Months of asking for hot water, ventilation and mould removal… and the payoff was a rent hike. Officially 'market forces'. Unofficially, I'd been branded 'high‑maintenance'.

The source of the dust is a monument to the past: a 50-foot mountain of towering black rock, called slag, left over from a copper smelter that operated on the outskirts of town until the smelter was ...