Lawsuit: Walden Park Apartment Owners Fail to Address Ongoing Heat and Hot Water Issues

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Two Massachusetts residents have filed suit against their landlords – Equity Residential Management, LLC and EQR-Walden Park, LLC – over claims that the defendants failed to provide heat and hot water services to residents of their apartment complex for over a year.

According to the complaint, the defendants own the Walden Park apartment complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the plaintiffs currently reside, but have failed to address “significant deficiencies and outages” involving the heat and hot water systems. The plaintiffs allege that the problems began in April 2012 and have continued through August 2013 – the date the original complaint was filed in state court. Instead of addressing the issues, the lawsuit attests, the defendants have provided “misleading and contradictory reasons for shutting off the utilities” including “conversion from oil to natural gas, a water conservation project, a heating and cooling project, fuel supply/consumption issues, operator error, and automatic shutdowns.”

The outages were apparently so frequent that the Cambridge Board of Health reportedly cited the defendants “for violations of the State Sanitary Code,” concluding that the conditions in the Walden Park apartments could be dangerous to residents’ health and safety.

The case further notes that the plaintiffs submitted a Demand Letter to the defendants on May 20, 2013, and agreed to a subsequent settlement deal. However, by July of that year, Equity had “backed out” of the settlement and refused to honor its terms, prompting the plaintiffs to file suit, the complaint says.

Originally filed in state court, the case has recently been removed to the Massachusetts District Court.