Crazy Neighbor causing damage to ceiling

[Nataliya Isupova]

Hi BP community!

I have a question and needing your advice.

Here is a background: One of our rental condos is on the ground level, is in a great neighborhood and everything would be perfect except for a tenant above our condo. In a few words, he is a 50-something single man with what looks like a somewhat unstable mental condition (bipolar maybe? But I’m not a dr to diagnose). He seemed to be friendly for the first couple of times I met him. Soon after the purchase of the condo we started work restoring it. The upstairs neighbor wasn’t happy about the noise and one day he came to our unit swearing and threatening my contractors. Fast forward, our unit was restored and renovated, we rented it out to a great tenant who moved out after a year, complaining that the upstairs neighbor was creepy and had been extremely loud the whole time. My understanding is that the neighbor was retaliating for the noise he had to endure during our renovation, but it seemed that he calmed down for a while there.

Our current great tenant just complained that the upstairs tenant woke him up at 7am hammering on something for 1.5 hours on a Saturday to the point that the ceiling drywall nails started to pop through in our unit.

Question: do I absorb the costs of repairing ceiling drywall in our rental unit in hopes of keeping the peace for my tenant and not make the upstairs neighbor wanting to retaliate, OR do I contact the owner of the upstairs unit and ask them to cover our repair expenses, knowing that they will most likely talk to their tenant which would probably make him angry and make him want to be loud and disrupt my tenant’s peace.

To be clear, there are multiple signs suggesting that the neighbor is emotionally unstable, not just the fact that he got angry because of the noise my contractors made. His landlord/owner of upstairs unit is somewhat uninterested in our experience, claiming that the tenant has been good with them.