I'd be more concerned about buying a home near St Eds. Private school kids have more money and opportunity to get in trouble.

Plus all those out of town parents drive like jerks. My favorite is watching the cars with Ed's stickers going the speed limit on Chesterland when they have their kids in the car, and then blast 50 MPH leaving the city after dropping their kids off. You don't get this nearly as much with LHS since a large portion of the students still walk to school.

Well probably because it rarely comes up. Most landlords and tenants are like you, and ignore/are ignorant of that statute. Most of the time the money owed the tenant isn't enough for it to be worth suing your LL over. The specific circumstances of below don't happen very often:

- tenant leasing for long enough term for interest to compound enough to be worth the time to recover.

- tenant simultaneously taking care of unit properly the whole time

- a LL engaging in behaviors that make said long-term tenant angry enough to want to recover these funds.

So in our case, we used ours deposit interest as leverage over the LL to ensure he returned our full security deposit fairly without having to sue - he tried to keep the full security deposit to repaint an entire unit after 8 years of continuous tenancy with zero updates.

Well my lawyer used to practice at Legal Aid specializing in landlord/tenant law and has won cases with the argument I made.

That wasn't my lawyer's reading of the statute. She said that it was written at a time when some rents may have been less than $50, and therefore that clause should be read as your security deposit must be at least $50 to apply.

Talk to the city. That may be able to put some pressure on the LL.

Fun fact! by the way - nobody usually stays long enough for this to matter, but state law says LL is supposed to pay you back statutory interest (currently 5%) on your security deposit. If they haven't done that, they owe you that interest no matter what happens with your security deposit. So example if your deposit was $1,000 and you've been there 5 years, they currently owe you ~$275.

You may want to share this information with the rest of the units in the building.

It's ORC 5321.16 (A).

https://law.justia.com/codes/ohio/2011/title53/chapter5321/section5321-16/

Landlords in Lakewood are not allowed to make tenants charge for water/sewer in multi-tenant properties unless every unit has an individual water meter (this is almost never true). It is totally fine for them to make you pay for sewer/water in single family homes.

Less likely inside Lakewood since the track is straight and generally at grade. Now if a train hits a sufficiently large enough vehicle stopped on the tracks, there's a small chance it could derail, but real small. Most train derailments happen because of operator error, snow and ice, or bad track maintenance.