A Battle Fought!

We've mentioned several times so far this month how we had a letter taped to our door on 05 January demanding that we remove our camera from the stairwell...

But, given that this is purely in response to our inquiry back in mid-December about Ruth's camera being pointed directly at our door—and factoring in the equally-twatwafflish-and-fact-free letter this "Gwen" lady had left on everyone's door back on Christmas Eve—I decided I'm not much for her style of baseless intimidation.

So, I decided to spar with her instead of surrendering... and I walked the following letter over to the leasing office and personally handed it to her at 8:30 A.M. on 09 January.

Enjoy!

Our First Response

To Gwen Nelson:

We're writing in response to the letter taped to our door on 05 January 2026, regarding the security camera we have in the stairwell.

As a reminder, we were the ones who brought your attention to our neighbor Ms. Barnyou's camera on 19 December 2025—after she moved hers from its spot on the floor and mounted it on her door to point directly into our apartment at eye level, introducing a violation of our privacy.

In response to our solicitation of your assistance with this matter—namely, our simple inquiry as to the specifics of Americana's (nonexistent?) policy regarding security-camera use in common spaces—your sole and exclusive reply has been to tape a letter to our door which you've asserted that we should take as a “warning,” and which you elected to conclude with the verbiage, “If this continues, you will receive a Cease Notice which will lead to termination of your lease.”

Now, far be it from us to be in the habit of openly defying requests—much less warnings—from the landlord; but we feel it warrants noting that, despite extensive research, we have found nothing in the terms of our lease—nor in Morrisville or Pennsylvania law—of which our camera is in violation.

And yet, we also cannot help but to regard your curiously aggressive approach here as quite a serious and egregious affront—especially considering your plain admission over the phone on 19 December that even you were not certain of any policy, and that you would have to check and get back to us.

You can rest assured that we are now treating this as a VERY serious matter indeed—and we feel it is of the utmost importance that we find a resolution that discourages both continued escalation of this aggression and further complication of what we believe was a very simple and straightforward initial matter. (Hence, this is now a formal letter instead of the friendly phone call it could have been.)

Though you have unfortunately chosen not to share with us whatever logic you employed to get from the point where we asked you a simple question, to the point where you are now openly threatening to arbitrarily terminate our lease, we are more than happy to outline the reality that underpins our position regarding our sensible and respectful use of a security camera in the stairwell outside our door:

• Our initial issue was not with the mere fact that Ms. Barnyou uses a security camera: She has had her camera connected since June of 2024, and we lodged our first and only complaint about it just recently when she opted to point it directly inside our apartment. We could not care less about Ms. Barnyou's camera—provided that it points away from our door, as ours does hers.
• We connected our camera just this past February; and, in the nearly-entire year since, nobody has raised issue with it—at least not that was ever brought to our attention—despite numerous instances when maintenance or other Americana staff surely had opportunity to do so. Yet, you now claim in your letter that you have “received complaints”—plural—about our camera. (?)
• We were unable to locate anything in the terms of our lease agreement with Americana—nor in the greater law itself—of which sensible use of a camera for personal security is in violation.
• It is our understanding that the stairwell—much like the parking lot—is expressly considered a “common area,” where the expectation of privacy is substantially lower than that which one expects within the walls of an actual apartment. It is precisely for this reason that we were mindful in ensuring that our camera does not point inside Ms. Barnyou's apartment—but rather at our own doorstep and at the stairs, such that we can see when packages arrive, when someone is at our door, et cetera.
• Furthermore, our daughter attends a virtual charter school and is routinely home alone both during the day and occasionally in the evening. And, although she is perfectly old enough to be alone at 16, she is still a minor and it is important to us that we have the peace of mind that comes with being able to monitor whether somebody who doesn't belong here should ever somehow find his or her way inside!
• On a similar note, as Americana may or may not be aware, our neighbor Ms. Barnyou has... a bit of a checkered past herself: Most recently (at least as far as we know) she assaulted her ex-boyfriend on 20 August, 2024—to the point that it sounded like he was being body-slammed, and he repeatedly shouted for someone to call 911. Police arrived to find the man disheveled and with his clothing torn—even down to his underwear!—and it was only by his declination to press charges that Ms. Barnyou escaped being charged with assault and taken to jail. So, we're confident that you can understand why we like being able to monitor our doorstep, as long as we share a common space with an individual of this caliber.

Nevertheless, threats like “cease notices” and “termination of your lease” are EXTREMELY explicit; and so, with all of the above being said, we would ask that you simply be so kind as to provide us your definitive clarification of the specific clause we're allegedly violating in the lease agreement we've signed—at which point we will remove our camera promptly and without further argument.

In all honesty, however, please know that we find the undue sternness of your initial letter—and the perplexingly aggressive nature of the threats therein—more than a bit off-putting and extraordinarily concerning, especially considering that these threats serve to constitute your sole and exclusive response to a matter that we initiated (!?) and factoring in Athennia's 16-year history with [redacted] Apartments!

We could better appreciate the severity of such a letter, had we been a nuisance of some sort—such as by feuding with Ms. Barnyou directly, retaliating by pointing our camera at her door, voicing repeated complaints to [redacted] Apartments over a more trivial issue, et cetera. Yet this is definitively not the case, as we merely inquired about the specifics of camera usage in the stairwells—since we could find absolutely nothing in our lease one way or the other.

We genuinely expected that you would merely reach out to Ms. Barnyou and request that she simply point her camera elsewhere besides directly into our apartment—which, incidentally, she has now done—and that that would have been the end of it.

Instead, your categorical response to our solicitation of your assistance in what was a clear violation of our privacy was literally to arbitrarily threaten termination of our lease over a nebulous policy of which even you were unsure mere days prior—and which you are STILL yet to share with us at all!

Thus, in light of the gravity of this threat, we respectfully request that any further correspondence on this matter occur in writing. Moreover, should you happen to find, as we did, that you cannot identify any specific clause being violated, we request a written concession acknowledging the veracity of our current understanding that having a camera in the stairwell (positioned, of course, to respect the privacy of all parties) is in fact not in violation of anything at all—whether in our lease or out of it.

We look forward to your response. Many thanks and best regards,

    ~ Kevin and Athennia

Gwen's Second Response

It took her 10 entire days to furnish this response to my response...

Remarkably, the overt threats are no longer anywhere to be found!

Yet, we're still not really at a point where I feel like we're having a "good-faith" argument over the nature of the rules that do and do not exist.

She cites bogus rules here; and—though I'm sure she has no awareness personally—I know of plenty of other apartments who keep personal belongings in their stairwells and skate by without consequence.

So...

Yeah, I think I'm gonna have to pound the message home a second time.

Bear in mind, this is still a work in progress for now—and I'm sure Kitten will make me soften parts of it to a considerable extent—but, at any rate, I do NOT take kindly to bullying (of which I consider selective enforcement of quasi-arbitrary rules to be a common form).

Our Second Response [working draft]

To Gwen Nelson:

Thank you for the follow-up response to our security-camera inquiry. Since you have this time deigned to cite an actual rule from the lease agreement, we have at your insistence removed our security camera from the stairwell as we promised we would do in our previous letter.

However, we must once again request your assistance in helping us to understand why our neighbor Ms. Barnyou has inexplicably been permitted to retain her camera; and furthermore, despite our reporting in our previous letter that she had at least pointed said camera away from our door, we would like to report that she has once again moved it to face directly into our apartment.

As you have consistently avoided rendering any assistance with this matter to focus instead on crusading against our security camera over the five weeks that have passed since we first brought this issue to your attention, we now ask you for a FOURTH time to please see that Ms. Barnyou's violation of our personal privacy comes to an immediate and permanent end.

We cannot overstate how thoroughly disappointed we have been by every step of your chosen strategy for [not] handling this matter. To recap, here is the chain of events that have transpired thus far:

19 December, 2025
We brought it to your attention that Ms. Barnyou had decided to move her camera from its long-standing position on the floor outside her door, to instead mount it on the door such that it pointed directly into our apartment.

Expressing our concerns over this very real (and almost certainly non-accidental) violation of our privacy, we inquired about the specifics regarding any existing policy for security cameras in common areas. You admitted that you did not know of any such policy and claimed that you would check with higher management and get back to us.

We waited an entire week, during which no response whatsoever was forthcoming; and so Athennia inquired by phone a second time as to what, if anything, could perhaps be done compel Ms. Barnyou not to remove her camera outright, but rather to kindly point it elsewhere besides directly at our door and into our apartment.

05 January, 2026
18 days later, you finally tendered a response in the form of a letter left taped to our door. Yet, rather than addressing the issue with which we had solicited assistance—Ms. Barnyou's violation of our privacy—your letter did nothing but threaten punitive action against us!

To quote specifically, you said, “Please take this letter as a reminder and a warning. We have received complaints about a security camera installed outside your apartment door. To maintain the privacy of other tenants living inside your building and their guest(s), we ask that you remove the cameras no later than January 9, 2026. […] If this continues you will receive a Cease Notice which will lead to termination of your lease” [emphasis yours].

There was ZERO mention whatsoever of ANY steps that you or [redacted] Apartments had done to preserve our privacy: There was ONLY an assertion that we were violating others' privacy—and that we could expect punitive action right up to full-fledged eviction—all stemming from an elusive policy of which we were still yet to be informed (and, last we'd heard, of which even you were unsure).

Wow.

09 January, 2026
Upon scouring our lease, we could find nothing definitively discussing the allowance, forbiddance, or guidelines for accepted usage of personal security cameras in any capacity. Furthermore, after reading extensively into modern case law as it relates to such matters, we quickly identified a widely-accepted and well-precedented opinion that the expectation of privacy is indeed lower in common areas such as stairwells (given the inherent “shared space” nature of such areas), and that sensible usage of personal security cameras in such spaces has been well-found to be legally admissible—especially in the absence of anything clearly expressed to the contrary within the verbiage of our lease agreement.

Thus, having weighed these findings against your initial letter's virtually fact-free assertions, we decided to challenge those assertions via a letter of response, in which we pointed out several well-reasoned nuances of our specific situation—specifically, that:

• We have a teenaged daughter who is a minor but sometimes stays home alone.
• Ms. Barnyou has had at least one violent criminal incident of which we are aware (rather intensely assaulting an ex-boyfriend in August of 2024).
• We had taken strides to place our camera in the most sensible way possible, so as not to violate Ms. Barnyou's privacy in her actual apartment, the way that she was (and still is) violating ours.

Though we felt—and continue to feel—that our arguments are completely sensible, it was quite strange nonetheless to feel like we were suddenly on trial for our neighbor's violation of our privacy! As such, we tried to walk the fine line between being firm while also being polite: We abstained from making any threats of contemplation of legal action, and we did our best to simply state the facts—expressly pointing out along the way that we had no interest in attempting to deny Ms. Barnyou the use of her camera, but, again, that she simply be compelled to kindly point it away from our door!

19 January, 2026
You delivered a second letter, responding to our response. In this one, you've declined to acknowledge in any capacity the potential seriousness of our living adjacent to and sharing a common area with an individual with a known history of violence.

Your letter insinuates that Ms. Barnyou has been similarly instructed to remove her camera as well—though we see no evidence of that, given that hers still remains active in the stairwell at the time of this writing, and she has again pointed it at our door. And, since she has configured it to automatically begin recording upon detection of motion, this means that she is recording us INSIDE OUR APARTMENT every time we come and go!

We advised you that this was happening on 19 December: [redacted] Apartments has had knowledge and understanding that this has been happening for nearly SIX WEEKS NOW, and you have done absolutely nothing but issue threats of punitive action and termination of our lease.

You now cite three specific rules from the lease agreement—two of which are completely irrelevant:

• Section 13-D concerns the attachment of satellite dishes or antennae.
• Section 11-M forbids the hanging of personal belongings from windows or doors.

We have a security camera... placed on the floor... and so, we're unclear on how these rules apply. (Moreover, given that we've now had two letters of response literally taped to the door of our apartment, we know with certainty that a member of American staff has now twice been in close enough proximity to have laid eyes on said camera—and so we're similarly unclear on how you could possibly think either of these rules applies either.)

At any rate, this leaves just one of your three cited rules having a modicum of relevance: Section 12-C, which—conveniently for your purposes—makes the blanket statement, “Do not leave your belongings in common halls, entrances, or anywhere outside of the apartment.” Thus, you have indeed managed to exploit a technicality, and we have concordantly (albeit begrudgingly) removed our security camera from the stairwell—though not without trepidation in considering the potential for some unfortunate circumstance to befall us or our daughter, given Ms. Barnyou's apparent proclivity for violence (and the mental instability that such a proclivity would seem to indicate).

This brings us to a new inquiry though: If Section 12-C is such a consequential matter—as your almost gleeful enforcement of it would seem to indicate—why it has for so long gone unenforced? As we've already noted, Ms. Barnyou's camera still remains present and active, even while we are being forced to discontinue the use of ours.

We also can't help but notice that our neighbors in apartment 26 have an enormous shelving rack just outside the door in their stairwell (which we can clearly see through our kitchen window). We can see exactly two other apartments' stairwells from inside the walls of our own apartment, and both of them have active and long-standing violations of Section 12-C—which [redacted] Apartments staff have been happy to overlook for months in one case, and years in the other.

Why is it, we wonder, that these offenses do not matter, but ours does?

Why is it that our camera—sensibly positioned to allow us to monitor the goings-on outside our door, without violating Ms. Barnyou's expectation privacy within the walls of her apartment—is inexplicably such a fierce issue, while her camera's intentioned position to violate our privacy, goes unanswered?

Why is it that our trivial little object scarcely the size of a baseball and positioned within the recess of our door frame must be removed immediately, while a full-sized shelving unit that poses a potential tripping hazard goes unanswered?

Considering the reality in which these “offenses” have clearly long been considered by management to be nothing worth objecting over, we were under the impression that—while the letter of Section 12-C may make a blanket statement banning all personal belongings in common areas—the tacit “good faith” reading would have suggested that the spirit of such a rule is fundamentally meant to discourage tenant behavior that could potentially negatively affect other tenants: That is, objects presenting a physical hindrance or a trip/fire hazard (e.g. a shelving unit); objects which others might find offensive (e.g. political signage or pornographic imagery); and finally, objects meant to menace or intimidate others (e.g. a camera deliberately pointing into a neighboring apartment).

Those were the sorts of “personal belongings” that came to our minds when reading over Section 12-C in our lease agreement. Incidentally, this is why you'll find no shelving unit outside our door as you will at apartment 26—nor will you find religious stickers plastered all over our door as you will on Ms. Barnyou's. All you'll find is a tiny welcome mat and—until now—a security camera scarcely bigger than a ping-pong ball... sensibly placed within the recess of our door frame where nobody could ever have possibly tripped on it, and reasonably pointed at the stairs so as not to violate Ms. Barnyou's privacy.

But Ms. Barnyou has had her camera in the stairwell since June of 2024—much of that time with the attendant wire crossing over the threshold of her doorway where she could have tripped on it... and nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has ever said a word.

The tenants in apartment 26 have had their shelving unit outside their door ever since their arrival in the last week of September last year... but nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has said a word.

Ms. Barnyou's door has been covered in religious stickers for well over a decade... yet nobody from [redacted] Apartments staff has ever said a word.

Where has Section 12-C been all this time? Why, pray tell, is it suddenly relevant only now? And, again, these are merely the two other tenants' doorways we can see without even venturing outside the walls of our apartment! We have not even begun to enumerate the other Section 12-C “violations” of which we're aware, having discussed this matter with neighbors in other buildings.

Yet, for reasons we cannot begin to identify, when we inquire about Ms. Barnyou's violation of our privacy... your sole course of “resolving” the issue is first threaten us with punitive action, and then to fight tooth and nail in a desperate attempt to produce anything you can lob at us—even going so far as to cite a rule regarding the mounting of satellite dishes—in the hopes that something sticks.

It's rather confounding—astonishingly so, actually—and, to be perfectly frank, it's all but impossible not to assess the sum of your responses to our inquiry as some sort of targeted discrimination at this point: How else are we to interpret your decision to wield Section 12-C against us with such merciless literality, while you turn a blind eye to countless others?

If the rules do indeed matter, it seems readily apparent that they should to apply to everybody. Yet, we see no evidence that this is even remotely the case. But, this goes well beyond the mere unpleasant taste inevitably left in one's mouth upon perceiving the preferential treatment that selective enforcement of the rules necessarily cultivates:

Through your blatant selective enforcement of Section 12-C, you are now knowingly preventing us—for no real reason whatsoever, as far as we can tell—from enjoying the security and the peace of mind that was provided by our ability to monitor the goings-on outside our door without having to open it. Furthermore, you are knowingly exposing us and our underaged daughter to the potential danger of living next door to a neighbor with a known assault on her record, by allowing her camera to remain!

Rest assured, we are now looking into taking legal action pursuant to a resolution to the discrimination that we believe we have faced and continue to face through your response to this issue—which, again, we initially raised with you, and which you continue to allow to go unresolved! We demand either that you grant us the ability to once again enjoy the security that our camera provided us (for nearly a year now without any issues whatsoever), or that you immediately enforce Section 12-C for all [redacted] Apartments residents with the same merciless literality you've employed in our case.

Furthermore, should the unfortunate reality arise in which we or our daughter are subject to harm or menacing (at Ms. Barnyou's commission specifically, but also anyone else's) which our camera's presence might have served to document, thwart, or otherwise prevent, we absolutely WILL consider both you and [redacted] Apartments personally complicit as a result of the poor judgment being exercised here.

    ~ Kevin and Athennia

Update: 28 January

As I reported elsewhere, our neighbor Ruth has now removed her camera from the stairwell entirely.

Since this considerably weakens the position I had intended to take in my second response (and, let's be honest, none of us is even remotely afraid of Ruth), I have decided to refrain from delivering this second letter, and I will let the matter go for the time being.

As annoyed as I still am about two of the three rules she cited being complete horseshit, I have to assume it's more likely than not that she simply did so at the behest of her superiors.

All things considered, I'll miss the luxury of our stairwell cam, but I'm happy that I at least got to smack Gwen with an intellectual "shut the fuck up" via my first letter.

Who knows? Maybe she even learned something about how to address tenants with more tact.