Anyone else have HORRIBLE neighbors?

[Snakeadelic]

Even though I've only spent about half my life living in apartments, I've discovered that a shocking lot of folks these days have NO IDEA that any such thing as "shared space etiquette" exists. The building I live in has 4 units, and at the moment I'm in one of the 2 ground-floor apartments.

The minute I turned on the washing machine because the resident I help with his activities of daily living is out of clean jeans, I swear it sounds like they're playing Whack-A-Mole up there! This is not new behavior--they get crazy loud if they hear motion down here, and if I put in a movie or turn on the 80s music video station they bang around louder! I'm not the new tenant here, either--in fact, I've lived in the upstairs unit on the other side of the building for EIGHT YEARS. These folks aren't even done with their first (and probably last) year here.

The neighbor downstairs on the other side is something else entirely. Even though she knows that repeatedly dousing me in her dryer exhaust has worsened my allergy to artificial scent to the point where it is now potentially lethal without warning, she has ignored requests from 2 different management teams to respect my right to continue breathing. Evidently, anyone who isn't related to her by DNA or marriage is not a real person. She's even, so far as I can tell, mad as all get-out that a physical shunt has to be installed over her dryer vent to physically force the exhaust away from the ONLY access to my front door, which is almost directly above said vent. Since the only outside door affected is an access door on the side of the garage behind her unit that leads to MY garage, I have no idea what she's so peeved about!

Initially I was told that the fair housing laws, the state's Board of Housing regulations, and the rules governing the Section 42 Tax Credit status of this property protected only her--she CANNOT be compelled to use unscented laundry products or swap units with someone who will (and there is a tenant totally willing to do that swap!). Amazing how fast the consortium of total strangers in California who actually own the property faxed over "reasonable accommodation/modification" paperwork when the head of Adult Case Management for the county's mental health care facility showed up to ask the onsite manager (who is 100% not the problem) why the disabled residents weren't being protected!

Is this normal in apartment living now? I was always taught to respect adjoining apartments and their residents because what I do can have a profound effect on others, which is all of why I walk lightly and part of why I don't fill the physical environment with allergens.

The stress of having vindictive noise upstairs while in one unit and highly dangerous allergens seeping up through floors and vents while in the one I actually live in decidedly does not make my anxiety challenges any easier to meet! Do I just have the worst neighbors possible short of hoarders (that was a different building on this site a couple of years ago) or drug dealers (different complex just across the street and owned by the same Californians)???

[Snakeadelic]

Update: well, the "reasonable accommodation" won't be happening. According to the contractor, the ONLY way to redirect the dryer vent is to run the ENTIRE THING all the way across her kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom under the floor, which the building owners will not shell out for--too expensive and too much of a HUGE fire hazard. If it's going to happen, I get to foot the bill, which is payable up front and almost as much as I get to live on every month. No making payments. My partner would gladly let me skip paying rent for a month if I had to, but SSI will not. I've been told by a Social Security Administration worker that if I do not pay half the rent and half the utilities everywhere I ever live again, I can be kicked for life or at the very least audited to the bone and grilled over every single missing receipt for anything I bought since 2008. I know how to live without money, but health insurance is another matter.

My choices are:
Shell out $700 to turn my home of 8 years into a hideously risky, possibly uninsurable firetrap, thereby risking eviction if anything did go wrong with the re-routed dryer exhaust.

Leave behind my chosen family (no kids, 2 adult partners for a total of 3 involved adults) and our pets to go live in an urban area (strangers and crowds are 2 of my biggest panic triggers, right behind vehicles in traffic!) alone and find out just how long it will take me to down an entire bottle of benzos to get the mess over with. Moving in with blood relatives is not an option. Neither of my partners has a medical exemption on breaking the lease, so if they leave they have to pay for their old apartments until either the lease runs out (late autumn for one, mid-autumn for the other) or the unit is rented. It's been known to take 18 months to rent a unit here--the work situation sucks because I live in a county with a population of about 40,000 and double the square mileage of Rhode Island, and by the standards of people who don't rely on the American taxpayers for rent money (THANK YOU ALL by the way!--not sarcasm) these apartments are not built to a standard that matches the base rent. Senior partner and I moved in here after 18 months including 2 Rocky Mountain winters in a 30-year-old mobile home infested with paper wasps and toxic black mold, where our only heating option the first winter was "take apart the 300-square-foot, 4-level front deck the original owners never bothered to protect from the weather and shove it in the woodstove bit by bit" and the woodstove was unsafe all on its own...too close to all the walls, chimney missing parts and incorrectly assembled, whole place abandoned to the feral cat colony on the property for TEN YEARS--we had to rake the carpets as well as moving out 33 garbage bags of broken toys and bits of who knows what--so our bar for "tolerably safe living space" is set a little lower than average.

Stay in my home of 8 years with everyone including that (unladylike words all over this space!!) downstairs who's apparently not aware of how allergies work (she seems to think they care whether her laundry treatment is administered by a dryer bar or a dryer sheet when it's the awful artificial "stink-pretty" I'm allergic to and SHE KNOWS THAT) and hope my next angioedema relapse (already had 2, both immediately after having to walk through her dryer exhaust) doesn't slam my trachea shut the way angioedema evidently really likes to do. MAYBE my MD can find me stronger allergy meds, and possibly something in case of emergency that will not, unlike cortico-steroids, cause necrotic skin lesions as is the case with every female on my maternal grandmother's side of the family--the same mitochondrial DNA I have. I already take Claritin-D daily and have Flonase to use as needed, plus I carry Benadryl and Prednisone in case of another relapse; this is not an allergy that will respond to an epi-pen. I can't WAIT until the mental health clinic opens and our case managers read the email from the on-site manager about this.

[Snakeadelic]

Update...

There are no stronger allergy meds. My insurance will pay for ONE med besides the one I've been taking, so we're trying the new one for a month although my MD does not anticipate any improvement--at least I'm trying, not just whining at the on-site manager about NEVER getting to see family again because even though the downstairs tenant can drive (unlike me) apparently all her family time MUST be conducted in a tiny 2-bedroom apartment and not, say, where her family lives.

There are no safe places to move to. Everything available to rent around here either has a centrally located laundry room or no laundry facility access or hookups at all. Even if I could afford the rent, the cheapest place I could find--which looks on the verge of collapse in its listing photo--has no laundry hookups and the rent & utilities would leave me about $75 a month for EVERYTHING else. "Utilities" does not include phone or internet, only electricity and, if applicable, natural gas for the furnace and water heater. Even if I found a place I would lose access to mental and physical health care as well as ALL medications.

After all the hassle, cost, and stress of actually getting it, turns out I will be shredding my medical marijuana card without ever actually using it. Keeping those meds in my home is an automatic eviction, say the property owners who live in another time zone. Not keeping them in my home results in the provider getting arrested. Lying to management or the provider would only make me part of the reason that people who need this kind of help have a harder and harder time getting it.

I lost my best friend to an unexpectedly closed state of mind back in July and she hasn't even noticed. We still communicate; she emails me about how hard it is to live through the slow, painful loss of a really good friend who will probably die of massively metastasized small-cell lung cancer before the end of this week. She tells me how great it is that her husband moved out and is now treating her better than he has in a year or more. She tells me how HIS struggles with mental health are going but still dismisses anything I say about anxiety and my life as either my 'incurably negative personality' (in which case I actually could have 3 mental health care professionals write her letters about how 95% of the time I'm one of the most upbeat, forward-looking, positive-minded clients they've ever worked with) or 'just get a better care team and take some antidepressants like the Wellbutrin I'm on for insomnia'.

One of my menfolk has repeatedly offered to sell anything but his truck and Harley to help finance moving the downstairs neighbor to a different unit. She will not consider the possibility. At all. Nor will she switch to an unscented dryer product. While the kid was running laps and slamming doors for THREE AND A HALF SOLID HOURS on Sunday, her "caretaker"--the one who locks her in because said caretaker cannot keep up with her--was doing laundry. I got a scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose twice, but now my eyes are giving me trouble they never used to until walking through her dryer exhaust Sunday resulted in hours of itchy, burning eyes. Now there's a nasty yellowish infected-looking spot beginning to intrude on my left iris; if it was there last week I did not notice and since most of my hobbies require decent vision, I try to keep tabs on my ocular health too.

Between the stress and the continuing to be doused in airborne poison, I don't think I've got a lot of time left. Considering the Hell this is bringing down upon everyone who actually tries to help me, that might not be such a bad thing.

[Snakeadelic]

Update: it's official. Spoke to management this morning. Child-abusing downstairs neighbor WILL NOT be asked why she cannot drive to her family's home(s) for visits. WILL NOT be asked to move into a different unit even if my family unit pays the moving costs. WILL NOT be asked to respect my now-lethal allergy to artificial scent in any way. Contacting her in any way will be considered harassment on our part. No medication is available that will reduce the allergy danger, only a mood stabilizer to make me easier to live with while I wait to die. I will probably require multiple eye surgeries, as the nasty spot in my left eye is now believed to be allergy-related and with a high probability of recurrence. Modifying the dryer vent to reduce my allergen exposure is extremely dangerous and will cost a minimum $600 that my partner and I will be expected to pay.

The short version: my life is not worth saving.

[Snakeadelic]

Update...

Just for fun I spent half my morning on the phone trying to track down disability advocacy. Ended up everywhere from Bozeman to the Governor's office to my home town.

End result: my life is not worth saving.