Need advise on a San Francisco living situaton (apartment, lease)

[delenatii]

I have a question regarding my current living situation. My roommate and I currently live in a lower/basement 2 bedroom unit that is attached to a garage. Our landlord and his family of 6 other people live upstairs. The apartment has two windows. One in the front bedroom, that faces a blocked off hallway, and one in the back bedroom. We also have a backdoor that gives us access to the yard. I am assuming that due to the poor circluation in the unit, we have had mold growth on our clothes that we keep both in our clothes and in our drawers. We also have a black mold growing on the walls and tiles in our bathroom. The landlord suggested that we keep the windows open, and that should clear up our mold problem, but this did not work, especially since it is winter, and San Francisco gets a lot of rain in the winter.

Also, the unit has no heating, when we brought this up to the landlord, they gave us two space heaters for each of our rooms. We noticed that by keeping the heater on, the mold seemed to subside. So, we've been keeping the heaters on low both to try to get some heat in the unit and to stop the mold.

For some reason, our apartment does not have an address of its own, so we share a mailbox with the landlord. We also do not have our own meters, so the landlord gives us a total to pay each month for utilities. We usually pay around $25 - 35 dollars for power, but this month they are asking us to pay $90 out of a $134 power bill. It seems unfair to pay more than half of the bill when there are only 2 of us and 7 people living upstairs. It seems unlikely that they haven't turned up their heat since it has gotten cold. Plus, they have given us no other solution to our mold problem except to keep our windows and doors open, which we can't do while we are gone, especially since we are on the ground floor.

I don't know if I need to take legal action, but the apartment is not working out for either of us. Do you have any suggestions. Is there a way to get out of the lease and get our security deposit back without paying a large fee.

[clongirl]

Contact these guys..the SF rent board..sounds like the place is an illegal unit.

San Francisco Rent Board : Home

[batransplant]

ugh! that sounds like a terrible situation, and unhealty. I agree with Clongirl. Try contacting a tenants rights organization. From my understanding, tenants are very well protected in San Francisco.