Ahhhh, “weasely roommate” stories. My roommate did the same thing to me when I went on a six-month deployment with the Army Reserves in '92, but in my case, the landlady cut me considerable slack when I got back and explained the situation, stopping the eviction proceeding on her own and giving me several months to get caught back up (I had to work a lot of doubles to get the overtime necessary to pay everything up, and had to postpone college for a semester because of him).
Well, it wasn’t the terms in the first and second leases I have ever signed. I don’t know what else to say other than that.
I guess if it’s really so impossible to find lease terms like that, maybe I should revise my entire rule set to basically be “don’t live with others, you’ll just end up screwed at some point.”
I never said the land lord would be giving up the power of eviction.
Why couldn’t they evict roommate B and just advertise a room as being available in the papers? Either way they’re going to lose rent if roommate B doesn’t pay. One way they lose all the rent because BOTH roommates get evicted, the other way they lose half rent until they can find someone else to take over the unit.
Anyways, if you have two people signing a lease it is almost without question that one of the individuals cannot afford to pay the entire rent. So the land lord is not going to be able to get a full months’ rent ever again once roommate B decides to stop paying rent and the land lord decides to evict.
If you make both of them liable I don’t see how it creates a situation preferable to making them separately liable.
Because that’s the job of the tenant who’s on the lease, not the landlord. If an individual tenant cannot pay the entire rent because their roommate flaked out, then that’s a mess the non-flaking roommate needs to clean up. The landlord is not responsible for seeking out another rommate to fill the deadbeat’s room. That’s ridiculous. It’s an apartment, not a dorm.
Again, if you sign a year lease, both rommates are responsible for paying the rent in full for a year. Period. How the roomates split that up is their business. All the landlord cares about is getting his rent. If Roommate B doesn’t pay, then Roommate A better figure out how to get the other half of the rent, and fast. It’s not the landlord’s problem, it’s Roomie A’s, because he’s on the lease. Being on the lease, he’s responsible for paying the rent. Period. Not half the rent. Not a quarter of the rent and a cookie, the whole rent. For a year. The landlord won’t get half the rent until he can find someone to take over the unit, because he will get all of the rent, or Roomie A is gonna find his ass out on the street. Trust me, I’ve been there. What’s better for the landlord, to kick both Roomie A and B out and get his full rent the next month or just kick Roomie B out and only get half the rent for however long it takes Roomie A to find Roomie C? I’m all for being sympathetic, but that’s just bad business sense. You’re basically advocating the landlord putting himself in a vunerable position to make life easier for Roomie A. Seeings how the landlord doesn’t owe Roomie A jack shit, I don’t really see it happening.
Not necessarily. There are many reasons to want to be on the lease with a co-tenant other than not being able to pay on your own.
Huh? The landlord is most certainly going to get a full months’ rent after roommate B decides to stop paying rent when he evicts them both and re-rents out the apartment. If Roomie A doesn’t want to be evicted then Roomie A needs to replace that good for nuthin’ Roomie B. That’s his job, not the landlord’s. The landlord is renting out the entire apartment, not each individual room within it. It’s not his responsibility to make sure each individual roommate is paying his share, he’s only responsible for getting the rent for that unit. He’s a landlord, not a referee, a bill collector or a mommy.
I don’t know how things are elsewhere, but here in the Big City, the laws provide decent support for tenants. As long as I’m a legal tenant (and it is legal in NYC for a tenant to have a subtenant, which makes the subtenant a legal tenant; there are restrictions on that, but that’s the loose and general case), the landlord must first give me notice (one month, and they have to document that I was given notice prior to the one month period, and they don’t get to start the month on the 12th if they decide on the 11th that they want me out. Then after that month has expired, if I haven’t left of my own accord, they can start a legal proceeding in court, and the court will set a court date and I will get summoned. I’m still occupying my apartment (or room) during this time, but I’m no longer paying for it, since if the landlord accepts further rent from me, that’s considered an indication that the landlord has chosen to continue renting to me. So I show up in court and the judge says “Landlord can prove ownership of the dwellingplace and can prove you were given notice. You gotta leave. I give you 30 days. OK, Landlord, if this tenant hasn’t departed by that time, you come back here and we’ll talk about maybe getting the Marshal to actually evict, assuming the tenant doesn’t show up with a valid reason for not having departed, etc.” So I go back to the room where I continue to stay and still am not paying rent, although by now the wheels are set in motion and they will eventually commence to begin to start to seriously consider putting my ass out on the street.
The larger landlords just figure it all into their overhead — some percentage of their apartment building will be occupied, at any given time, by tenants not paying rent, many of them in some stage of the eviction process. The small-time landlord, on the other hand, often gets badly screwed.
IANAL and may have some bits and pieces of this wrong but I think I’ve got the overall pattern down pretty good.
I’m not out to abuse the system’s protections to any unfair advantage, I just want time to find new digs. Went to see two places yesterday, and one today. I’ve got four places to look at tomorrow. My laundry is now a huge mountainous pile because I’ve had no time to do it, I spend all my free time examining room shares!
Update: I appear to have landed a new pad. I get to live in pretty nice accomodations almost under the Geo Washington Bridge just off Cabrini. Nice folks renting out the room, nice BIG room, I can play music (not just .mp3’s, I can play the piano w/o headphones!), a genuine written lease, big storage bins above the dual closets, and did I mention that I like the people?
Congrats! You’re up by 181st, then. That’s a great neighborhood, you’ve got the A train to get you downtown, the area looks pleasant enough, and you get some space for your money. The wife and I are thinking of moving up to that area, get some room for our stuff, instead of trying to find new places to hide it away.
I work up by there - nice area, good Cuban and Dominican food. Congrats. Let me know if you want to do lunch sometime.
I still think you should hang your ex-roommate by his heels until he coughs up the money you gave him towards rent. Or until his beet-red face gives you the giggles. Whichever.