My Roommate and I have been having troubles recently with my roommate’s daughter’s boyfriend.
It has not become unmanageable yet but it’s getting progressively worse and I’m not sure we see an end in sight.
There’s no violence or anything (thought they sometimes have screaming, but nonphysical, fights in the middle of the night), but mostly it’s a problem with the frequency that the boyfriend is around- and the disrespect being shown for the rules meant to limit his presence.
As an internal matter it’s simple: he’s banned from being at the apartment until further notice.
The ban isn’t being completely respected and I’m wondering about the legal situation since the daughter turned 18 a month ago and is therefore a legal adult. She does not pay rent, but I am aware that tenant’s rights do, to some extent, apply to people who are not paying rent. For example, I’m aware (thought not informed enough to point to a cite) that a person who has lived at a particular residence with consent of the owner/leaseholder/etc. can not simply be kicked out if it has been their residence for x number of …months? years?
So, even though the daughter doesn’t pay rent, I’m wondering what her rights are concerning having guests. Before she turned 18, I’m sure that the boyfriend’s presence in our home against my roommate’s/my consent would not have been o.k. legally since the daughter was still a minor- her invitation would not override the fact that her mother and I had directly told the guy he was not allowed in the apartment.
But now the daughter is a legal adult and our apartment is her legal residence. At this point, does her invitation make his presence legal?
If we end up having to call the cops one day are the cops going to have to tell us, “He’s here as an invited guest by an adult who lives here, nothing we can do.”?
At least in Massachusetts that’s exactly what they would tell you. You would need to formally evict the daughter to be rid of the boyfriend. I serve on the board of an affordable housing trust. This is a very common issue. Parents want to allow adult children to live with them but restrict their ability to invite guests. Since the kid isn’t on the lease in the first place, we can’t evict them. They are legally sub-tenants, whether paying or not. The lessees can institute eviction procedures, the trust (building owner) cannot. Typically they don’t want to expel their adult child.
Basically if you want to impose the “under my roof, under my rules” principle you need to have a credible threat of eviction. In Massachusetts there are statewide and some local eviction procedures and limitations.
I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction. This is just my experience. In fact my exoerience is that you need a lawyer.
Yikes. That’s exactly our situation. The daughter is not on the lease, only her mother and I. When we moved in the daughter was 13 (the other daughter, no longer living with us, was 15) and the landlord was only interested in having the paying adults on the lease.
Can she legally give him permission to enter when she is not home if that permission is in conflict with her mother and I while her mother and I are on the premises?
You’re not her landlord, you’re her father … you can do anything you want in your own home for the most part. There’s absolutely NO law that says you have to give any of your children a key to your home. If she doesn’t like it, she can move out. She’s an adult now. Remember, the police are going to laugh in your face if you call them, but the police are going to laugh in her face as well if she calls …
Under no circumstances am I advocating violence, just that such wouldn’t come under the jurisdiction of Child Welfare any longer. It would be 4[sup]th[/sup] degree assault at worst, maybe the DA doesn’t have the time if you get my meaning.
Time for you to admit you’re getting to that age … start forcing her and her boyfriend to celebrate with you every time you have a decent bowel movement … she’ll have another place to live within a week !!!
Actually, it’s probably worse than that. The OP & the mother are prohibited by law from changing the locks and forcing the daughter to the curb, even if they arrange to safeguard all her possessions until they can be moved to the daughter’s new residence.
The OP has a knotty problem where calm moral suasion, or simply acting like a jerk, are the only tools available.
An interesting question I’ve not considered is what would happen if the grown-ups simply announced that they were moving to a new location, got a new lease, ended the old one, and left the adult child at the curb that way.
It amounts practically to the same thing: involuntary eviction of the adult child. But I suspect it falls into a completely different category legally.
Here’s another vote that you need to contact a local legal aid or landlord tenant dispute resolution service to learn about the local rules, both written and unwritten.
You could file a restraining order against the boyfriend. He could be invited all day long, you could even post a neon sign in the window asking him to come in and he’d still get arrested if he violates the restraining order.
Do you have a citation for that? I read through California State Law concerning Landlord/Tenant relationships and I can’t remember anything to this effect. In Oregon there’s absolutely nothing like that, you can kick a guest out and dump their belongings on the street if you want to. That’s not to say Orange County doesn’t have an ordinance, they may …
Here’s the problem, if the OP evicts the girl, she’ll never be able to rent from a quality landlord in the State ever again. Such an action will be a part of her permanent judicial record, open to the public and eventually the day will come where this judicial record is available over the internet.
I’m assuming the mother is on board with all this … if not … perhaps a divorce attorney is the better option … if she’s tolerant of this bullshit, then the OP can look forward to this bullshit the rest of his life.
This is what I recommend to my tenants who are in this situation, “fights in the middle of the night” bring my own eviction threat down on the tenants’ head under the “disrupting the neighbors’ peaceful enjoyment of the premises” laws.
There are legalities and there are practical matters of relationships. While you do not explicitly say it, per the length of tenancy assumedly you and the mother are in some sort of long term relationship, and this daughter whom you have been residing with from 13 to (now) 18 is effectively a defacto adult stepkid.
Screaming arguments with your boyfriend are as common as clay at 17-18 the difference is that most kids have enough common sense, even when suffused with hormones, not to have these tussles around their parents. The “decider” in this issue is not the daughter or her boyfriend or even you, but your roommate (her mother) who is allowing her daughter (adult or not) to hold you hostage to this nonsense.
The daughter is not going to get rid of the boyfriend until he no longer interests her and your warnings have no weight with her. The mother is not going to boot her 18 YO daughter despite her disrespect and is only pretending (to humor you) to even be considering this. You are in an almost impossible situation with an extremely limited legal ability to ban him from your proximity.
Were I in your situation I would short circuit this drama and go directly to the boyfriend and talk with him man to man and lay out the following. Regardless of who starts it you and your girlfriend have a contentious relationship in or near my home which disturbs my peace. This is disrespectful and will probably end with me calling the police and you being arrested at some point and this will not bode well for anybody. You will then have an adult arrest record which will screw up your ability to get a job and progress in whatever you wish to do. I know your girlfriend is 18 and as an adult can decide who she wants to date but you will have that relationship well away from where I live.
I predict that will get his attention and he then has adult decisions to make.
As a side note the daughter needs to be on industrial level birth control at this point even if you have to drive her to the clinic and put it on your credit card.
This is probably the cleanest way to handle it. The adult daughter has no rights at a new place where you move. She could be allowed at the new place if she signs a contract for how she will behave along with the consequences for breaking the contract.
A few cases of beer should get a construction crew to stand around when you have this talk; or talk to your landlord, that much beer should get a half dozen police officers …
First of all, what state are you in as YMMV based on jurisdiction.
Second, you probably only have two choices. Legally evict her according to the process in your jurisdiction or put up with her and her boyfriend’s shit.
Well, there is one other choice - has the girl’s mother ever actually told her she will have to choose between a rent-free life and having the boyfriend visit her at home? I’m not seeing that in the OP and I suspect most people would never give up a life where they have the freedom of living however they wish and don’t have to pay rent, utilities etc. People leave their parents’ homes because they don’t like the conditions/rules they have to live under or sometimes because they don’t want to have to live under those conditions/rules and pay rent. Few of them need to be formally evicted - for the most part they either move out or deal with the conditions/rules.
Don’t assume that that a tenant who lives as part of an existing household has any rights beyond the right to an eviction proceeding if they don’t voluntarily leave when given notice. By that I mean that person renting an apartment may have a right to have guests, or to have a roommate move in, but those rights may not necessarily apply to those “renting” something smaller than a complete dwelling unit.
Most written rental agreements have a clause prohibiting sub-letting. Guests are allowed, but there may be a time limit on how long they can stay, for example “3 days/night in any 1 month period without landlord approval”. I highlighted the phrase above to point out this is not a right of the tenant if the rental agreement does prohibit sub-letting, the landlord retains this right to himself.
This situation appears to be where the “guest” is the daughter, and the daughter has landlord permission to reside there longer than the time allowed. I’m afraid filing an eviction lawsuit here will just be thrown out, no one is violating the Landlord/Tenant Laws.
This smells more like civil trespassing, the daughter as a “guest” cannot invite anyone she pleases into the dwelling, only the tenants that signed the rental agreement can invite guests.