Worst Rental Experience EVER

Back in May of 2020 me and my fiancé moved into a basement apartment, it was modern, all inclusive, cheap, well lit, students only, and had washer and dryer on site, it seemed perfect. Upon move in we were shocked and disturbed to meet what would be our upstairs neighbours; a group of trailer trash, loud, motorcycle gang, women with 2 motorcycles, and 4 trucks. Not only did we have nowhere to park; but they had SIX loud dogs! I thought there was some sort of mistake, this was student rentals, and I had severe dog allergies! I contacted the rental company immediately and found out these people were illegal squatters which the real tenant was charging double the rent to live in the upper unit. Unfortunately due to the circumstances with COVID it took them months and months to get evicted, the rental company refused to let me break the lease, and there was no way I could possibly sublet with those people upstairs. In the mean time we had a lot of fights with these people and we even had to call the police on them because of a domestic fight they had upstairs! They stole stuff from us, broke our stuff, stole our mail, threatened to beat us up, and even threatened to cut our break lines if we called the police on them again. We were exhausted, they partied until 3am then woke up at 7am for work, we had the worst sleep schedule and they disturbed whenever they could by waking us up by knocking on our windows in the middle of naps. On top of all that their dogs vacated inside their apartment all over the floor, and had the worst flea infestation ever. This infestation eventually moved downstairs to our apartment, and we were getting bit. We spent 500$ on flea treatment and even had to seal our vents to get it to stop because our two cats were basically dying from the infestation, even with the most expensive treatments. When they moved out it took them four weeks to get the smell out, and two weeks to clean their hoarder garbage. We never got reimbursed for the flea treatment, and we ended up having our rent doubled despite all the suffering we went through because the rental company never told the landlord we were a queer when we signed the lease and he decided it “wasn’t fair” that he had to pay for the utilities of two people of the same gender sharing a room. In the end we ended up subletting and moving into a townhouse with a friend once they moved out due to not being able to afford the rent any longer. Moral of the story, never rent a basement unit unless you know the upstairs neighbours personally because you never know who you will get!