What happens if I never gave my landlord a forwarding address?

A landlord might act like skipping this step lets him off the hook entirely. That's not how the statute reads. His duty to send the itemized statement doesn't disappear, it just falls back to your last known address, which in most cases is simply the unit you moved out of.

Where this actually hurts you is practical, not legal. If mail genuinely never reaches you because nobody's collecting it at the old address anymore, you lose the benefit of receiving what he sent, even if he technically complied. The fix is simple: put a forwarding address in writing, ideally inside your demand letter, and that argument disappears entirely.