My question involves landlord-tenant law in the State of Texas:
My spouse and I are living in a large (expensive) apartment community in Austin. Since day one we have experienced noise issues with our upstairs neighbors. These tenants live a nocturnal lifestyle and habitually slam, stomp, bounce, and drop objects on our ceiling often while blasting bass heavy music. There is also a lot of foot traffic coming in and out of this unit. Let me reiterate that this dysfunctional chaos all takes place between 6pm to 6am.
We have contacted the property management company for several months about this issue without any alleviation in sight. I’ve submitted several informal (verbal) complaints and two formal (written) complaints to the manager, who doesn’t even have the common courtesy to speak with me in person. This leads us to the impression that we aren’t being taken us seriously. They offered us the option to transfer to another unit, but we would be required to pay a transfer fee and new deposit, which I find unreasonable considering the circumstances.
As of late, we have resorted to calling 311 for help. From what we’ve gathered, there is a male and female living there and the former is apparently the main perpetrator of the noise. We have also been informed that he isn’t even on the lease. We are now afraid that he will act out in retribution against us for exposing him. After expressing this concern to management, they treated me like I'm a paranoid lunatic.
We have 6 months left in the lease, but cannot continue to live under these people. Do we have the legal right to break the lease without paying a large sum? It just seems unfair to have to move and be charged thousands of dollars all because we are subjected to this harassment.

