Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in Iowa

Salutations, my roommate, Mike and I have been living at an apartment at..:

1018 24th st. Apt. #6

Des Moines, IA 50311

..For around two years now, a couple days after we had moved in to the apartment we have since sadly found many discrepancy's with the apartment, that our landlord wont fix. Such as: Barley any heat, we only have two registers that barley work, and they are in the bathroom and kitchen on one side of the house then on the other we have the living room and bedroom that have NO Heat, (we have called our landlord, Bradly Voss (515) 577- 9792 repeatedly over this and many other issues, he always says he will get to it, or that he has all ready sent someone over to fix it, when it is obviously everything is still broken and has never been fixed. Then after we went through our first winter with no heat he said he had no responsibility to fix it because it was no longer winter and we required no heat, now that winter is coming around again we are trying to threaten him to fix everything by not paying rent and he is still not fixing it.)

The other issues with the apartment include; Tones of roaches (which is getting very unbearable) to this issue Bradly always says that they have already sprayed our apartment, witch they have not, they did ONCE send a notice saying they were going to spray our apartment and we got everything ready but they never came, so I called Bradly and he told me that they sprayed the day before the notice. A day that my roommate was home all day, a day that my cats would have been subject to the poison because we didn't know it was happening. Needles to say there both fine though because it never happened! The only thing they have done is leave us bombs to set off our selves, and poison to spray ourselves, way to do your jobs, real helpful.

Anyways, to continue the list, Mice (that we have caught and put in a fish tank, because they love eating all our roaches.. and we thought this would help us out, because we could show pretty blunt evidence of how bad it is here), Fleas(we have had to spend a bunch of cash trying to protect our cats), A huge hole under the kitchen sink ( that most of the rodents come from), A hole in the Kitchen ceiling ( they actually half fixed this, but didn't finish it), A leaking Kitchen faucet, Stolen mail (because this house used to be a half- way home so all the mail could be put in one mail box and now that it is an apartment complex by regulation he should have to have a mail box for each tenet, but a coarse he doesn't want to pay to change it from one mail box to six mail boxes, like regulation states it should be. So we bought a mail box because we were sick of losing important information/ parcels and recently we found our mailbox shredded into pieces and thrown everywhere with our late rent notice in the box.), We also have other smaller issues that I will not go into now.

Recently we had our apartment inspected and the inspector was pretty discussed after seeing our apartment and pointed out many things they needed to fix and left quickly in a poor mood. After hearing that information from someone who deals with this stuff for a living and after being fed up for so long, we decided that we need to take a stand now, we really don't see why we should have to continue to pay rent, after we have bothered Bradly so many times over theses issues and have been perfect tenets always paying our rent on time until now. We have documented everything that has happened fairly well.& We have been telling him for months that if he didn't address these issues we weren't going to pay. A coarse though he sent us a late rents notice for this month because we didn't pay because he wont fix anything, so I was wondering if you could give me some legal advice as to what I should do next, please we need help.

p.s. We also have tried finding a new place but he obviously doesn't want us to leave because everywhere we go we are denied despite being good tenets, he just still wants to keep collecting his $450 every month for a place that isn't even worth all that fixed up properly. We have addressed this issue with him also and he said he would only raise the price of the apartment.

Sincerely,

Kathrine

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