Trapped with a nightmare roommate

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Also, Sweet Pea hugs

Is your lease month-to-month? I would make sure everything is kosher with your landlord before moving out, since his inability to pay the rent or keep the home clean could lead to problems with your credit score and landlord references if your name is still on the lease while he's the only one living there.

It sounds like you've been good friends for a while and he helps you with some areas where you struggle. If you decide to stick around for a little while longer as he works on this, you may want to see what professional help is available in your local area.

Hoarding is a big problem social services agencies, like home health agencies and low income housing providers, run into. So, some cities have programs dedicated to helping with it. In Philadelphia, they have an interdisciplinary Hoarding Task Force and some of my clients from work have gotten a lot of help from it. This can be a hard thing for some people to tackle on their own.

Your local aging services office might be a good place to start, since hoarding seems to be more prevalent with the elderly (it's especially linked with grief and the loss of loved ones ... you mentioned your friend has lost most of his family?), they might know of resources.

Whether you go or stay, good luck!

Thanks for the helpful replies, everyone. I’ve told him that I’m casually looking for a new apartment, and he’s not angry about it anymore. He understands the issue and says he’s been working on cleaning his room. I’m not sure if that’s true, but when I asked him about how it got this way, he said it was because of depression, but he said because he’s not really depressed anymore, he won’t let it get this bad again. If he really does clean it and it stays that way, I can probably continue living with him, because he’s a good guy; he just has some annoying habits.

If I were in your shoes I would do one final thing before leaving. I'd tell him that his "cleaning," jobs is entirely inadequate and unacceptable and offer my help to clean it up to a reasonable level with him so that it gets done and he learns what's acceptable. If he receives the message well, I'd put in that day's effort to throw things out and clean things up. If he gets offended or defensive or says anything to the effect that he cleaned up and this is fine, I'd reiterate that it is not clean and isn't fine, and he has one last opportunity to make it right with my help, or 100% my mind is made up I'm leaving because I cannot and will not live like this.

If he truly wants to salvage your friendship and roommate status, he'll accept that he is incapable of doing this on his own to a level that's acceptable for you or ANY roommate and you'll have a bit of a roommate team building day getting rid of his hoarded mess. And if he's a jerk at all, well, too bad, you went above and beyond in your efforts to help him and make things work and he refused to help himself or allow you to help him so there's nothing more you can do about that and his rent/income problems are not yours to solve. (Although $720 for a 2 bedroom apartment is crazy cheap.. they're 3-5x that here depending on the neighbourhood and building etc. A bit strange that someone with 2 part time jobs can't manage to pay $720/mo IMO unless he only works 1-2 days a week due to his obvious clinical depression - which he should also address in order to improve himself, his life, his well being, his earnings capacity and productivity etc.)

But yeah, even though you've given him a chance and ultimatum which he failed hard on, I'd maybe make One Last offer of help on the condition that he accept it and then once he realizes what the minimum standard is that he makes an effort to maintain it. Fail on any of that and I'd be out the door as soon as I found a place and then his problems are his problems.. which he would have to solve in a similar manner; cleaning up and then finding a roommate asap. So, really, it's in his best interest to just do the work NOW without all the extra stress and uncertainty of changing roommates.

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