Mold in a New Orleans Rental: What Tenants and Landlords Should Know

Whoever controls the water, and that is the argument worth having in writing rather than an argument about mold. Start there, because the one thing Louisiana law is clear about will surprise most tenants: R.S. 37:2157(A)(17) exempts a landlord's own managing agent or employees from mold remediation licensure entirely, so if the work in your unit was handled in-house, no license requirement, no written report duty and no separation rule applied to it.

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Describe the damp, and leave the mold out of it

Mold is arguable. Water is not. A message saying there is mold in the bathroom invites a disagreement about how much and whose fault; a message saying the ceiling under the upstairs shower has been damp since the fourteenth, with a photograph and a date, is a record of a building fault. The EPA's own framing supports you here: the way to control indoor mold growth is to control moisture, and material dried within 24 to 48 hours will in most cases not grow mold. So the clock and the cause are both about water, and both are things a landlord can act on. Put it in writing, keep the dates, photograph the source rather than only the stain, and note when you reported it. Everything else in this guide is easier if that record exists.

Your landlord's own maintenance crew is exempt from the licensing rules

R.S. 37:2157(A)(17) exempts from mold remediation licensure a residential property owner performing the work on his own property, and an owner or tenant, or a managing agent or employee of an owner or tenant, performing it on property they own or lease. The exemption falls away only where that agent or employee engages in the business of performing mold remediation for the public. In plain terms, if the building's own staff dealt with it, the statute's duties never attached: no license was required, no written report was owed, and the rule keeping the assessment separate from the removal did not apply. This is not a reason to assume the work was poor. It is a reason to ask, in writing, what was found, what was removed and what was done about the source, because those are the things a contractor above the threshold would have been legally obliged to put on paper.

What changes the moment an outside contractor is brought in

If the landlord hires a firm and the job exceeds seven thousand five hundred dollars in labor and materials, that firm is a mold remediation contractor under R.S. 37:2150.1(11) and the duties switch on. It must provide a written report to each person it performs the services for, it may not render false, deceptive, misleading or unfounded opinions, it may not perform both the assessment and the remediation on the same property, and it may not own an interest in both entities. As a tenant you are usually not the person paying, so the report duty runs to the landlord rather than to you. Ask for a copy anyway. A landlord with nothing to hide has no reason to refuse, and the report is the document that tells you whether the source was found or only the surface was cleaned.

About half the households in Gretna, Terrytown and New Orleans rent

This is not a niche situation in this metro. Renter share of occupied homes runs from 20.2 percent in Belle Chasse and 22.5 percent in Laplace up to 48.8 percent in New Orleans, 50.8 percent in Terrytown and 51.2 percent in Gretna, with Harvey close behind at 47.3 percent. Gretna and Terrytown are also very different buildings: Gretna has 8,352 units with 16.5 percent built in 1939 or earlier, the highest pre-war share in Jefferson Parish, while Terrytown's 9,723 units went up almost entirely across three decades, 2,478 in the 1960s, 2,744 in the 1970s and 2,173 in the 1980s. In a single-generation subdivision like Terrytown, your neighbors' units were built to the same specification as yours, so if several report the same symptom, that is evidence about the assembly rather than coincidence and it is worth collecting.

On a shotgun double the water may be entering next door

New Orleans has 195,552 housing units and only 46.0 percent of them are single family detached. 28,986 sit in two unit buildings and 19,407 are single family attached, the doubles and row forms that share a party wall, and 31.4 percent of the whole stock dates from 1939 or earlier, against 6.1 percent statewide. If you rent half a double, the water behind your stain can be arriving on the other side of a wall you have no access to. That changes who has to act: not your landlord alone, and possibly not your side of the building at all. It is also the commonest reason a repair on one side gets done twice. Say it explicitly when you report the problem, because an assessor who is told the building is attached will look at the party wall and one who is not told will look at your bathroom.

Is it the house itself, or how the rooms are run

It is a fair question and it deserves a fair answer, because the honest answer in this climate is usually the building. The EPA's target is 30 to 60 percent indoor relative humidity, the CDC's ceiling is 50 percent, and reaching either means venting bathrooms and dryers outside and running exhaust fans. Those are things a tenant can do and should. But NOAA puts the mean dew point at 75.2F in July, at or above the temperature a cooled unit holds its walls at, and four finishes turn an exterior wall into a condensing plane here: vinyl wallpaper, oil-based interior paint, polyethylene sheet inside the studs, and faced batt insulation with the facing toward the room. None of those is a tenant's decision. If there is vinyl wallcovering on an exterior wall of your unit, the growth on the back of it is a building fault with a date of installation, and a hygrometer reading taken in August is the evidence that settles the argument.

Which authority holds the permit file for your address

It is worth knowing who the building answers to, and it is not always the name on your mail. Five of the sixteen places in this service area are Census designated places with no municipal government of their own, and Metairie, Harvey, Marrero, River Ridge, Terrytown, Chalmette, Arabi, Belle Chasse and Laplace all fall to their parish for permits, inspections and floodplain rules. New Orleans is the simplest case in the metro: the city and Orleans Parish are the same jurisdiction, with one permit office and one floodplain administrator for every address. The City states that building permits come from the Department of Safety and Permits, that a permit is needed to alter, repair or demolish part of a building, and that interior painting and papering is exempt. So a repainted wall leaves no trace, and a wall that was opened up should have a permit record behind it. If you are asking whether real work was done, that is where the paper is.

If you are the landlord reading this

The separation rule is a protection for you as much as for a tenant. Above $7,500 you cannot lawfully have one firm both assess and remediate, and you cannot use two firms you own an interest in, so the structure the law requires also happens to be the one that stops you paying for a scope written by the person who benefits from its size. Below the threshold nothing forces it and the same logic still applies. Check any firm on the board's public Contractor Search, which takes a name, license number, city, parish and qualifying party and returns only currently active licenses. And read a quote that lands just under the line carefully: R.S. 37:2158(B)(1) disregards any division of a contract made to avoid a licensing threshold and treats the parts as one, which tells you that pattern was anticipated. Get the written report either way and keep it, because it is the document that answers the next tenant's question.

Ask whether the building has flooded before

This is a normal and answerable question in this metro, and it changes what a damp wall probably means. The federal multiple loss property dataset records 24,518 properties across these six parishes: 9,168 in Jefferson, 7,625 in Orleans, 3,853 in St. Tammany, 2,539 in St. John the Baptist, 858 in St. Bernard and 475 in Plaquemines. Orleans Parish alone has 127,238 flood insurance claims on record since the program began. A building that has taken water repeatedly has usually had material replaced repeatedly, sometimes well and sometimes not, and knowing that before you sign a lease or price a repair is worth more than any inspection of the visible surface. The insurer already knows. Ask for it in writing.

What you do not need to hire anyone for

A lot of this. If the affected area is under about 10 square feet, roughly three feet by three feet, the EPA says a homeowner can in most cases handle it themselves, and the same practical logic applies in a rented unit once the landlord has agreed to it. You almost certainly do not need testing: the EPA states that where visible growth is present, sampling is in most cases unnecessary, and the CDC states that it does not recommend mold testing, so paying a laboratory to confirm what you can see is money that would be better spent finding the water. What is worth buying, when the argument has stalled or the area is large, is an independent moisture assessment with the readings and the extent written down, from a firm that is not the one selling the removal. That is what we arrange, and we keep the two in different hands at every price. Send us the details and we will start there.