." Eventually I brought up the fact that I'm on the spectrum so things like loud noises and strong unpleasant smells send me into sensory overload and cause anxiety/panic attacks which was especially a problem with covid since I was working from home. At that point the management talked to the maintenance people and put an air freshener in my ventilation. Needless to say, the issue still wasn't fixed, which both the property manager and her manager higher up in the company said they'd "look into". The last I heard from either them was 3 months ago. So I just assumed I was stuck and turned off my AC or heat when it got bad enough and just dealt with the discomfort from the temperature if that when I could, but when it was 95 degrees and 85% humidity, I just dealt with the panic attacks instead. However, I recently discovered that in the state of Indiana, you are able to break a lease without penalty if a tenant with a disability cannot be given proper accommodations for their disability. This isn't the first time I've had a problem they didn't/couldn't fix, so at this point that's feeling like my best option. My question is if I have enough of a case to actually break the lease without penalty based on this situation. I would assume that being sent into panic attacks in my own home on a semi-regular basis would constitute not being accommodated for my disability, I have email correspondence about the issue and unanswered tickets in the maintenance system, and can get diagnosis paperwork and confirmation from a therapist that the smell is an issue due to my disability. Thoughts? Thanks