My downstairs neighbor smokes and it comes up through the bathroom vent all day, and since I work from home I am sitting in it from nine to six. I have mentioned it once in passing to the manager.
What actually gets this fixed?
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Same building type, same problem, I taped a furnace filter over the bathroom vent and it cut maybe seventy percent of it. Not a fix, but it made my apartment livable while I waited on management.
I will say this from the owner side, because I do rent places out: a manager cannot do anything with a passing comment in the hallway. Put it in writing, email is fine, and describe it the way you just did here, which hours, which vent, how long it has been going on. That creates a paper trail and it also creates an obligation, because most leases have a nuisance clause that covers exactly this.
Ask them specifically to seal the vent penetration and the gap under the neighbor's door. That is a maintenance item, not a favor, and keep a copy of every reply you get.
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I looked into this a while back when we had a smoker right below us. In the city of LA smoking is already banned in the common areas of multi unit buildings, so the hallway and the laundry room are covered, but inside a unit it comes down to what your lease says. Check your own lease for a smoking clause first, because if the building is nonsmoking on paper then your manager has a rule to enforce instead of just a preference to weigh.
Let me be honest, the management route takes months. Get foil tape, seal the vent from your side, add a door sweep. Under thirty bucks at Target and the smell was gone that night.
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We went through this in my building two years ago and the thing that actually moved it was the other tenants. One person complaining is a personality conflict to a manager. Three units putting the same thing in writing in the same week is a liability. I knocked on doors, found two neighbors who were also getting it, and we sent separate emails on the same day. The vent got sealed within a month.
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If writing to the manager stalls, the next step is the LA Housing Department. You call 866-557-7368 and open a complaint, and habitability complaints get an inspector out.
Smoke migration usually gets written up as the gap it travels through, an unsealed vent or a bad door seal, so the inspector is looking for the physical defect, not the neighbor. That is also the version a landlord has to fix on a deadline.
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