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Dear Reasonable People,

I live in a small 6-unit coop building in Carroll Gardens. Last winter we had some major issues with one resident repeatedly setting the common building thermostat to 78-80 degrees, so we replaced the thermostat with a Tekmar boiler control in the basement (which has the additional advantage of providing finer control over the building heat). Now, everyone in the building is much more comfortable, except for the same resident, who is throwing a fit that borders on psychotic.

She claims that it’s freezing cold in her apartment, when the rest of the building is 74 degrees or warmer. But she refuses to let anyone in to investigate the problem, and she refuses to put a thermometer on her wall to prove that it’s cold. At first, she acted out by leaving angry phone messages, yelling at us in the hallway, and stomping around in her bedroom (which is above my living room). But now we feel like she’s putting us in danger – she started leaving her oven on all day to add heat to the apartment.

I’ve been in her apartment before (when the situation wasn’t so hostile). It didn’t feel any different, temperature-wise, from the other units. She has working radiators and new well-insulated windows. And she now has two additional 1500W oil-filled electric space heaters (one of which I personally gave her). So her motivation must be a combination of her being naturally cold (possibly due to some medical condition?) and feeling like she has no control over the situation. But the fact is that her behavior was unreasonable before she started causing a fire hazard, and now we have a duty to ourselves to do something about the problem.

What do you Brownstoners think we should do? Do we have legal options? Should we talk to the city? Is there anything we can do without starting an all-out war between neighbors? Help!