From today’s SF Examiner
[url=“http://examiner.com/001020/1020eviction.html”]She got Hitched, then Ditched[/ur]
Is it right for landlord’s to deny people the right to move in with their spouse? Should they have that right?
discuss.
I’m not sure it’s morally right, but if they went against the lease, it’s legally right. The landlord gave the couple a chance to change their lease, and when they didn’t hear back about their new lease they just assumed the landlord had changed his opinion, and went on living together illegally. They didn’t call, didn’t write. What did they expect to happen?
It’s not just a SF thing, either: a few years ago, a married couple I know living in Cambridge MA were informed by their landlord that he’d like them to leave, once he learned that the wife was pregnant. See, Cambridge city ordinances require lead paint removal in all rental facilities where the tenants include a child under x years of age, and the landlord didn’t want to deal with that expense.
She is paying $696 for a 219 sq. ft. studio and that is below market value? I’m glad I don’t live in San Fran.
I recently had to deal with a similar problem with one of my tenants. She married a guy that has a long history of being a poor tenant, crappy, disrespectful neighbor and all around destructive jerk.
That is the reason our rental and lease contracts have clauses limiting the number of people allowed in a rental.
We don’t have the rental regulation here in Idaho that other states do, but it sounds to me as though the landlord is indeed trying to use the case to raise the rent. He did everything right in MHO, I can’t imagine a court overturning a lease agreement the tenant signed. The manager took new applications, considered them and denied them, although they did offer another rental.
She had every right to negotiate the lease agreement when she originally signed it, good thing to keep in mind if you rent.
Some observations:
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The landlord is not so hot on public relations.
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The Examiner is not so hot on objectivity (it being clear to me, at least, that their sympathies lie wholly with the couple).
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Frankly, a restriction on the use of a 219 square foot room (just under 15’ x 15’ if it’s a square) to one person does not sound so outlandish. Of course, both parties are talking in terms of absolutes, but I imagine (and please let me know, SFers, if I am off base) that the landlord would probably have been less pushy if it had been a 700 sq. ft. apartment at market rent.
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A lease is a contract. If the contract is not against public policy, it should be enforced. The lease would be against public policy if it forbade married people from renting. By the terms of the agreement the lessee signed, only one person is allowed to use the apartment. If one half of an already-married couple wanted to lease this apartment and signed the lease, I think the landlord would be well within his rights not to allow the other spouse to move in. He would not be within his rights to disallow the first spouse as a tenant because of his/her status as a married person.
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Both parties seem to be after money. “Heather Doerr said she had declined to move because rents on vacant apartments in the building had hovered between $1,300 and $1,450 for a studio.” In other words, she wants to be allowed to violate the express terms of her contract in order to avoid paying a market rent.
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There’s nothing wrong with a landlord trying, in what appears to be a lawful way, to get a market rent for an apartment rented below market (absent some government regulation prohibiting the practice, another topic entirely). “Legally, Rosenthal said, Artal couldn’t charge more rent without switching them to a new apartment and was not obliged to accept another tenant in the apartment.” It seems to me quite rational that the landlord would hold her to the lease.
The more I analyze this, the more I side with the landlord, at least in this instance.
Kimstu wrote:
Good thing for the landlord he was in Massachusetts and not California. In California, it’s illegal for landlords to discriminate on the basis of whether or not you have kids. He would have been up on the punitive-damages chopping block so fast it’d make his head spin.
I actually don’t see much wrong with what the landlord did. Trust me, people, if you want to find a group of rich people that you might actually pity, San Francisco landlords have to be at the top of the list. (I say that as someone who lived in SF for three years under the constant threat of eviction.) The local politicos are fully aware they’re basically guaranteed re-election by running on a “Tenant’s Rights” platform, and the Examiner is two steps above toilet paper.
adam yax wrote:
We are talking about three-quarters of a million residents, plus skyscrapers, parks, commercial districts, historical buildings, Castro Street, etc., all crammed into a city smaller than Washington, DC.
And real estate is pretty pricey throughout all of California to begin with.
tracer: Good thing for the landlord [who asked my friends to move out when he learned they were about to have a baby, since he didn’t want to pay for mandatory lead-paint removal] he was in Massachusetts and not California. In California, it’s illegal for landlords to discriminate on the basis of whether or not you have kids. He would have been up on the punitive-damages chopping block so fast it’d make his head spin.
Oh, I think he was technically out of line in Massachusetts too, and I don’t think he took any formal steps to make them leave. But they were so unfavorably impressed by the fact that he’d even make the request (and not real thrilled with him as a landlord in other respects, either) that they decided moving out was in fact the best thing to do.
When I first saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about the unfairness of the property-division-after-divorce laws.
I don’t see any rights being violated here. The lease was with the female and was made years before marriage. The lease specified that no other person was permitted to move into the apartment. Personally I believe that this is a reasonable rule for an apartment building to have.
I don’t see how anyone could view it as discrimination either. I believe landlords have the right to limit the number of people living in their apartments. Just because you get married doesn’t mean you get to violate your lease.
Of course this wouldn’t be a problem in a lot of other cities. Tyey just don’t want to leave because they’ll have to pay 500-600 more dollars a month for a similiar apartment.
Marc
This is the only issue. But the policy of the landlord (I think) is not exclude married persons, but to maintain control as to who is moving in. When I moved in to my current apartment, my roommate had already been living there for a number of years. But I still had to submit an application that could possibly have been rejected. I was ok with this because I see the sense in it.
My roommate was attempting to change the terms of the contract (who was living there). The landlord was trying to protect his interests. Hey, just because my roommate is good tennent with a good, clean record says nothing at all about me. For all the landlord knew, I could be a violent deadbeat with a long history of trashing apartments. So he has a right to screen me out if I don’t meet certain criteria (i.e., evictions, bankruptcies).
I’m surprised so many people are quick to side with the landlord in this case. Possibly not everyone’s been young, walked into a big city and had to shell out over three grand just to move into a shabby little apartment that wasn’t worth a third of it, as I did.
No ‘market rent’ lectures, please. I smell future slumlords.
I also agree with the property owner in this case.
A lease is a contract between a tenant and a property owner. If the tenant moves someone else into the property they violate the contract. Many propery owners have been burned by this situation. You rent to a good honest clean hardworking person, then they move in a ‘friend’, then the original person moves out. Now the property owner’s rental is in the possesion of a unknown person, and it is very difficult to get them out. In the meantime they can do 1000s of dollars of damage to your property.
Say a small cheap rental is worth 30,000$. Would you like to loan 30,000$ to someone you don’t know and then hope they give it back to you.
Well that’s true. I only had to shell out about 1,200 when I moved into my first Apartment in Dallas. But then the price of apartments in the SF Bay area doesn’t really have anything do with the conditions of the lease.
Marc
It seems to me that you can’t make exceptions for spouses without opening a whole can of worms.
Clearly, the landlord is would be within his rights if he had prevented her from letting her friend Betty move in, correct? Now then, the article seems to suggest that the landlord is not within his rights to let her move her spouse in. Now then, if he can’t keep her spouse out he can’t keep her homosexual lover out, correct? That would be discrimonatory, and I think that in San Fransico of all places you would have people raising holy hell (and rightly so) if a heterosexual couple could circumvent a lease but a homosexual couple could not. So then you get a situation where you can cicumvente a lease if and only if you are in a romantic relationship with the add on, and frankly, that is a silly and unworkable idea, unless we want a situation where the landlord is snooping about, looking for evidence of two sleeping areas so that he can throw someone out.
I find it ridiculous that these exact situations are not addressed in a lease or rental agreement. How many people live exactly the same life for ever and ever? Spouce, child, roommate, any of these can come up for any number of people, and the land lord should know enough to put these provisions in at the start of a lease - c’mom, a little common sence.
My guess is that this will come down to the landlord’s motivation. “Only one person in the apartment because it’s the size of a baby-shoe box” is okay, IMO. “Only one person in the apartmnet because I don’t like married people” is not.
The thing is, it’s almost always okay to discriminate, meaning to make choices based on given factors. But it’s not (legally) okay to discriminate for improper reasons – like gender, race, religion, and, one presumes, marital status. It is okay to discriminate for reasons that are independently justifiable – like that it’s neither hygenic, safe, or economical to have ten people living in a 15 x 15 room – even if the ten people are Mom, Dad, and their eight kids.
I think it will be difficult for the tenant to prove that the landlord is discriminating against them because they is married, as opposed to discriminating against them because the apartment is too small for two people to share. But then, we’re talking about San Francisco, so Lord knows what the court will say.