What should Jade do?

One day, a woman named Jade needed to relocate to a new city. As she signed the lease for her first apartment, everything seemed fine. The residents were friendly, it was in a beautiful area within a safe neighborhood, and the building appeared well-managed. She checked reviews of the building before moving in, and they were generally positive.

However, shortly after moving in, Jade encountered a hidden problem—the building was overrun with rats. This wasn't just a stray rat here and there; it was a total infestation. Jade couldn't keep anything in her pantry for more than a day before it was destroyed. They left droppings everywhere, literally turning everything to shit.

When Jade reported the situation to the building manager, they were neither surprised nor considered the rat infestation a problem. After relentless pleading, they finally agreed to send a pest control technician to lay traps, but the infestation was so severe that it hardly made a difference. The rat population soon increased. Jade went back and forth with the building manager for months trying to find a solution. Concerns were raised, paperwork exchanged, but eventually she realized that the problem would never be resolved.

Jade then looked for apartments on the opposite side of the city. She found something promising! It seemed clean, well-managed, and had good online reviews. She went on a tour, and from what she saw, there was no evidence of rodent infestations. So, eager to leave her current place, she signed the lease.

To her horror, upon moving in she discovered this apartment building was indeed infested with rats after all—as bad as her first place! She again tried working with management to resolve the issue, but they did not prioritize it here either. Talking to long-time tenants, she was shocked to learn many had the same attitude as management: living with rats was an unavoidable reality of life. While no one liked it, everyone seemed certain nothing could be done to fix the problem.

But Jade couldn't tolerate this. She fully understood that before modern times, many people did have to live with rats and didn't have much choice about it. However, she also knew society had made enormous progress since then, and re-normalizing disease-spreading rat infestations was absolutely a step in the wrong direction.

Despite all the frustration and headaches, Jade remained optimistic. Having only experienced two apartments in this city so far—a small sample size—she resisted making generalizations. While her intuition and emotions tempted her to conclude otherwise, Jade heeded her rational side and stayed optimistic, now tempered by the lessons she had learned. She decided to be more skeptical of the apartments she considered. She was no longer as green as her name implied.

So, when Jade began searching for her third apartment, she made sure to ask "does your building have a rodent problem?" She asked countless landlords across the city this question. Most tried to evade it. Some weakly denied having a rat problem, but Jade found out those were lies after talking to a tenant or two. Often, she simply wasn't called back. She noticed how differently landlords and building managers treated her when she was upfront and adamant about not wanting to live with rats. Those who would otherwise have been eager to have her sign a lease were now misleading her and ghosting her.

This continued for months. She spoke with people living in the city who seemed to live rat-infestation-free lives, but this too proved to be a false assumption. They admitted their buildings also had rats, and they had learned questionable and downright unhealthy ways of adapting to the situation. A few commended Jade for demanding better, but most said accepting rat infestations was more normal than she realized, and conforming to it was her only option in this backwards city. The people that had tolerated this the longest even started to look and act like rats themselves.

What would your advice be to Jade in this situation?

Would you tell her to stay strong and resilient?
Would you encourage her to accept this situation as-is, and that she can adapt to it by becoming more rat-like?
Would you tell her that her experience is not representative of the city overall, since she has only lived in a couple places?
Would you call her entitled for demanding better?

Or would acknowledge that the city needs to do something about its rat problem?