My landlord is difficult and unpleasant to deal with and she doesn’t want to renew the lease. I am planning to leave Taiwan anyway, but 6 months after the lease ends. Moving during my last months here would make it impossible to finish writing my dissertation since I also work full time. I need advice on what might happen if I just keep paying rent even though the lease expires.
Does she have right to enter my apartment without my consent?
What happens if I changed the lock?
Given her personality, she may well escalate, so I need to know what to expect.
The mediation bureau in Xindian seems unlikely to side with a foreigner against a landlord. They told me that I would need to go to the mediation bureau in her jurisdiction, where SHE lives, not the one for my neighborhood. Is that right? She lives so far away you need a car to get there, and I don’t have one.
Background:
When I first moved in here, I had just been forced out of a previous apartment by neighbors at Shida Rd. who didn’t like me having rotating roommates, one of whom was a black man. New neighbors seemed to imagine I sleep with all my roommates–maybe that was just a convenient excuse. I left that location six months after moving in, because neighbors wanted to specify who I could and could not share my apartment with, and the landlord would not oppose them for my sake.
In my current place, the same thing started happening again. (I suppose I emanated trauma, which invited further bullying.) Again, one of my new neighbors complained to the landlord and told me she didn’t want a westerner in the building because it would be a bad moral example for her children.
The point is, my current landlord is hard to deal with. She harassed me for the first year I lived here and made explicitly racist demands about who I could and could not live with. I made friends with the neighbors who stopped complaining. I also enlisted many people to deal with the landlord. The point is that this landlord can be very hostile. I have watched her also bully my neighbor, who is her tenant. She has also alienated other homeowners in the building.
I don’t want to spend a lot of energy researching and preparing arguments, dealing with harassment, etc. I just want to stay until the end of August–six months past the end of the current lease.
What are my options and what are the likely issues to arise?
Thanks for your advice.