That wasn't my lawyer's reading of the statute. She said that it was written at a time when some rents may have been less than $50, and therefore that clause should be read as your security deposit must be at least $50 to apply.

That’s only if the deposit is over the amount of your (usually monthly) rent.

Does this apply to places that have a water/sewer fee added on to the rent? Example: a two unit house, vacant unit is $1450/mo and water/sewer trash is $75/mo for first tenant and $25 for each additional tenant.

Making the unit effectively $1550/mo for two adults

Talk to the city. That may be able to put some pressure on the LL.

Fun fact! by the way - nobody usually stays long enough for this to matter, but state law says LL is supposed to pay you back statutory interest (currently 5%) on your security deposit. If they haven't done that, they owe you that interest no matter what happens with your security deposit. So example if your deposit was $1,000 and you've been there 5 years, they currently owe you ~$275.

You may want to share this information with the rest of the units in the building.

It's ORC 5321.16 (A).

https://law.justia.com/codes/ohio/2011/title53/chapter5321/section5321-16/

Mine has individual water meters, but decided to tally up everyone's water usage in my building and divide it by units. I was fucking pissed. Now it's a flat rate, after it being included in my lease for over 5 years that it was included.

They started sending water bills after years and so many people left. So many.

21 units 1 water tank. Have to sometimes run water for 5 minutes in sink before it's hot. It takes so long for hot water to come out, I literally just boil cold water faster when I cook.

Landlords in Lakewood are not allowed to make tenants charge for water/sewer in multi-tenant properties unless every unit has an individual water meter (this is almost never true). It is totally fine for them to make you pay for sewer/water in single family homes.

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Sewer will be double your water. But sewer will be less for an apartment than for a house, because the sewer commission has an aerial measurement of your roof and driveway that it uses to charge you extra for "runoff." I last paid $24 for water and $50 for sewer for my house. I have paid sewer as high as $75 during rainy months.

In my experience renting here, water is generally covered by the landlord, especially in multi-family housing.

Cox doesn’t offer fiber to the home. They offer a fiber to the node service, with cable service to the home. This is not equivalent, as it maxes at 1Gb down and has severely capped upload speeds (IIRC it’s a sad 35Mb), versus FiOS which is 1:1 speeds. Cox also has data caps. It’s also mad expensive… I’m paying $160/m for 300/30 speeds and an unlimited plan, versus $80/m for 1000/1000 and unlimited on Fiber.

I was on AT&T Fiber for years before buying a new home and being stuck with Cox. It just takes me back to my years in NC on TWC. I have experienced so many issues since moving to this home a year ago. You will never convince me that any cable plan is better than FiOS.

My parents moved into the house next door from their previous house. They had AT&T but the house next door was outside the service area. It’s totally hit or miss.

My experience has been to stick with Cox, which has proved to be more reliable than AT&T. I live on Warren and have fiber through Cox, installed a couple of years ago, and get gigabit speed for 69.99/mo (no cable or other service).

Cox is installing more fiber optic cable today along Madison Ave. between Warren and Lincoln, which caused a small, temporary drop in service around 10am this morning. But it's all fine now.

We also have 5G access through the Verizon network put in two years ago--which we don't use, since we have T-Mobile. Still, internet access is not a problem in this part of Lakewood.

I really appreciate the insight. Glad to hear they are actively working on things a few streets over. Will keep my fingers crossed for fiber before the end of this year.

They said the node for Marlowe and Lincoln is on belle and Franklin. Seems like a big push is happening. If you’re really curious, you should be able to find a crew that are working on the lines. Their trucks are not labeled, so I imagine they are a third-party that are running the fiber optics. You could probably just ask them if they’re running AT&T fiber, and what’s the outlook for your street.

I’m on Lakeland Ave. Summit Ave, the next street over, has had fiber since we bought this house in Nov ‘21, but we don’t.

Here’s hoping that Lakeland to Marlowe is a single node. Seems small enough to be.

What street? I just talked to the crew that was splicing the line in the backyards between Marlowe and Lincoln. They told me they just started the work which will take about 4 weeks. After that it will take about a week to test the signals. So about mid April the sales staff will start coming door to door.

I’m paying $160/m for halfway decent internet from Cox and it still pales in comparison to what I used to get for $70/m from AT&T. I hate cable internet. It drops too often, has too much packet loss, costs too much, and the upload speeds are god awful.

It does but it is applied in blocks. Unfortunately I have it 1 block in 1 direction and 6 blocks in the other. So basically my node is one of the only ones right in the heart of Lakewood that doesn’t have it.

Fiber isn’t phone line. It’s fiber optic cable. It’s so far above the capabilities of cable internet.

Also, it’s not new. FiOS directly to consumers (and not just businesses) has been around for like 15 years now. Tons of providers use it. It is the backbone of every major internet provider. The faster cable speeds are often due to fiber to the node setups bringing the bottlenecks of cable internet closer to the houses. AT&T, Google, Verizon, and many others have been doing direct Fiber internet to homes for waaaaay more than 5 years, offering 1-5Gbps speeds for half the cost of cable internet.

It used to be the case (and I thought it was still the case) that any cable wired connection to the internet was far better than anything through a phone line because it is much more consistent service. As far as I'm aware AT&T has always been utter dogshit service at least in Cleveland.

Have things changed somehow in the past 5 years?

I’ve had AT&T fiber since I’ve moved here in April 2021. I think it honestly depends on the street.

I've been trying to get answers since before the pandemic. AT&T won't comment. City officials don't seem too concerned. I'm tired of Cox and their monopoly on broadband in my neighborhood. Yes, AT&T does offer DSL as an alternative, but it's capped at 25Mbps. That's not going to cut it when we've got a full-time WFH person in the house and two online students. Cox is the only choice right now for me.

I think there's one in the area of Franklin & Winchester. But yeah, much better speeds at a much better price. Good luck!

Any specific streets you’ve seen the signs?

I had it for years when I lived in NC and going back to cable internet has been such a bummer. And 2.5x the cost 🙄 So ready to ditch Cox.

I don't have specifics to the expansion, other than I've recently seen a couple "Coming soon!" yard signs.

I can say that I recently switched to it from Cox, and that the service has been spectacular.