10 ms·

> Someone can move in and refuse to pay rent, refuse to leave, use your house as a drug den, destroy your property and lots more, and you can do nothing about i

> Someone can move in and refuse to pay rent, refuse to leave, use your house as a drug den, destroy your property and lots more, and you can do nothing about it. This is one of those things that really just confuses me. It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". And to whoever downvoted you, there are some places in the bay that are demanding 6 months rent up front in order to move in because they can't do much if you stop paying rent.

TimPC 5y ago
These laws are hard to get actually correct. The major problem is court delays. There is a very high bar for kicking someone out before they get their day in court about whether it is fair to do so. This seems eminently reasonable but there is also a severe shortage of judicial services that result in court dates over a year out to resolve such issues. In that year of time, it's quite possible for a tenant with maybe $5K to their name to accumulate $500K in damages and debts. For many such tenants it is a cost they could never repay in their lifetimes which means even if the landlord gets the desired verdict they'll never see the capital they wanted. I agree there are places in the world that are so biased against landlords that they don't even try to get this problem correct but I think for many cases the problem isn't bad laws but rather the delays to being able to execute reasonable actions to limit damages. I'm not sure what a good solution is for many cases because I think it would take fairly extreme evidence to kick someone out without their day in court if they decided to fight it. I do agree with landlords it should be easier to kick someone out if they stop paying rent and that fact is adequately documented. I mean stop paying rent in the sense of an appropriate pattern not a single late payment.
- bombcar 5y ago
  From what I've heard is a common thing for landlords to do is a "pay to vacate" where they show up at the door with $1k in cash if the tenant will just leave.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    > show up at the door with $1k in cash In SF, there have been six-figure buyouts to remove tenants from rent-controlled properties.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      Sure, because those tenants signed contracts with perpetual leases (as also understood by the landlords who provided the contracts). Evicting in SF means you can't turn your property into a Condo (only a TIC) - so to maintain the value of the condo conversion option, landlords pay tenants to leave. The buyouts are proportional to the rent difference so it's not surprising that someone who's rent is increasing from say $1k/month to $4k/month would need a large sum of money (that's taxable!) to be convinced to leave. Call the buyout $100k -- best case scenario, it's taxed as capital gains so you'd take home $85k. At $3k/month increase in rent, you'd be looking at a little over two years before you're below water. Housing in California is broken in 1,000 different ways but the tenant buyouts seem to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
  - nunez 5y ago
    if you go onto /r/landlord, you'll learn that "cash for keys" is (a) usually way more than $1k, and (b) not a fool-proof way of kicking someone out (since the squatter still need a place to live, and they know that the cash won't cover it). this was/is a huge HUGE issue with the COVID real estate moratoriums that popped up.
  - yardie 5y ago
    My ex got about $40k cash to vacate her rent-controlled studio. Because turning off the heat during winter, greasy trashbins in the hallway, and holes in the staircase weren't doing it. The building was mostly elderly NYers and she was one of the few millennials so waiting for her to die wasn't going to work either.
- dataflow 5y ago
  How does one accumulate $500K in damages and debt in 1 year? That's like $41k/month.
  - Zircom 5y ago
    Some people don't take kindly to being kicked out, even if they're in the wrong, and there's not a lot you can do to stop them from causing hundreds of thousands in damages while you go through the process of evicting them.
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
      The first house I lived at in California was part 2 of that - previous owners destroyed the place during a foreclosure, so we got what was previously an $800k house for $400k in a short sale by a bank. Took ~$50k to fix up because we were willing to do the work ourselves over about a year. It was disgusting. Glass and other obstructions flushed down the pipes, literal feces on the walls, holes everywhere, missing parts of the ceiling, fixtures ripped out, etc. Move-in process was essentially move all our stuff to a storage area, continue renting until we'd made the place no longer a biohazard, then we moved in slowly as we fixed up rooms. But hey, a few hours of work a day for a year essentially saved a year of a FAANG salary on the place.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        Damn. Props to you but i would rather be 400k poorer instead of doing that.
    - beezle 5y ago
      Was told by local sherrif who handled judgment related asset seizures as well as foreclosure sales that in our state the original owner can do as they wish, even after a court ordered foreclosure sale, until they day they are required/made to vacate. He had seen all kinds of wanton destruction by the outgoing former owners simply out of spite with repair bills likely in the 10s of thousands, if not more.
- bruce511 5y ago
  A side effect of tenent friendly laws is that owners get more and more picky about who they rent to in the first place. It's cheaper to have a place empty for a few months than to take a risk on a potentially bad tenant. Ultimately this is creating a class of people who can't rent. Their track record is poor - or if not them specifically they are in a group with a poor track record. Not surprisingly this mostly affects the poorest and most vulnerable - those with the least job security - those with health/work issues and so on. This overlaps with the group least likely to actually be able to purchase a home to begin with. This issue will not be solved with free-market economics. Either one accepts the need for some layer of free social housing, or one accepts that a decent chunk of society will be homeless.
wwweston 5y ago
> they can't do much if you stop paying rent. I'm aware of specific stories where bad-faith tenants have made enforcement difficult, but I'm also aware of enough specific stories from the other side where tenants -- even some who have committed no violations -- have found themselves without housing to know that as a total generalization, these statements are false. And you don't get to a resident-sourced homelessness crisis if landlords are truly powerless (and sure, coastal homelessness numbers are driven by bus-ticket policies elsewhere, but it's not the whole story). AFAICT there is in fact a medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". Whether or not it's a happy one probably depends more on court outcomes than any apparent shortcomings in statutes, but if anyone has specific complaints about the law, perhaps they should point them out.
- anchpop 5y ago
  > I'm aware of specific stories where bad-faith tenants have made enforcement difficult, but I'm also aware of enough specific stories from the other side where tenants -- even some who have committed no violations -- have found themselves without housing to know that as a total generalization, these statements are false. I'm aware of hundreds of stories about homicidal cardiologists, but I wouldn't try to make a judgement about cardiologists based on that because I have no reason to think the stories I'm exposed are a representative sample of cardiologists. In your case, tenants who have committed no violations finding themselves evicted make a much more sympathetic story than landlords who want to evict an annoying tenant, so I'd expect the former to be very overrepresented in what you hear.
  - wwweston 5y ago
    Sure. As the saying goes "the plural of anecdote is not data." And that goes as much for specific stories about sympathetic landlords suffering from abusive tenants as vice versa. How would we find out what the systemic pattern is? Maybe we'd compile relevant court records and outcomes. Maybe we'd collect information from tax filings. Or maybe we'd make bare assertions on HN.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
MiroF 5y ago
> It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". No place in the US actually has the latter unless you've been letting them squat for half a decade or something, the issue is court delays and landlord's wanting to make their lot out to be worse than it is.
- dijonman2 5y ago
  It’s very difficult to evict folks in Colorado, according to someone I know who buys and rents homes for a living. I think most landlords are pro tenant until they find someone who knows how to work the system. It costs them so much that they are skiddish to all renters.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their personal pains here, but I don't believe "pro tenant" has a useful meaning except in a context where you need to support them in opposition to some force or entity. And that entity is landlords.
    - anchpop 5y ago
      As a widget maker, I'm pro widget-users even though I technically have an adversarial relationship with them. In particular, I'm pro widget-users because without them I would be without money and without me they would be without widgets, so we're both supporting each other against the harsh forces of nature that would leave us all destitute if we didn't work together.
      - giraffe_lady 5y ago
        only comparable if the widget you make is a necessity for life, really straining the meaning of the word "widget" imo.
      - 5y ago
registeredcorn 5y ago
>landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason I don't understand. Why aren't landlords able to do this? Isn't it seen as immoral to steal property from an owner?
- MiroF 5y ago
  > Why aren't landlords able to do this? Isn't it seen as immoral to steal property from an owner? Well, for one, the government should enforce contract neutrally - so if you sign a contract leasing your property, you can't unilaterally break this without cause. Second, we as a society have an interest in giving people time to move their stuff out and find a new place to live.
  - registeredcorn 5y ago
    Thanks for the response! Honestly, I was going to delete my comment, I felt like I was asking in bad faith, but can't since it had a reply. I guess I see your point. I tend to side a bit harder with the landlords, but I don't want people tossed out on the streets without any sort of warning either.
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      > I tend to side a bit harder with the landlords, but I don't want people tossed out on the streets without any sort of warning either. I expect that that hardly ever happens. Landlords aren't in the business to make life unnecessarily bad for renters, they're there to make money. A tenant who stayed in the same place for 3 years, always pays on time and never damages the property is preferably to an unknown. Landlords know that starting an eviction can cost them up to a year of income, plus there is always the risk that the new tenant is going to be even costlier. Why on earth would a landlord roll the dice on someone new? My guess is that many of those sob stories you are hearing from tenants are their side of the story. They aren't going to tell you that the miss rent sometimes (and they'd have to miss a lot of months before a landlord will start the eviction process). They aren't going to tell you that the landlord had to make substantial repairs to damages that they caused. They aren't going to tell you that they sublet to "their cousins", and have 4 people to a room in a 3 room house. When you listen to a landlord's side of the eviction story, it always comes down to money: "that house is my income and I wasn't getting it anymore". No landlord is cutting off their income stream for several months just because they want to throw tenants onto the street.
sometimeshuman 5y ago
Not arguing, but there are also many people who do not rent their vacant property because they are too rich to be bothered and are content with the capital gain appreciation. Perhaps there needs to be a higher tax rate for vacant property that is not a primary residence.
1024core 5y ago
Could you not put ejection conditions in the lease itself? (SF resident here, but with no experience in landlording). I'm wondering why can't a landlord put in the lease a term like "if tenant does not pay rent for 30 days, tenant gives up all of his rights and landlord has the right to eject tenant within 15 days".
- astura 5y ago
  You generally can't put illegal terms in a contact like that.
- refurb 5y ago
  No. It’s pretty common for tenancy laws to make all other condition “void and unenforceable”.
vkou 5y ago
There is a happy medium, and many cities are in it, it's just that landlords love painting that happy medium as tyranny. They also never make any distinction between letting a basement or a room in a home, a private landlord letting a detached home, and a corporate landlord letting hundreds of units.
tempnow987 5y ago
I had a friend who let someone move in as part of an apartment share. Person NEVER paid them a nickel, never paid landlord anything, claimed they felt unsafe and got a restraining order. It was actually genius. My (female) friend HAD TO MOVE OUT of the house she was renting, the landlord required she still pay rent on the lease. "self-help" (changing locks) was totally out. All this would have been fine I think if she could have gone to court in a week or two (the person literally hadn't paid anyone anything). Instead it was 18 months to the FIRST court date, plenty of drama between A and B, and at that court date it was clear it was going to take a LONG time longer (in fairness COVID came into picture but still). It turned out of course this person had done this repeatedly. In my friends case the landlord just demanded she keep on paying rent and so was no help on eviction. So she was paying rent on a new place, paying rent on the old place AND paying legal bills vs a tenant getting free community legal help and who was an absolute expert in the rules. Luckily for her for some reason tenant DID want to move eventually, and they basically arranged a settlement. She paid landlord for some damages, she paid tenant a cash for keys amount (substantial) and was allowed to go on with her life. You could only afford this on a bay area tech level salary. For normal landlords and people this is insane. When someone says the eviction has to be "for" a reason, and a court has to review that reason and approve it, in the bay area that easily 1-2 years if someone wants to stretch it out.
- jdmichal 5y ago
  So she basically directly sublet part of her apartment, and is surprised the landlord didn't care and still held her responsible? That's exactly the stance the landlord should take in such a situation. Assuming it wasn't just directly a breach of contract of the rental terms to start with, which would even further just protect the landlord. Did she even bother to draft a contract with the subletter? Or was this all just, "sure, stranger, move right on in to the property for which I am legally obligated? I'm sure this will all work out fine."
  - zamfi 5y ago
    Did you miss the part about waiting 18 months for a court date? A legal contract is only as strong as the incentives to litigate it. Doesn't seem likely a contract would've helped, it may even have existed.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". Renters vote. Prospective renters don't vote, because they don't live there. Landlords vote too, but there aren't enough of them to counteract the renters.
pyuser583 5y ago
The problem is ultimately how well the courts handle liars. The middle ground is to investigate the situation and establish facts. And do it quickly. That costs money, and poor tenants can’t afford it. So many courts adopt the position of believing one side over the other. This isn’t limited to liars … it applies to all bad faith actors. For example, in parts of the Midwest, it’s really hard to evict someone in winter. So bad faith tenants will sign a lease in September, pay for a month or two, then stop. Can’t be evicted until spring. And by “can’t be evicted” I mean can’t begin eviction proceedings. If the proceedings can be stretched out (“I’m in the hospital and can’t appear in court”) you can get to the next winter.

TimPC 5y ago

These laws are hard to get actually correct. The major problem is court delays. There is a very high bar for kicking someone out before they get their day in court about whether it is fair to do so. This seems eminently reasonable but there is also a severe shortage of judicial services that result in court dates over a year out to resolve such issues. In that year of time, it's quite possible for a tenant with maybe $5K to their name to accumulate $500K in damages and debts. For many such tenants it is a cost they could never repay in their lifetimes which means even if the landlord gets the desired verdict they'll never see the capital they wanted. I agree there are places in the world that are so biased against landlords that they don't even try to get this problem correct but I think for many cases the problem isn't bad laws but rather the delays to being able to execute reasonable actions to limit damages. I'm not sure what a good solution is for many cases because I think it would take fairly extreme evidence to kick someone out without their day in court if they decided to fight it. I do agree with landlords it should be easier to kick someone out if they stop paying rent and that fact is adequately documented. I mean stop paying rent in the sense of an appropriate pattern not a single late payment.

bombcar 5y ago
From what I've heard is a common thing for landlords to do is a "pay to vacate" where they show up at the door with $1k in cash if the tenant will just leave.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  > show up at the door with $1k in cash In SF, there have been six-figure buyouts to remove tenants from rent-controlled properties.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Sure, because those tenants signed contracts with perpetual leases (as also understood by the landlords who provided the contracts). Evicting in SF means you can't turn your property into a Condo (only a TIC) - so to maintain the value of the condo conversion option, landlords pay tenants to leave. The buyouts are proportional to the rent difference so it's not surprising that someone who's rent is increasing from say $1k/month to $4k/month would need a large sum of money (that's taxable!) to be convinced to leave. Call the buyout $100k -- best case scenario, it's taxed as capital gains so you'd take home $85k. At $3k/month increase in rent, you'd be looking at a little over two years before you're below water. Housing in California is broken in 1,000 different ways but the tenant buyouts seem to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
- nunez 5y ago
  if you go onto /r/landlord, you'll learn that "cash for keys" is (a) usually way more than $1k, and (b) not a fool-proof way of kicking someone out (since the squatter still need a place to live, and they know that the cash won't cover it). this was/is a huge HUGE issue with the COVID real estate moratoriums that popped up.
- yardie 5y ago
  My ex got about $40k cash to vacate her rent-controlled studio. Because turning off the heat during winter, greasy trashbins in the hallway, and holes in the staircase weren't doing it. The building was mostly elderly NYers and she was one of the few millennials so waiting for her to die wasn't going to work either.
dataflow 5y ago
How does one accumulate $500K in damages and debt in 1 year? That's like $41k/month.
- Zircom 5y ago
  Some people don't take kindly to being kicked out, even if they're in the wrong, and there's not a lot you can do to stop them from causing hundreds of thousands in damages while you go through the process of evicting them.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    The first house I lived at in California was part 2 of that - previous owners destroyed the place during a foreclosure, so we got what was previously an $800k house for $400k in a short sale by a bank. Took ~$50k to fix up because we were willing to do the work ourselves over about a year. It was disgusting. Glass and other obstructions flushed down the pipes, literal feces on the walls, holes everywhere, missing parts of the ceiling, fixtures ripped out, etc. Move-in process was essentially move all our stuff to a storage area, continue renting until we'd made the place no longer a biohazard, then we moved in slowly as we fixed up rooms. But hey, a few hours of work a day for a year essentially saved a year of a FAANG salary on the place.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Damn. Props to you but i would rather be 400k poorer instead of doing that.
  - beezle 5y ago
    Was told by local sherrif who handled judgment related asset seizures as well as foreclosure sales that in our state the original owner can do as they wish, even after a court ordered foreclosure sale, until they day they are required/made to vacate. He had seen all kinds of wanton destruction by the outgoing former owners simply out of spite with repair bills likely in the 10s of thousands, if not more.
bruce511 5y ago
A side effect of tenent friendly laws is that owners get more and more picky about who they rent to in the first place. It's cheaper to have a place empty for a few months than to take a risk on a potentially bad tenant. Ultimately this is creating a class of people who can't rent. Their track record is poor - or if not them specifically they are in a group with a poor track record. Not surprisingly this mostly affects the poorest and most vulnerable - those with the least job security - those with health/work issues and so on. This overlaps with the group least likely to actually be able to purchase a home to begin with. This issue will not be solved with free-market economics. Either one accepts the need for some layer of free social housing, or one accepts that a decent chunk of society will be homeless.

wwweston 5y ago

> they can't do much if you stop paying rent. I'm aware of specific stories where bad-faith tenants have made enforcement difficult, but I'm also aware of enough specific stories from the other side where tenants -- even some who have committed no violations -- have found themselves without housing to know that as a total generalization, these statements are false. And you don't get to a resident-sourced homelessness crisis if landlords are truly powerless (and sure, coastal homelessness numbers are driven by bus-ticket policies elsewhere, but it's not the whole story). AFAICT there is in fact a medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". Whether or not it's a happy one probably depends more on court outcomes than any apparent shortcomings in statutes, but if anyone has specific complaints about the law, perhaps they should point them out.

anchpop 5y ago
> I'm aware of specific stories where bad-faith tenants have made enforcement difficult, but I'm also aware of enough specific stories from the other side where tenants -- even some who have committed no violations -- have found themselves without housing to know that as a total generalization, these statements are false. I'm aware of hundreds of stories about homicidal cardiologists, but I wouldn't try to make a judgement about cardiologists based on that because I have no reason to think the stories I'm exposed are a representative sample of cardiologists. In your case, tenants who have committed no violations finding themselves evicted make a much more sympathetic story than landlords who want to evict an annoying tenant, so I'd expect the former to be very overrepresented in what you hear.
- wwweston 5y ago
  Sure. As the saying goes "the plural of anecdote is not data." And that goes as much for specific stories about sympathetic landlords suffering from abusive tenants as vice versa. How would we find out what the systemic pattern is? Maybe we'd compile relevant court records and outcomes. Maybe we'd collect information from tax filings. Or maybe we'd make bare assertions on HN.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago

MiroF 5y ago

> It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". No place in the US actually has the latter unless you've been letting them squat for half a decade or something, the issue is court delays and landlord's wanting to make their lot out to be worse than it is.

dijonman2 5y ago
It’s very difficult to evict folks in Colorado, according to someone I know who buys and rents homes for a living. I think most landlords are pro tenant until they find someone who knows how to work the system. It costs them so much that they are skiddish to all renters.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their personal pains here, but I don't believe "pro tenant" has a useful meaning except in a context where you need to support them in opposition to some force or entity. And that entity is landlords.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    As a widget maker, I'm pro widget-users even though I technically have an adversarial relationship with them. In particular, I'm pro widget-users because without them I would be without money and without me they would be without widgets, so we're both supporting each other against the harsh forces of nature that would leave us all destitute if we didn't work together.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      only comparable if the widget you make is a necessity for life, really straining the meaning of the word "widget" imo.
    - 5y ago

registeredcorn 5y ago

>landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason I don't understand. Why aren't landlords able to do this? Isn't it seen as immoral to steal property from an owner?

MiroF 5y ago
> Why aren't landlords able to do this? Isn't it seen as immoral to steal property from an owner? Well, for one, the government should enforce contract neutrally - so if you sign a contract leasing your property, you can't unilaterally break this without cause. Second, we as a society have an interest in giving people time to move their stuff out and find a new place to live.
- registeredcorn 5y ago
  Thanks for the response! Honestly, I was going to delete my comment, I felt like I was asking in bad faith, but can't since it had a reply. I guess I see your point. I tend to side a bit harder with the landlords, but I don't want people tossed out on the streets without any sort of warning either.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > I tend to side a bit harder with the landlords, but I don't want people tossed out on the streets without any sort of warning either. I expect that that hardly ever happens. Landlords aren't in the business to make life unnecessarily bad for renters, they're there to make money. A tenant who stayed in the same place for 3 years, always pays on time and never damages the property is preferably to an unknown. Landlords know that starting an eviction can cost them up to a year of income, plus there is always the risk that the new tenant is going to be even costlier. Why on earth would a landlord roll the dice on someone new? My guess is that many of those sob stories you are hearing from tenants are their side of the story. They aren't going to tell you that the miss rent sometimes (and they'd have to miss a lot of months before a landlord will start the eviction process). They aren't going to tell you that the landlord had to make substantial repairs to damages that they caused. They aren't going to tell you that they sublet to "their cousins", and have 4 people to a room in a 3 room house. When you listen to a landlord's side of the eviction story, it always comes down to money: "that house is my income and I wasn't getting it anymore". No landlord is cutting off their income stream for several months just because they want to throw tenants onto the street.

sometimeshuman 5y ago

Not arguing, but there are also many people who do not rent their vacant property because they are too rich to be bothered and are content with the capital gain appreciation. Perhaps there needs to be a higher tax rate for vacant property that is not a primary residence.

1024core 5y ago

Could you not put ejection conditions in the lease itself? (SF resident here, but with no experience in landlording). I'm wondering why can't a landlord put in the lease a term like "if tenant does not pay rent for 30 days, tenant gives up all of his rights and landlord has the right to eject tenant within 15 days".

astura 5y ago
You generally can't put illegal terms in a contact like that.
refurb 5y ago
No. It’s pretty common for tenancy laws to make all other condition “void and unenforceable”.

vkou 5y ago

There is a happy medium, and many cities are in it, it's just that landlords love painting that happy medium as tyranny. They also never make any distinction between letting a basement or a room in a home, a private landlord letting a detached home, and a corporate landlord letting hundreds of units.

tempnow987 5y ago

I had a friend who let someone move in as part of an apartment share. Person NEVER paid them a nickel, never paid landlord anything, claimed they felt unsafe and got a restraining order. It was actually genius. My (female) friend HAD TO MOVE OUT of the house she was renting, the landlord required she still pay rent on the lease. "self-help" (changing locks) was totally out. All this would have been fine I think if she could have gone to court in a week or two (the person literally hadn't paid anyone anything). Instead it was 18 months to the FIRST court date, plenty of drama between A and B, and at that court date it was clear it was going to take a LONG time longer (in fairness COVID came into picture but still). It turned out of course this person had done this repeatedly. In my friends case the landlord just demanded she keep on paying rent and so was no help on eviction. So she was paying rent on a new place, paying rent on the old place AND paying legal bills vs a tenant getting free community legal help and who was an absolute expert in the rules. Luckily for her for some reason tenant DID want to move eventually, and they basically arranged a settlement. She paid landlord for some damages, she paid tenant a cash for keys amount (substantial) and was allowed to go on with her life. You could only afford this on a bay area tech level salary. For normal landlords and people this is insane. When someone says the eviction has to be "for" a reason, and a court has to review that reason and approve it, in the bay area that easily 1-2 years if someone wants to stretch it out.

jdmichal 5y ago
So she basically directly sublet part of her apartment, and is surprised the landlord didn't care and still held her responsible? That's exactly the stance the landlord should take in such a situation. Assuming it wasn't just directly a breach of contract of the rental terms to start with, which would even further just protect the landlord. Did she even bother to draft a contract with the subletter? Or was this all just, "sure, stranger, move right on in to the property for which I am legally obligated? I'm sure this will all work out fine."
- zamfi 5y ago
  Did you miss the part about waiting 18 months for a court date? A legal contract is only as strong as the incentives to litigate it. Doesn't seem likely a contract would've helped, it may even have existed.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". Renters vote. Prospective renters don't vote, because they don't live there. Landlords vote too, but there aren't enough of them to counteract the renters.

pyuser583 5y ago

The problem is ultimately how well the courts handle liars. The middle ground is to investigate the situation and establish facts. And do it quickly. That costs money, and poor tenants can’t afford it. So many courts adopt the position of believing one side over the other. This isn’t limited to liars … it applies to all bad faith actors. For example, in parts of the Midwest, it’s really hard to evict someone in winter. So bad faith tenants will sign a lease in September, pay for a month or two, then stop. Can’t be evicted until spring. And by “can’t be evicted” I mean can’t begin eviction proceedings. If the proceedings can be stretched out (“I’m in the hospital and can’t appear in court”) you can get to the next winter.