True. They'd even have a fair pool of students to offer employment, assuming those students have pretty teeth.

Those are all great things you can do...if you own a home AND have the income or credit to fund them, especially given how expensive they currently are. None of those suggestions solve OP's problems either, as they're in a rented space, and there's little to no incentive for a landlord to modernize when they have artificially inflated market price profits to offset utility costs when they don't have tenants.

Budget plans are an answer here. Sure, it may feel annoying to pay a little more in the summer months, but this is the time of year that it really pays to be on a budget plan.