Illegal apartment: To tell or not to tell?

Tweet

Hello fellow mylotters, I'm living in a two bedroom basement apartment with my boyrfiend. The bedrooms have normal windows, but the living room and kitchen have basement windows that don't open. We moved in last March and found out that our landlady is a heavy smoker. Since the gas heat is forced air, all the ciagarette smoke comes down into our apartment. It's rather frustrating, especially because we are so sensitive to the smell. My boyfriend thought it would be difficult to prove this to a health inspector so we've been dealing with it, with air freshners, and air purifiers. The landlady has no intention of doing anything about it (we did tell her). Recently though we were doing some research and it seems the apartment is in violation with zoning laws and minimum ceiling height requirements for fire safety codes. He thinks that we should bring this to the landlady's attention seeing as she can be heavily fined for renting this place, and have free rent until our lease is up and our security deposit returned. I personally, don't think the landlady will agree to this and if it's an illegal apartment we should report it anyway. The only problem with reporting the apartment is if we aren't correct it will create more bad vibes between us and the landlady. We also don't know how this will affect us with the town getting involved. What would you do? Report it or wait it out? Any advice, suggestions or personal experiences would be most helpful.