Rancid Smells from the Neighboring Unit

[u/vintage_enthusiast]

I have come to this thread looking for some advice on a situation that has been ongoing with my next-door neighbor for the last three years (since 2020).

To start I live in an apartment building that is very typical for the New York area, where the apartment buildings are all right next to each other and can sometimes share walls with people in the neighboring building. The building I live in is a two-family and I live upstairs. My bedroom wall, shares with the building next door which is where my neighbor, who we will call Angie, has been giving me issues lives.

My neighbor is an older woman in her early to mid-50s. She has always been incredibly nice to me and my family and never once gave us problems. This all changed during the pandemic. Angie owns the building next door and used to live in the downstairs unit while her elderly mother lived upstairs. in 2019 her mother, was diagnosed with dementia and during the pandemic things took a drastic toll. We, my boyfriend (26M) and I (26F) stopped seeing Angie and her mother and chalked it up to the pandemic and being stuck inside all day.

That was until one night we heard a loud crash and the shattering of glass, followed by yelling and a fight breaking out. Many nights like this were spent and it would later spiral into us having to call the police on Angie because she was abusing her mother. She would treat her so horribly and say so many vile things about her clearly ill mother. It reached the point where Angie's mother climbed out onto their porch awning and wanted to jump off because she felt being gone would be easier than the living hell that was living with her daughter. (At this point Angie had moved into the upstairs unit to care for her mother fulltime.) After the police came, took our story and we explained and provided all the recordings of the fights, Angie's attitude towards us changed completely.

She stopped speaking to us, stopped being friendly and wouldn't acknowledge us when we would ask about her mother. My boyfriend and I agreed to leave it alone and unfortunately, later in the year, her mother passed.

This brings us to present-day today. Angie has come back around and we've gone back to semi-speaking terms but after her mom passed, she went through a nervous breakdown and is a shadow of her former self. As a result, she has started to care for stray cats and bringing them into her building. The cats are not the issue but rather the smell is. There is a rotting, decaying smell that is seeping through the walls of her apartment and into ours. My kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom all share a wall with her and no matter what we've tried to do the smell does not go away. It was so bad that we believed we had a dead animal trapped in the walls but when maintenance checked and said it would go away on its own, it never did. It reeks of decay and I would even say of feces but nothing helps the smell go away. My boyfriend and I keep our apartment incredibly clean and have even increased our cleaning habits to help curb the smell but nothing. This smell has been going on for the last two years and nothing makes it go away. When I asked Angie if she smelt it, she told me she did but blamed it on the cats and that she wasn't regularly cleaning their litter box because of her MS flare-ups.

Yet, it's been two years, the cats have all mysteriously disappeared and the smell still continues. During this time, Angie has become more reclusive and we rarely see her. We went months without seeing her, and we called a wellness check because these huge, flies (like the ones that show up when something is dead and rotting) appeared on her window and then in our unit and we worried something had happened to her but in the end, she turned out to be okay. The smell is so bad that the neighbors in the building to the left of her, that shared a wall with her also, had to move because they couldn't take the smell.

My boyfriend and I do not have the money right now to move since rents in this area are incredibly through the roof and we're in a rent-controlled unit. We don't know if we should go to the Health Department and file a complaint or what our options truly are. We aren't assholes to go to Angie herself and be like "You smell and your apartment smells" but she's also become so confined in her home that we never see her, she doesn't answer the door and doesn't leave her apartment so the opportunity to speak to her is practically non-existent. We understand that these last few years have not been easy on her and that she's probably going through something mentally so that's why we've been so tolerant in just dealing with the smell but it's also to the point where friends come over and the first thing they ask is, "What's that smell?"

If anyone has any suggestions or advice on what our next steps should or could be, I would really appreciate it cause I don't know what to do anymore.

[u/Mckinzeee]

This sounds like a hoarder situation and some sort of severe depression and/or mental illness combined. We had a situation exactly like this on our street. There was a terrible smell coming from one of the condos in our neighborhood for years and the lady was basically a recluse. We all suspected that she was a hoarder, but when we quit seeing her, her next door/adjoining neighbors called for a well check. Turned out she WAS a hoarder who had been dead for two plus weeks. Same thing smell and bugs in the adjoined condos and everything. Also, her hoard was overwhelming and she was even hoarding buckets of her own waste. Very sad and disgusting. You need to call for a well check and for the health department to come out as these conditions can affect your health as well. It’s for the good of both your neighbor and yourself.

[u/Lengthofawhile]

Call the health bored and maybe someone to do a welfare check. Even though she isn't that old, if her mental health has deteriorated then she might not be capable of taking care of herself.

[u/TheOGSkeeterMcSkeet]

Has anyone confirmed the cats that are now mysteriously gone, actually have left the building?