When renting a car you have to return it in the same condition in which you borrowed it. Likewise with tools and other equipment. Houses are no different. It’s still the owner’s property, and you’ve got to take care of it according to the standards they lay out. Houses represent a huge investment and renters can easily do thousands of dollars worth of damage, so the owners tend to be pretty protective. Renters are guests with privileges, not temporary owners.
Yah, I think this is the issue. If someone has 30 people living in a 3 bedroom house, I’ll bet you $2 that they don’t have a lot of money lying around to pay for repairing stuff when they trash it.
Sure, you have a security deposit, but it’s usually capped at about 1 months rent. If the rent is $1,000, and you have a $1,000 security deposit, that will be eaten up with one nasty sewer back up and then the landlord is screwed for any further damage. Sure, they can sue and win, but you can’t get blood from a stone and the landlord is left on the hook for thousands of dollars in damage.
To rent a house in these parts, you must obtain a cetificate of rental occupancy from the city. The application lists everyone living in the building. A copy is sent to the Fire Department.
If the building catches fire and it is determined you have more people living there than is stated on the CRO application, the fines are severe. And if anyone dies, the landlord is in deep shit.
When I worked in rental property management, the lease listed all occupants of the apartment. If anyone else moved in, the lease had to be amended or the tenants were evicted.
In one marvelous cast, we rented an apartment to a mother and her son. When they couldn’t pay the rent, his girlfriend moved in and tried to get Welfare to pay the rent by showing them an amended lease that we had no knowledge of. They were out on their asses, and the girlfriend lost her welfare because it was considered fraud.
Parents and relatives went in on a shared house close by. Is that uncommon to you? I have at least 2 friends in similar situations where they went straight from parent’s house to buying a house, and another 2 who rented for very short periods before buying a house.
Wouldn’t things like noise, parking, and trash have existing avenues for people to pursue? If my neighbor who owns the house he’s living in is too noisy, I can call the cops. If their cars are in my curb, its fine since I don’t own the curb, and why wouldn’t trash just be taken by the garbage men every week? Unless you don’t pay them, which any neighbor can just call to complain to the local health department, can’t they?
I guess I was looking at it the wrong way then. I was more on the latter side, probably incorrectly
Though, wouldn’t it be true that if you have 30 people, the costs per person is much lower and therefore they can afford it? Why doesn’t it work the other way around? I believe you, I just don’t know why it doesn’t work that way 
I didn’t know you could cap the deposit. I’m sure that its because there are bad landlords as well as bad renters. It might be interesting to see which there are more of, it may sway me a bit from one side to another
Renters are basically renting the space between the walls.
I wish that was true. I think it’s fairly common that a tenant-occupied house is treated a lot differently than an owner-occupied house. I live in a middle-to working-class mixed rent and owner-occupied neighbourhood, and I could go down the street and tell you which ones are rentals by the garbage on the front lawn, the un-done repairs, the weedy lawns, the unshovelled icy sidewalks, etc.
Because if you have 30 people together in a house, it’s not because you have 30 people who could all afford to live in a more reasonable arrangement (e.g., 3 to a house), and are just trying to be really frugal…it’s because you have 30 people who, combined, probably can barely afford the rent for one house.
Such a cap is likely to be a local or state law in any particular location, and I imagine that 90+% of landlords ask for the biggest security deposit that the law allows.
Let’s say that there is enough curb space on your block for 12 vehicles. Under normal living arrangements, that may well be sufficient for the needs of the residents on your block (for guests to park, for the resident whose garage is full of stuff and parks his car on the street, etc.) Believe it or not, most people do expect that, in those circumstances, they should be able to park in front of their own houses (or, at least, very close).
Now, let’s imagine that you have that hypothetical house with 30 people living in it, and that there is one vehicle for every third person in the house. That’s 10 vehicles, most of which wind up on the street, most if not all of the time. It creates an ongoing hassle for everyone else on the block. Is it the end of the world? Probably not. Would many people consider it annoying? Probably so.
I have an uncle who owns a bunch of rentals and he comes close to this philosophy, although with a few modifications. If a renter has paid on time for years and never calls for repairs, he mostly leaves them alone and doesn’t raise the rent.
One set of renters moved out after twenty years. They had four cats and a pot-bellied pig that all used a cat flap to go in and out of the house. But although they were good at using the cat flap, they were bad about using the cat box. The carpet became so full of pee that it welded to the floor. He had to rent a floor sander to chip it off.
He shrugged and said they’d never called him for a repair once and that it was like pushing all of the normal work to the end of the twenty years. And that he hadn’t had to work to find new tenants in twenty years either.
But start calling for repairs or having the neighbors complain, and that would be a different story. Not sure what his thoughts are on adding people to the household. He mostly told stories to needle my Dad.
(Dad & Mom had built their first house and when we moved because the family was getting too big for it, they had a hard time parting with it and decided to rent it out instead. Bad idea. Dad’s reaction to the things that renters do was intense. It set up a great opportunity for his little brother to poke at him a bit.)
HuH? I learned something today.
A crawl space is ABOVE the house?
I always thought it was the space between the ground and the floor.
Wow.
And yes - my father crashed through the ceiling of a house he renovated,
AND I also crashed through the ceiling of a house when I was moving stuff around in the attic
And no, our family name is Spencer (nor is my dad Frank or mum Betty)
OMG, you can’t imagine the things a tenant can do to a place. They can completely destroy them. An owner has to be very careful who he/she lets live in their property. Where I live, eviction is a long drawn out affair that cost a lot of money. Each adult living in the house has to be served…and that includes those that you don’t know about. You can go through the whole eviction process only to find out that there’s an extra adult or two living there and then you have to go through it all over again with those people. We had tenants once who rented out their garage. It’s illegal to let people live in a garage, but because they “squatted” there we had to go through the eviction process - all along the city was sending with threats of fines for having someone live in the garage! Never, ever again will I own or manage rental property.
If it’s not big enough to call it an attic, I’d call it a crawl space.
And it’s not easily accessible, either. SOMEBODY had to get a ladder of pile up a bunch of stuff to access the panel. As a landlord, I’m gonna go WAAAAAY out on a limb and say that a bunch of kids had NO BUSINESS fooling around up there!
~VOW
From my experience, I don’t know anyone who has done such a thing. I’m a big-city boy and most folks I know left home for college, or wouldn’t be able to afford a house until they were well established in their career. I haven’t lived anywhere where someone could buy a house soon after starting their first job, plus I don’t know anyone who would want to live with their parents much past age 18 anyway.
I think a lot of those complaints would also be directed to the landlord who keeps renting the place out to people who are bad tenants.
Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I think there are landlords who simply don’t care about anything as long as they keep making money, but there are quite a few landlords who don’t want the hassle of keeping after crappy tenants who leave messes for both landlords and neighbors to deal with, and therefore these landlords tend to be adequate (maybe not good) neighbors.