Ah well okay, in all fairness that’s a bit worse than I assumed. But it still sounds like old wiring imo, from the days of far fewer appliances. Ideally, they would’ve replaced that by now, but as you can probably tell, those guys buy fixer-uppers and then never fix jack shit.

My good friend lives in one of their houses. Their furnace was locked out. The oil company wouldn’t send a contractor without authorization from the landlord, and they couldn’t get the landlord to authorize it. For fucking heat. My buddy would’ve even paid for it. Still got ghosted. Thankfully, between me and his dad, we ultimately got it working, but that just goes to show what you’ve already figured out— they’re negligent slumlords. And that’s hardly the headline when it comes to the scumbag who leads them.

Best of luck with all this. Hopefully withholding rent helps out. I doubt you’ll get anywhere when it comes to getting a basic standard of wiring, but the rest of this stuff sounds plausible.