Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in Philippines

Hi,

My question is in regard to Landlord-Tenant conflict. I am renting this house for almost three years now and I am very good with my payments. In fact, I have already given almost 170k for the years that I have stayed in this house. Our conflict started almost two months from the day that I started renting the house. It started when the toilet gets busted. Busted in terms that it doesn't flush properly and it takes 6-8 pails of water to completely flush it out. We had someone checked it out and he said that the toilet doesn't have a breather and it will take a large amount of money to completely fix it. I raised the problem with the landlord but the whole time that I have stayed here, he didn't do anything to address the problem. So for almost three years I've been struggling with this problem, which actually raised my expenses with my water bill and additional weekly expenses for toilet plungers. The second issue I had is the fact that the house doesn't have it's own drainage so when it rains the water is accumulated on the back area of the house when it fills up it flows directly into my kitchen. Every time it rains, our kitchen is flooded up to several inches of water. This is also the reason why my refrigerator broke down because it accidentally took in flooded water which messed up it's motor. That is what the repairman found out. I also raised this concern to my landlord but he still didn't do anything about it even now. Aside from those problem, we also have his nephew, who is our next door neighbor and a known drug addict in our neighborhood. 8 months ago, our landlord requested if his nephew can tap with our electricity. Being our landlord, I agree, since according to them, thew will only tap for three days until they settle their bill. But until now they are still tapping and I've been paying for their electricity for 8 months now. The moment I remove it, I receive threats from his nephew saying that he'll go on rage or something like that. So last month, I couldn't take it anymore and I decided not to pay rent until all of the problems I have in the house are fixed and the tapping stops. I don't want to leave this house because it's a walking distance from my kid's school. Am I right to demand that? What are my options? please advise....

Marvin B. from Cebu, Philippines

[email protected]

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