Situation: my brother and his wife over-extended themselves in buying a house – with inflation pretty minimal no automatic cost of living type pay increases, and neither of them have gotten the promotions they thought were in the cards. Add to that the real estate market is stalling out in the area so reselling isn’t an option, and they’re hurting making the monthly payments.
So my brother got the idea of finishing off part of the basement as an efficiency apartment. He did all the work himself (and it’s probably all done exactly right, he worked construction for many years) but they didn’t apply for a building permit OR have any of the inspections done. Basically because they knew it wouldn’t be granted, due to zoning rules.
It’s a pretty nice little setup: basically one large room furnished as a bed/sitting room, with a kitchenette alcove and a 3/4 bathroom, and because the yard slopes one wall has HUGE windows and a door that walks out onto level into the backyard. Which is the ‘official’ second escape route, but because of landscaping and the slope and such, hiking around to use that as your entrance door is impractical.
Instead you go in through the main door, walk down the hall to the basement stairs, down the stairs, across the first section of the basement to reach the wall closing off the apartment area. In that first room there’s a washer/dryer that the tenant is welcome to use, plus a freezer/pantry setup that they aren’t, but mainly the room is my brother’s workshop.
My brother is into building furniture. He has a range of tools that Norm Abrams would probably covet, and genuinely uses them. For example, he made every case good, table, and wooden chair in his house. He made a gorgeous dining room set for me as our wedding present. He’s constantly making other furniture either on order or for selling at weekend shows.
I’m telling you this for reasons that will become plain shortly, but back to the apartment. They passed word around discreetly at the junior college in their town, and had the place rented to one of the instructors in no time. A woman, which suited my brother. (He has jealousy issues.) All was fine for about six months.
Then the woman (let’s call her Tracy) asked if it would be okay to have her niece and nephew (3 & 4 years old) over to stay for a few days – something about their parents wanting to go away for a long weekend, she said. My brother and SIL said that was okay, though my brother was grumbling: it would mean he couldn’t use his shop for those days, because of the need to have all those lovely sharp chisels and saws and bottles full of stains and varnishes and other such poisonous substances all carefully locked away.
But, as I’m sure you are all expecting or there’s no point to all this, the children didn’t go back home. My brother asked Tracy about it on the following Tuesday, and Tracy said it would be just a couple more days, that her brother and sister had somehow gotten comped to a few days free (they’d gone to Las Vegas, supposedly) and so were taking advantage.
When my brother confronted her again after a few more days, Tracy owned up. It’s a long ugly, muddled story (and I got it third hand, so likely I don’t have it all straight) but the bottom line is that the children’s father had abandonned his family a couple of years earlier, and now their mother has said she couldn’t deal with the stress of raising her kids any longer and has dumped them on her sister for who knows how long ‘while she gets herself together.’
Which brings us to the potentially scummy part: my brother wants Tracy and her children to move out pronto.
She doesn’t want to leave – she likes the apartment, and there really aren’t a lot of nearby places she could go to. She ‘thinks’ her sister will be able to take the children back in a few months, maybe. My brother wants back the use of his workshop, plus both he and my SIL don’t want the extra noise and disruption of having two young children living in their house. They pointed out to Tracy that they had specified from the start that they would only rent to a single person and she knew that. She said it was illegal to discriminate against families with children so she could stay. He pointed out she was only renting month to month, no lease, so he could tell her to go at the end of the current month for any reason. She pointed out that the apartment was illegal and that if he tried to force her to go she would rat him out to the police. He pointed out that would leave her out of the apartment just the same. Round and round.
So…what now?
Can he ‘force’ Tracy to leave at the end of the month? If she refuses to go, can they just pack up her clothes and such, put them outside, and change the door locks while she’s out? (This is what he’s threatening to do.)
Even if it’s legal to do that – and wouldn’t get him into a passel of trouble over the illegal apartment, which I expect it would, and I’ll bet he didn’t report the extra income, either – isn’t it rather scummy to force a woman and children out just because she’s helping with a family emergency?
On the third hand, it is his house, and Tracy had been told of the ‘house rules’ before moving in, so it is right for her to force them into inconveniences because of her own family emergencies? My brother can’t afford losing the income from his furniture building on top of everything else.
All I could suggest to my brother was that they should try to find another apartment that Tracy would be willing to move to, but they didn’t think that would work.